Category: Teacher resources

Every teacher I know juggles an exhausting teaching schedule with parent conferences, administrative tasks, and specialized student needs. They take work home evenings and weekends and often are forced to choose between family and job when it comes to allocating a finite quantity of time over what surely seems to be infinite needs.

The teachers I know are also positive thinkers. They always start the new school year with a promise to be more organized, work more efficiently, use available tools to complete tasks faster, and prioritize needs.

There’s a problem, though: Where does one start? Scholastic offers a list of one hundred tips, but most require set up time (yikes!)–and worse, non-existent classroom real estate–before they can be used. For my short list, I looked for:

• a net savings of time
• a way to quickly accomplish common tasks
• easy access from digital devices that teachers commonly carry
• simplicity, so even when my mind is somewhere else (like on the child across the room or the admin peeking in my door), it performs flawlessly
  

Here are three that meet all of these qualifications:

Waze (http://www.waze.com) Free

Waze is a free navigation app for GPS-equipped smartphones that bills itself as ‘the largest community-based traffic and navigation app’. It includes spoken turn-by-turn directions and the ability to search for destinations by address, category, place name, or landmark. Thanks to its over fifty million users, Waze gives you real-time crowd sourced reports about which highway is jammed, the location of  accidents, where to find the cheapest gas, and when your friends are arriving at the same destination as you. You can even send an ‘I’m on my way!’ comment to whoever needs to know with a click.

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A wide variety of topics, with one thing in common–they teach you about technology in education:

1. Common Core training–the Hunt Institute
2. Common Craft--videos on wikis, phishing, etc.
3. How-to videos–technology, reading, math, more
4. How to Videos for Web 2.0
5. Internet Movie Database
6. K-8 school-related videos. Tons 
7. Learn Zillion—teaching videos
8. Teacher Training Videos   
9. Teaching Channel
10. YouTube Education
11. YouTube Pure—removes comments

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Mentoring Minds is an education publishing company and resource site created by former teachers. Their goal: Critical thinking for life–

” to develop affordable, effective learning tools that help children think critically, giving them the skills to succeed not just in the classroom, but in life.”

• Materials enable differentiated instruction, student practice, and teacher evaluation of progress. Through their dashboard, teachers can identify which students have mastered specific standards, what learning goals should come next for each student, and which students require in-depth interventions to meet the standard(s) being assessed.
• Professional development is available for teachers on core concepts like differentiation in the classroom, rolling out Common Core Standards, best practices for instruction, formative assessment strategies, and more.
  

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If I’m trying to get from Los Angeles, California to Minot, North Dakota, I start with a map. I build a route that includes the sights I’d like to visit, shows me the connecting roadways, and gives me a rough idea of how long it’ll take.

The same is true with teaching a class. I need a map to show how best to blend my curriculum and the school’s standards, scaffold skills on each other, and connect to all stakeholders involved. In education, that’s called a Curriculum Map.

What is a Curriculum Map?

According to Education World, a Curriculum Map is…

…a process for collecting and recording curriculum-related data that identifies core skills and content taught, processes employed, and assessments used for each subject area and grade level.

 —Education World: Virtual Workshop: Curriculum Mapping

A Curriculum Map first and foremost is a planning tool, a procedure for examining and organizing curriculum that allows educators to determine how content, skills and assessments will unfold over the course of the year. It is an in-depth view of topics teachers will instruct over the school year, their pacing, and how they blend with other subjects. In an IB school, that includes the learner profiles that are satisfied. In a Common Core school, that covers the math and literacy standards addressed. In other states, it’ll be how lesson plans meet their unique state standards.

In general terms, a Curriculum Map includes:

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Daylight Savings Time is back today. Watch this video for background information:

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Here’s a good collection for both summative and formative assessments:

1. Class badges
2. Grading automatically w G. Docs–Flubaroo
3. Hollywood Sq/Jeopardy Templates
4. Jeopardy Labs
5. No Red Ink–track student learning, create quizzes, CC-based–free sign-up
6. Online quizzes that you create, online grades 
7. PollDaddy
8. Puzzle maker
9. Quizbean–make and take quizzes online
10. Quizdini
11. Rubrics I
12. Rubrics II
13. Rubrics III
14. Rubrics/Assessments—create–KSchrock
15. Rubrics—for CCSS
16. Socrative
17. Technology use survey—interactive
18. Test creator—online
19. Tests—create fill-in-the-blanks
20. Padlet

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Create a trifold brochure in Publisher to go along with colonization or another unit of inquiry in the classroom. This project focuses on research and is more involved than #51 History Trifold. Students add lots of detail and lots of research on different colonization topics. Besides Publisher, students learn to research on the internet and copy-paste pictures from the internet

Lesson Plan

Use each panel in the trifold (there are six) to cover a different topic you’re discussing in class.

Click on each page of lesson plan.

You can also use a template in Google Docs, Google Presentations, or MS Word if you don’t have Publisher:

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I’ve been blogging for about six years, some professionally (for my tech ed career) and others on topics of interest to me (writing, USNA, that sort). That first post–putting myself on the line, ignoring that I had no hits, wanting to approve comments from spammers because that would look like someone loved me–I thought that was the hard part. The second post was easier and so it went.

But somewhere around the twentieth post, I figured out I had to do blogging right. I couldn’t simply show up, spout off and slink away. There was a lot more to ‘blogging’. I could have quit–it was getting to be a lot like work–but I enjoyed the camaraderie with like-minded souls. I learned a lot about writing by doing it and could transfer those lessons to my students. So I honed my skill.

Now, years later, there are a few items I wished I’d known early rather than late. Let me share them with you so you don’t have the hard lessons I did:

• only reblog 10% of someone else’s post. If you’re on WordPress and push the ‘reblog’ button, they take care of it for you. But if you copy someone’s post and give them attribution, you blew it. You have to get permission if you are reposting more than 10% of someone’s work. Where was I supposed to learn that?

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With a new year upon us, I want to share three items I’ve discovered that help organize my desk-related items like nothing else I’ve tried. I didn’t want these to be the ‘pencil caddy’ sort of ideas, but those that popped a light bulb over my head, significantly improving my ability to get the job done while sitting at my desk.

Here’s what I came up with. See what you think:

Computer Privacy Screen Protectors

Have you ever gotten that prickle in the back of your neck that someone is reading over your shoulder? Maybe you’re working on a sensitive email while students are in the classroom (during lunch break, say) and when you turn, you see a student standing there, politely and quietly waiting to ask a question. Or your computer screen–like mine–can be seen through your classroom window, which means anyone walking by can see what you’re doing on your screen, even if it’s grading student work.

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