Monday by the numbers
August 18, 2008
Baptism by Fire: 100 Essential Tips and Resources for Student Teachers
If you or someone you care about is scared to death about his/her first student teaching assignment, this list will take away some of that stress. You’ll find tips on everything from classroom management to lesson plans to resume and interview help.
8 Essential Skills They Didn’t Teach You In School
School’s important, but there are some lessons it doesn’t cover. Your students — and maybe you, too — can try adding a few soft skills to the ol’ resume after reading this list. These skills are useful to folks of any age. I found some I’m already doing (listening to audiobooks while driving or doing mundane tasks) and a few I need to work on (networking). Defining the problem is half the battle, so if you feel you’re deficient in any of these skills, now’s as good a time as any to shore them up.
TED Talks: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web
The interweb as we know it today is a ripe old 5,000 days old. We’ve come a long way since Prodigy, baby. Wonder what the next 5,000 days hold? Check out this TED Talks video.
TED’s Top 10 Videos - A (Free) Goldmine Of Inspiration
Speaking of TED, they’re an all-around compendium of awesome videos, tantalizing us with what’s possible. Here’s a handy Top 10 list, courtesy of Mike Stopforth, of cool, inspiring TED Talks to get you excited about the coming school year.
Photo credit: Sister 72 on flickr
Quick! You need to come up with some writing prompts for your students for a creative writing assignment, but the best thing you can come up with is “What I did on my summer vacation.” You’ve got a a writing emergency on your hands. You need
This site, and others, feature lots of great places for your students to create content, and to locate materials like audio, photos, and videos to 

It’s a good thing they didn’t let me design the Instructify site. We probably would’ve ended up with a generic graphic of a chalk board on a background of brown and light blue, one of about three color schemes I know looks good.
Are you ready for your close-up shot? Are your students? If so, there are a couple of video contests out there to show off your filmmaking skills. First up is
Ever wanted to make plastic? Okay, have you ever wanted to make something out of plastic, but didn’t know how? Just curious?
No longer will you take hours and hours to put together picture presentations for Open House, awards ceremonies, or end-of-the-year graduations. Liven up any presentation with the use of
I loved playing with Legos as a kid. Trouble was, I was always a brick or two short of creating the perfect fort for my
Not too long ago, I wrote about
I’d really like to use some mind maps. I know I can benefit from using one, but I really don’t have the time to sit down and think one up and then design it and then oh great its 3 a.m. and I’ve got to wake up for work in a few hours.
Lights, camera, action! Looking for a way to bring your students’ book reports, science/social studies projects, or writing projects to life? Let them create a