iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Do you manage your time or does time manage you? The lines between work and home life have blurred over the past year of remote working conditions for many educators. The feeling of always having something to do or an email to answer can be hard to turn off. Cognitive overload is real for educators.

But honing executive functioning skills will make it easier to find balance between work and life. Here are five ways to get started.

Teaching is hard. Anyone who believes otherwise has either never met a teacher, or clearly wasn't paying attention during their 13+ years inside of a classroom.

Business Insider asked K-12 public school teachers to answer the question, "What's something about your job that a lot of people don't know?"

For many of us managing email is a chore we'd rather not have to do. Fortunately, Gmail offers some helpful features that make managing email an efficient process. Additionally, Gmail now offers tools to ensure that your messages are only seen by the intended recipients at the time that you want your recipients to see the messages.

I can’t count the number of technological tools that were marketed directly to me during my 14-year teaching career. I could probably count the number of tools I tried out and tested—that number would be in the double-digits. And the number of education-specific apps, services, and software I actually used consistently? Those I could easily count on one hand.

"What is Flipgrid?

In short, Flipgrid is a free, education-focused platform to create and share short videos.

Quick Overview: How Flipgrid Works

The embedded guide further below provides a much more detailed overview of how Flipgrid works, but the short version is that users create videos around topics, then upload those videos to a ‘Grid’ for sharing, feedback, and topic-based ‘response videos.’

But what features make Flipgrid it unique? It’s really about ease of use (through ‘Topics’) and privacy (through ‘Grids’)."

If we want to see innovation happening in our schools, we need to trust, encourage, and empower teachers to transform their practice. Too often, teachers are forced to teach inside the box and it can feel frustrating. In this post, I explore why teachers are the innovators, what’s getting in the way, and what we can do about it.

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

Several years ago, former fourth-grade teacher Tracy Johnston Zager took an informal survey of two groups of people to find out how they feel about math: mathematicians and teachers who teach math. She discovered that while mathematicians used words like “beauty” and “wonder” to describe math, teachers recalled “dread” and “fear.” These words aligned with what Zager had observed in her job mentoring student teachers who expressed similar reservations about math. Teachers’ sentiment toward math is noteworthy because research has shown that adults can transfer anxiety to kids.

As teachers try to improve how they teach math by applying numeracy, inquiry-based learning, productive failure and complex instruction, the idea of how to become better math teachers is gaining a wider audience. But Zager writes in her book, “We moved right into a new way to teach math, without addressing teachers’ personal histories with and understanding of mathematics.”

"While teachers may always be the best line of defense for students falling behind, busy schedules don’t always permit the special attention and feedback that students need. That’s where artificial intelligence–powered teaching assistants might come in handy.

“These intelligent tools can adapt pacing based on the student’s ability … and provide targeted, corrective feedback in case the student makes mistakes, so that the student can learn from them,” states an eSchool News report released earlier this year. “These tools also gather actionable insights and information about a student’s progress and report the data back to the teacher.”

Understandably, there is still some hesitation at the idea of using this technology, as education professionals fear the day robots will replace teachers. However, as Thomas Arnett, a writer at the Christensen Institute, explains in his report, Teaching in the Machine Age, these advances are not meant to replace teachers but help them bring students to new heights.

“Innovations that commoditize some elements of teacher expertise also supply the tools to raise the effectiveness of both non-experts and expert teachers to new heights and to adapt to the new priorities of a 21st-century workforce and education system,” writes Arnett.

Schools have already begun to adopt machine learning initiatives to help teachers and students fill learning gaps, and the results have been received well so far."

If you haven't already seen it, here is a handy visual featuring some of the best educational websites to try out in your instruction. based on our previous reviews, we selected a number of our favourite tools and arranged them into 8 main categories:  websites for language arts teachers, websites for math teachers, websites for science teachers, websites for physics teachers, websites for history teachers,  websites for social studies teachers, websites for arts teachers, and websites for music teachers.  You can find links to the websites in this chart. Enjoy

"As a consequence of these lessons from Finland, I have often heard people wondering if the quality of their own schools and entire education system would improve if only they had teachers like the Finns have—just as having good teachers has improved schools in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, for example. There has been a global movement to turn attention to teacher quality and how it might be improved. Indeed, the desire to enhance teacher quality comes from the lessons learned from education systems that score high on international student assessments.

