teachers
3 Tech Tools for the Sped Classroom
Being a Special Education teacher is something that takes patience and a warm heart. These teachers are truly in it for the love of seeing a student develop as a person socially and mentally. However, they seem to be in need of and short of resources more than most other classrooms.
How Active, Digital Learning Fosters Business Skills in Students
The array of social technologies open a wide swath of possibilities for active learning, particularly in the online and blended teaching space.
Teachers Inspiring Teachers in a New Age of PD
A major shift in the force of education has emerged as teachers have become self-directed, independent designers of their own learning. Embracing social media, blogging, and learning from one another in digital spaces, they have forged a new era of professional development that is changing classrooms from the ground up. Simultaneously, and perhaps because of their online interactions, teachers also have begun to re-energize the professional learning in their brick-and-mortar professional spaces.
Great Teachers or Great Technology?
Matt Miller, Washington Post columnist and host of KCRW's "Left, Right and Center," moderated a debate November 2012 around the motion that "Great teachers are more important than great education technology." Debate participants included Nakia Towns, Director of Human Capital Strategy at Knox County Schools in Tennessee, and Heath Morrison, Superintendent of Charlotte Mecklenberg School District in North Carolina, for the motion and Gloria Lee, Chief Operating Officer at New Schools Venture Fund, and Kwasi Asare, Executive Vice President of Everfi, against the most.
Lulu: The Way to Self Publishing
Instead of waiting for some magic gatekeeper to accept them, people can publish when they are ready, and in turn, we get to see new and different things that we might never see in a bookstore.
12 Wishes for a Creative New Year
Call me hopelessly Romantic in the 19th-century sense, but I believe deeply in creativity as the wellspring of a meaningful, productive, and happy life. I am never more joyful than when I am fully engaged in puzzling out a challenging problem, making something with my hands (including wiggling my fingers on a keyboard to craft something digitally), or building on the work of others to invent new ways for my students to learn. My philosophy of teaching, then, stands on a foundation of creativity.
3 Lessons on Faculty Development from an Education Innovator
Oregon State University went from not offering formal tech support to its faculty to having the director of its faculty tech training program named one of this year’s top 50 innovators in education. What can we learn from the success of OSU’s program?
MasteryConnect Eases Common Core Alignment, Instruction & Tracking
Three years ago Doug Weber and Mick Hewitt had left a web design agency and were consulting on a social network in Japan. During that same time, Cory Reid was CEO of Instructure. Trenton Goble, a school principal, and Mick were training for a marathon and discussing Trenton’s frustrations around tracking progress of formative assessments in a mastery learning approach.
Sir John Daniel: Openness Rather Than Scale is MOOC Contribution
"I'm delighted that openness has gotten to some very closed institutions," said Sir John Daniel. As the former CEO of Commonwealth of Learning and Vice-Chancellor of Open University, he knows a lot about higher education, open education resources (OER), and online learning.
5 Ways to Use Google Docs in the Classroom
Google Docs is a user friendly suite of online collaborative tools that come with tremendous potential for use in the classroom. Last year all of the students in our school received Google Docs accounts and I was kept quite busy getting students and teachers up and running with the new tools, then discovering innovative ways to use them as effective tools for learning. Here are some of the favorites.