Creativity and innovation are now seen as high priorities in virtually every human endeavor, spanning academic, business, and artistic domains. Some say we have left behind the “information age” and entered the “era of creativity,” in which our role as educators is to define and teach students how best to maximize their uniquely human creative potential.
College & Career Readiness is defined at a new level – student performance at a level of synthesis and extended thinking. Kevin Baird shared concrete examples of student work and grading rubrics to support educators in evaluating learning synthesis.
The first years of practice for teachers can be filled with great hope and exhilaration, as well as fatigue and anxiety. Without adequate support, new teachers often struggle through their early days, months, and years in the classroom.
Every student, and every teacher for that matter, is a unique individual with characteristics, beliefs, abilities, needs, and preferences. Variation, rather than standardization, is the reality in our classrooms, our lives, and for our students.
Ask any parent about their children’s media use, and most will tell you they’re interested in media that help their kids learn. But what are parents’ experiences with their children’s use of educational media?
Webinar presenter, independent languages consultant Joe Dale, examined the SAMR model developed by Dr. Rubin Puentedura, which provides a useful framework for helping teachers rethink how they design activities that involve the use of technology. Joe drew on practical examples to explore the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and finally Redefinition stages of the model, suggesting how previously inconceivable tasks can be achieved which transform learning and allow educators to ‘teach above the line.
Rigor is driven by a balance among conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application. After focusing on conceptual understanding of the operations, teachers must help students use their conceptual understanding to build procedural fluency, both with basic facts and a variety of algorithms.
Non-traditional forms of assessment, such as peer-to-peer learning, can produce useful information for the teacher. Another idea is to include an assessment component in warm-up, group, and closure activities during class. Teachers can make students more responsible for their own learning through technology-enhanced self-assessments.
Students with autism can achieve great success in environments that help them succeed. How does that work? Settings that are “autism communication friendly” provide a variety of little things that result in big positive changes in student participation.
Novice teachers are put in a precarious position when it comes to assigning homework to their students – their veteran mentors tell them to load students down with it, while research shows that there is little (if any) educational benefit to assigning homework.