The Myth of the Super Teacher from EdWriters on Vimeo.
Being a good teacher requires perseverance and practice, it's not something that happens naturally, even with teacher training. Roxanna Elden gives an honest and hilarious account of the dangers of thinking there is such thing as a 'super teacher'. It's worth watching whether you're a new teacher or you've been teaching for years and just need a reminder of what's important in our profession.
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I simply love yourlogicalfallacyis.com's free posters about various logical fallacies. Great for those teaching persuasive writing, debating techniques, or evaluating sources of information! They have 3 different sizes to download, including a huge A2 sized file that will print out full poster size if you have a giant printer.
ScreenLeap.com is nice web app that allows you to share your screen with anyone. The sharing takes place all within your browser so there's no need to download any programs (other than making sure you have java script installed in your browser). The refresh rate isn't amazing, so you won't be sharing any video with this method, but you could use it for presentations, or just sharing what you're looking at. In class I used it to share a presentation from my laptop to the desktop computer that was hooked up to the projector. There was about a 5 second lag in refreshing, so again, animations would be affected, but not simply content sharing. I would suggest having students use it to quickly share what they have on their laptops with the class without having to have them come and plug their computers into the projector. You could simply have them all share and then switch between view, especially if you open them up in multiple tabs. Might also be a way to keep track of what their working on! I could imagine asking a student who is not on task to share their screen with me so that I could periodically check in on them and they wouldn't be able to alt-tab out of a program to hide it from me! Back in March I wrote a post about answering the question: What if students were able to choose when and what they wanted to be assessed on? Through answering that question my colleagues and I have come up with a framework that allows students to choose not only their own assessment product (essay, experiment, video, website, expert talk, etc), but also the objectives by which they will be assessed. Students are grappling with what our MYP objectives are and how best to ensure that their progress over the year matches the objectives by which they must demonstrate their learning . . . and it's freaking me out! Last night I had a moment of panic lying in bed and I was tempted to throw in the towel and call the whole thing off when I realized how little I was in control. How in the world am I going to manage all these independent inquiries? What if someone slips through the cracks? Are they really learning enough content? Are they making connections to our concepts? Everything that I could imagine going wrong was flying through my brain. However, as I began to reflect on why I was afraid of the process I began to realize that it was due to the unknown, and not knowing if this thing is really going to work. That's when the light came on that I am right in the middle of my own personal inquiry cycle. More importantly, I realized that many of my students are most likely also feeling fear and anxiety at various points in their own inquiry. So this morning, I acknowledged my fears, reflected on what was causing them, then tackled the issues in my classes today. I still don't what the end of this whole process will be, but I know that tomorrow we'll be having a brief opening to class where we talk about our fears, and how to overcome them in our own personal inquiries and journeys as learners! If you haven't seen Harvard's WorldMap you should definitely take a look. They have an excellent open source mapping project that allows users to create geo-tagged maps and then share them with the world. The types of maps you can create are really limited to what you can imagine! To embed the map, you need to follow the link, named LINK just above the map! This will allow you to grab the embed code to paste into your site. Women In The World Foundation data regarding organizations around the world working with women's rights. A Promise Renewed is a great new dashboard for investigating child mortality rates around the world over the last 10-30 years. Struggled to embed the dashboard into my own site, but it's all on a nice stand-alone page for students to investigate various trends in the data!
Challenge yourself and your students to be creative. So many good Approaches to Learning in this video! It might be a great way to start off a new lesson or project that you want students to work on, or use it as an advisory lesson starter. Whatever you do. . . stay creative! 29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo. |
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