Each of these successful systems has managed to create a

situation where teaching is regarding by young people as an interesting career choice. Most teachers in these countries spend most of their working lives serving schools. From the international perspective, however, there are three myths related to teacher quality and school improvement that often steer education policies in the wrong direction in countries where the teaching profession has declined in status (Sahlberg, 2013)"

Primary teachers are some of the most amazing people to walk this planet.  In fact, I consider primary teachers to have rockstar status.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not forgetting the fabulous middle and secondary teachers. I could seriously write a whole new post about how great ya’ll are!   But today, I am focusing on primary teachers because that’s where my experience lies.  So, for your entertainment, humor, and reading pleasure, I present to you: 10 Reasons Why Primary Teachers Are Rockstars.

iPad is a versatile device that embeds tons of interesting features that are not immediately visible to the lay user. Knowing how to operate these features can make a whole difference in your productivity and transform your iPad use experience. For those of you using iPad in their teaching, the need to delve deeper into iPad's hidden features is even bigger. You can use the same sources we used for writing today's post, Apple's Tips app and iPad User Guide for iOS 10.2, to learn more about your iPad and make the best of it in your instruction.  We have gone through guidelines provided there and came up with the list below. These are useful iPad  tips/features we think you need to know about as a teacher or parent. While most of these tips work on iOS 10 and up some are exclusive to iOS 10.2. Check them out and as always share with us your feedback in out Facebook page.

"The premise is simple enough here: What are the kinds of messages that inspire students?

We’ve talked about student engagement and motivational videos for teens, in addition to ‘good class rules.’

This is similar but not intently meant to ‘inspire.’ Rather, the hope is that by separating these kinds of messages into three different categories and perspectives (I, You, and Us/We), you might be able to use them to guide a lot of what you do, from curriculum and instructional design to creating class rules and norms."

There are so many ways to learn with YouTube channels for teachers and students!


When you want to learn something new these days, most of us head over to YouTube.

You can learn just about anything on YouTube: how to fix your dryer, how to create a blog, or how to use Google Docs.

For students, YouTube is often their first stop when learning a new skill.

Did you know you can also get notifications when new videos have been added by your favorite channels?

Or that you can use YouTube as a curation tool to create playlists for your students?

Today, I am going to share with you some of my favorite YouTube Channels, and some that were shared in the Shake Up Learning community.

Over 500,000 education-related pins are saved to Pinterest every day. That number is expected to grow with the launch of Teachers on Pinterest External link — a collaborative effort between Pinterest, education experts such as Edutopia External link , and a collection of teacher bloggers. The platform's creation of their own education-focused Pinterest community demonstrates the value and power of using this tool in the classroom.

Recognizing that power, we've teamed up with noted author and education expert Leah Anne Levy External link to create The Guide to Pinterest for Educators — a handbook designed with today's digitally literate educators in mind. This handbook provides teachers and administrators with the tools needed to not only navigate Pinterest, but also to use the social platform as a powerful learning tool for both teachers and students.

The meaning of "digital literacy" has shifted over the years. While there was a time when job candidates were encouraged to list "Proficient at Microsoft Word" on their resume, now such skills are considered standard. This shift toward a technologically savvy workforce has permeated the classroom as well.

It makes sense to assume that the more digitally literate our teachers are, the more they'll employ these skills in the classroom, which will in turn foster a strong sense of digital citizenship in our students. However, the importance and scope of digital literacy extends beyond this simple theory. Here, we've laid out seven reasons why digital literacy skills are important for today's teachers.

If you would have told me a year ago that I’d be working for an edtech startup in San Francisco, I would have thought you were crazy. I’ve had many jobs as an educator over the past 16 years, but at my core, I’m a 7th-grade middle school teacher. Nonetheless, here I sit in the heart of Silicon Valley ingenuity and innovation, exactly where I’m supposed to be—surrounded by engineers, business gurus, and dozens of fellow educators who have also made the switch.

For any educators who are considering a switch from education to edtech, here are six lessons I’ve learned from my first year since the transition.

When teachers reexamine how they were taught math and their perceptions of their ability, student test scores and attitudes about math dramatically improve, according to a new study.

The research, which appears in the journal Education Sciences, shows that fifth-grade teachers who took an online class designed to give them a different approach to mathematics teaching and learning, achieved significantly higher test results for their students compared with a control group of teachers in the same schools who did not take the class.

I always say it’s a great time to be a teacher. New technologies are constantly changing what is possible in the classroom, the skills our students need to be successful are changing at an increasing rate, and we no longer need to teach in isolation. The ability to share resources, strategies, and ideas has never been easier. Unfortunately, we are also busier than ever, and staying current with 21st-century teaching and learning requires educators to look for new ways to be continuously learning.

 

When I add up the time I spend alone in my car, on the elliptical, or working around the house, I realize that it makes up a good amount of my “non-working” hours. The number of awesome podcasts for teachers being produced today has enabled me to turn this time into opportunities for lifelong learning and professional development. Whether I’m streaming in my car or listening through my earbuds, podcasts have become an essential part of my professional growth.