Ditch That Textbook

Now is an unprecedented time for new teachers. If settling into the profession wasn’t enough, there are technology standards, 1-to-1 laptop or tablet initiatives and educational technology to embrace. It’s an exciting time for new teachers, but it’s a complicated one also. My first year of teaching was so overwhelming, trying to find my voice [...]

It’s a noisy world. Everywhere you look, someone’s trying to sell you something. Someone’s trying to convince you of an opinion. There’s a pull for people’s attention everywhere. That’s definitely the case in classrooms. Students have plenty of challenges for their attention. After-school activities. Social media. Video games. Teenage relationships. Even the cows outside my [...]

I am a sucker for a good to-do list. At this time of year, I have these lists all over the place. Grading to do. End-of-year activities. Summer event planning. For years, they’ve been on scrap printer paper cut into quarters. Good size, and I always have plenty of it. Those days are changing. I [...]

Welcome to Tech Tuesday, where we take a look at a useful piece of educational technology and discuss some of its uses in the classroom and beyond. Today’s Tech Tuesday will divert from its usual screencast approach (partly for technical difficulties and partly to try something new) to present Google Hangout. Google Hangout features a [...]

We’re in the home stretch. In my school district, that means there are six school days left. In my classroom, that means the following: Three final-exam review days One Hispanic food fiesta day Two full days of finals In my tired body, that means a nagging desire to let my foot off the gas. To [...]

Influence. It’s the real reason so many of us got into education in the first place. That “make a difference in the lives of children” place in our hearts? It’s about influence. We don’t just want to teach content. We want to influence lives. One of the epic tomes on the subject, “How to Win [...]

Choose Your Own Adventure stories allow readers to pick the course of the story they read. The story changes based on the decisions that they make. These stories can be great fun for students as wrap-up activities to stories they’ve read (how does the story progress from here?) or simply as a creative writing activity. [...]

This weekend, I got to participate in the largest half marathon in the United States: the OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis. It was my first half marathon, and I was pretty excited. I met my goal, to run it in less than two hours, by finishing in 1:57:46. (That was a small miracle considering [...]

Twitter chats are starting to catch fire in education. Ever participate in #edchat, the founding educational Twitter chat? It’s fast-paced. Packed. Next-to-impossible to keep up with. There are chats for almost every subject area, grade and persuasion in the education world. (A pretty exhaustive list of educational Twitter chats was produced by Thomas Murray and [...]

Today’s Tech Tuesday screencast is about QR code scavenger hunts. A QR code scavenger hunt creates QR codes with text questions that appear when the QR code is scanned. The QR codes are hidden throughout the school, where students try to find them, scan them and answer the questions. Classtools.net offers a quick, easy QR [...]