Recently I’ve had great discussions with fellow educators and checked into blogs and news articles, questioning the pros and cons of flipping our classrooms. I wondered if this is right question to ask: to flip or not to flip? Key Understandings Let’s start with a key understanding: What do we mean by a flipped classroom? In a flipped classroom, teachers use a variety of technology-based media so that students do initial study of a subject outside the classroom, typically at home, via screencasts or videos teachers record themselves or with videos sourced on the web. The flip: imparting initial knowledge around a topic, typically...
Read More Post a comment (4)A colleague of mine recently shared this image: I immediately thought about our English learners and students who struggle, as well as students with special needs. Entry into the promised land of the Common Core does indeed seem to be closed. With the bar raised to new levels for all of our students and all of us as their educators, we have many questions on how to arrive at the “promised land.” How do we provide access to the Common Core for all students in our diverse classrooms? How can we accomplish all that we need to with the many changes connected...
Read More Post a comment (0)“Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” ― Geoffrey Chaucer This simple yet powerful description introduced us to the clerk, Chaucer’s devout Oxford student, of Canturbury Tales’ fame. Fast-forward some 600-plus years to meet an individual, Salman Khan, who takes this description beyond all boundaries, where the world truly comes together for shared learning in the global classroom he founded, Khan Academy. The mission is lofty: a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Its reach is already staggering, with over a million students per month, one- to two-hundred thousand lessons delivered per day via more than 3,500 videos. The Khan Academy video...
Read More Post a comment (0)Defining Digital Citizenship: A Heroic Approach In our classrooms, we may wonder how to define digital citizenship. Where do we begin? Google it and you’ll see hundreds of entries in page after page of search results, a torrential downpour of information! I have always found inspiration in biography, a genre in which actions speak loudly through the words that document their far-reaching effects, many times profound, in some cases, truly heroic. So, let’s adopt a “heroic” approach for digital citizenship and look to those who inspire us through their presence in the digital community. When you think of a hero, what faces, what...
Read More Post a comment (0)Reaching our students—easier or more difficult than before? To answer, go back to your first year of teaching or your freshman year of high school when your teachers were reaching you, or trying to. In the digital era, we may feel like shouting or at least hitting Caps Lock before responding: more difficult! The sense of competition with digital tools breeds a kind of exasperation—how do I get my students’ attention, much less sustain it for an entire lesson and string enough of these together to cover the standards? When we leverage the digital tools that define our students as digital residents...
Read More Post a comment (2)The other day, my son asked me why I like to read and his dad doesn’t. Good question! I really didn’t have an answer, other than thinking about the way I grew up. In my childhood, household reading was what we did. Every night before bed, my parents read to me. As I grew older, I was allowed to stay up thirty minutes past my bedtime to read on my own (motivating me even more—who doesn’t want to stay up late?). Reading was simply a habit I developed early on and luckily still enjoy doing today. Now, as my own household winds down (kids...
Read More Post a comment (0)How important is technology in classrooms today? In doing some research, I stumbled upon a YouTube video called “A Vision of K-12 Students” (see below). I know that with over 1 million hits, many people have had an opportunity to see this video. For me it was extremely powerful both as a parent and as an educator. The message was simple – we must think about technology today differently than we did five or ten years ago. The technology available to me as a child looked a little like this: Obviously, what I had available to me looked very different than what we...
Read More Post a comment (2)If you’re like me, you enter each school year with plans for expanding, improving, or updating your professional repertoire, “New Year’s Resolutions” for the classroom, if you will. While 21st century learning and technology standards are high among priorities and while you share the idea that increasing use of technology in the classroom offers huge benefits for you and your students, technology-related resolutions may not have made it onto your list. There’s still time! In fact, time is the exact reason we’re going to look at RSS today (RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication). Not only is using RSS a key strategy to...
Read More Post a comment (0)For some of us, bringing interactive technology into our lessons is anything but second-nature. We know technology is a powerful tool for motivation and engagement, but… Where to begin with planning? How to connect to best practices? Can we spare the time? Literacy 1.0, New Literacy, Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants, Blended Learning, Networked Literacy, D-Gen, Net – Gen, Digital Literacy, Literacy 2.0, Hybrid Learning The terms related to technology and education can confuse rather than clarify. We are on firm footing when we acknowledge—vigorously—that we strive daily to fully equip our students for a bright, successful future. There IS a brave new DIGITAL world. And...
Read More Post a comment (3)Reading and re-reading are necessary steps to improve fluency and comprehension, however, it can be challenging to find innovative, authentic ways to encourage students to read the same work over and over again. As many of you know from experience, Reader’s Theater asks students to reproduce written work using voice alone (no props, sets, and costumes), providing a legitimate rationale for re-reading. In the process of using the scripts and performing, students demonstrate marked gains in literacy including, but not limited to, a more complete understanding of how to read expressively by achieving the right volume, pitch, tone and timing. A interesting study...
Read More Post a comment (0)
