It being pretty early in the summer, I know you’re not really thinking about developing that perfect lesson plan. However, in mid-September, when you’re frazzled from start of school madness, parents’ night, and you realize you don’t have a lesson for tomorrow, you’ll want to refer back to this website, Science with NOAA Research.
BY BILL FERRIS
“The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 [on a scale of zero to 100] is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.” -Malcolm Gladwell
I stumbled across this TED Talk from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. In this talk, Gladwell tells the story of Howard Moskowitz, who revolutionized the food industry by figuring out what people actually wanted, as opposed to what they said they wanted. In doing so, Gladwell also inadvertently makes a great case for differentiated instruction.
Five Best Note-Taking Tools
Back when I was a student, we had to take notes with a pen and paper. Today’s learners have a lot more options that take advantage of online technology. Lifehacker presents this list of the top five ways to take notes (don’t worry, my trust old pen and paper made the cut).
25 Tools every Learning Professional should have in their Toolbox
Another list of free tools teachers should use. Firefox, Skype, Wordpress, all that stuff. You’re probably using a lot of these already. If not…well, this may not be the blog for you.
7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling
Anybody with a video camera and a computer can broadcast a movie to anyone thanks to YouTube. Not surprisingly, smart teachers want to harness this technology for educational purposes. This article from Educause Learning Initiative will give you a good introduction to various forms of digital storytelling and how to use them for teaching and learning.
5 Things We Learned About Teens at TOC
The Publishing Trends Blog presents a fascinating glimpse at how teens use technology, gleaned during the Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Among them, kids don’t care about mastering a piece of software — they won’t sign up for a training seminar on Excel or Photoshop, they just want to know how to use it for the project they’re working on. To quote the article, “they’re concentrated on the outcome, not the tool.” These five discoveries may help you better understand your students’ learning process. -BILL FERRIS
I have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Shopping there can be unpleasant, as I always seem to get stuck in an aisle behind a family of six who can’t find what they’re looking for; however, I still shop there because I know I can find anything I want. Well, 4teachers.org is like the Wal-Mart of classroom technology resources, but better. You can find it all under one roof, AND you won’t spend hours stuck behind a slow-poke.
4teachers.org has a plethora of tools that teachers can use to make their lives easier. Some tools such as RubiStar and Assign-A-Day have already been discussed in this blog. Some other tools that are useful include CasaNotes, Project Based Learning (PBL) Checklists, and The Teacher Tacklebox. CasaNotes generates simple form letters that you can edit and print in English and Spanish. It offers some of the basics you might not want to recreate like progress reports, field trip permission slips, and parent-conference notices. The PBL Checklist section not only gives you information on the basics of PBL, but also provides customizable checklists for typical projects at various grade levels. Finally, the Teacher Tacklebox will allow you to search the best of the resources found on 4teachers.org. You can input a subject (such as Math), a theme (such as Basic Math), and a topic (such as Place Value), and it will come up with lesson ideas, TrackStar tracks (another 4teachers resource), and links to help you differentiate your instruction and integrate technology.
There are many more useful tools on 4teachers.org, so, please browse the “aisles” on your own. You’re guaranteed to find something you can use right away in your classroom, and you won’t have to dodge wayward carts. -REBECCAH HAINES
Instructify is finally letting me share information about one of my favorite online tools, Diigo. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers).
In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet). -ALICE MERCER
FYI: it’s pronounced dee-go (Digest of Internet Information Groups and Other stuff).
The new essentials: Top 10 school supplies for today’s students
With IDEA, kids with an IEP (which qualifies them for special education services) aren’t relegated to the classroom at the far end of the yard. Many are in classrooms like yours and mine. Yeah, I took a class in “mainstreaming,” but I can always use some new ideas and resources. Here is a quick list of resources for all educators that will help you with all your students.
This post is about resources for differentiating instruction. I recently attended a session on this topic at NECC done by Bill Dolton. He began with the question, is differentiation about having individual lessons for each student? I share this because the answer was, “no.” Many teachers think they will have to have to do individual lesson plans, which is not possible with 30+ students in a class. Instead it’s about giving students some choices, and this term wasn’t used, but scaffolding (which technology can be great for). As he puts it, the goal of DI is not to”cure” or resolve student learning differences, but to harness or cultivate them.
Mr. Dalton has a wiki (an editable Webpage) chock full of resources. The nice part is that these resources are not just a hot list of sites, but articles on how and why to differentiate. Most are in friendly, easy to understand language (e.g., lots of pieces are from Edutopia).
I will also take this opportunity to share a series of posts that Mathew Needleman wrote on the how, why, and when of differentiation. -ALICE MERCER
NECC 2008 Reflections from Sessions on Day 1 | The Blog of Ms. Mercer
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