More amazing blog posts from this past week:
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Free Technology for Teachers: TinyTap – Create Image Reveal Games and Identification Games
This morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for a way to create educational games in which students have to correctly answer questions in order to reveal a picture or part of a picture. My suggestion was to try TinyTap.
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It Takes More Than Passion! Our Young Girls Need Resilience to Thrive! – Teacher Reboot Camp
Savvy, my baby girl, is an incredibly curious, brave, and happy child. She sees the world as an adventure and believes she can do anything.
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Peer Feedback with Forms – Mari Venturino
Class presentations are a lot of fun, and it’s essential to give students the experience of speaking in front of others.
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10 Tips for Using Social Media to Tell Your School’s Story – Class Tech Tips
From Instagram to Twitter, social media has a powerful way of connecting users from around the world.
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Free Technology for Teachers: How to Add an Image Search Box to Google Sites
Late last year Google started to allow you to embed content and widgets from third parties into your Google Sites. One of the things that you might consider adding to your classroom or library Google Site is the Photos for Class image search tool.
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8 Excellent Do It Yourself Apps for Students | Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
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Free Technology for Teachers: Write Notes and Save Bookmarks to Sync With Google Docs & Slides
This morning I was browsing Product Hunt when I saw someone pitching a Chrome extension that promised to let you write notes while browsing the web and save those notes to Google Drive. As I read the description I thought to myself, “that’s what Goo…
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5 Ways NOT to Implement Next Generation Science Standards @coolcatteacher
Patti Duncan shares some of the common mistakes she finds that schools implementing Next Generation Science Standards make. If you’re implementing NGSS in your school or state, this is a must listen.
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Free Technology for Teachers: 13 Free Typing Games for Kids
TypeTastic is a service that currently offers thirteen free typing games. The games start with basic skills like identifying the letters on a keyboard and build up to touch typing skills.
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Doing Poorly on Purpose: Why Smart Kids Choose Not to do Well in School
As a teacher myself, I feel your pain when a capable student chooses — yes, chooses — not to perform well academically.
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The US students who walked out of schools nationwide in protest against gun violence yesterday have counterparts in many other countries. On March 24, young activists all over the world will be staging events in support of the March for Our Lives mo…
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Fabulous FETC Finds – AR, VR, MR & AI
In January, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Orlando, Florida for FETC 2018 (Future of Education Technology Conference).
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California: Why the State Board of Education Will Never Say No to KIPP | Diane Ravitch’s blog
Expanding charter schools is the passion of Betsy DeVos. Lest we forget, it was also the passion of the Obama administration, which spent eight years promoting the wonders of charter schools.
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Ted Dintersmith is a successful venture capitalist and father of two who has spent years devoting most of his time, energy and millions of dollars of his personal fortune to learning about — and advocating for — public education and how it can be ma…
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Scratch Game Design Curriculum and Professional Development | ScratchEd
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Algae blooms continue but toxins decline in Jefferson County lakes | Peninsula Daily News
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Blue-green algae blooms have been found on Jefferson County lakes in January but toxins in the waters have declined
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At Anderson Lake, no visual traces were left of a previous severe bloom which kept the lake closed for much of 2017
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A warning sign says that, while the lake is open, it is recommended that people avoid areas of scum, keep children and pets out of the water and clean fish well and discard the skin and guts.
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Giveaway: Freemakers, Last Jedi, and LEGO, Oh My! – GeekDad
Interested in a slew of Star Wars goodies? Who am I kidding? Of course you are. This incredible giveaway is perfect for Easter morning, any other occasion you have coming up, or – really – for no reason whatsoever. Do you really NEED a reason to ind…
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How To Find A School Your Kids Will Love (And That You Will, Too)
There’s so much pressure for them to believe that a good school is defined by high test scores and high rates of entrance to college and university, but there’s a lot more to education than that.
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The US students who walked out of schools nationwide in protest against gun violence today, March 14, have counterparts in many other countries. On March 24, young activists all over the world will be staging events in support of the March for Our …
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Seriously? Am I the only one who didn’t know about the EPIC reading tool? | History Tech
Remember that one time when all your friends went out, had a great time, came back, saw you sitting in your lonely bean bag, and acted surprised? “I thought someone asked you to come along,” they said. “We just figured you were in the other car,” th…
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Free Technology for Teachers: Three Good Options for Building a Course Website
Twice this week I have had readers ask me for recommendations for platforms building course resource pages or full course course websites. Both readers were looking for options that had more flexibility than Google Classroom and systems like it.
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Free Technology for Teachers: A Great List of Tools for Making Cool Infographics
Cool Infographics is a book and a blog written by Randy Krum. I read his book a few years ago and came away with some great design ideas that I now use in my slides and in some social media posts.
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NPE Action Warns: Stop This New Federal Voucher Program Now | Diane Ravitch’s blog
There is a very large Federal program called Impact Aid, designed to provide money to districts affected by federal military facilities, which puts a strain on the budgets of those districts.
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4 Types of Questions You Should be Asking Your Students – History Gal
I have always heard ‘There are no stupid questions.’ While this may be true, there definitely are ill-timed questions asked in your class. And, it’s not what you are thinking. The ill-timed questions don’t come from our students, but from us.
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It’s almost ten years since I first began blogging! I thought it was timely to update this post on the benefits of blogging for teachers and students. Back in 2008 I didn’t know much at all about blogging but nevertheless took the opportunity to se…
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Rate this item: No votes yet. Please wait… How do I design a business gamification to make it fun for users or employees? This is a question that comes up a lot in my world. In this case, what follows is my answer on Quora when I saw this.
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What legal rights do students really have to protest during the school day? – The Washington Post
What rights do students have under U.S. law to protest? On Wednesday, students across the country are planning to walk out of class for 17 minutes, from 10 a.m. to 10:17 a.m., to protest gun violence and urge lawmakers to pass gun control measures.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Dig CC Mixter – Find Music for Your Next Video Project
In this week’s tip of the week newsletter I featured sources of public domain and Creative Commons licensed videos. I’ve had a couple of people reply with questions about using music in multimedia projects.
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Are you serving the learner or the score? – The Principal of Change
Based on the title of the post, “Are you serving the learner or the score?”, it would be easy for educators to say “both.” This is not about an “either/or” mentality, but focusing on where you start. When we talk about “teaching to the test,” the i…
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If you are a district that uses Macintosh computers or iPads then you will want to check out this new weekly feature at 9 to 5 Mac. Jason and I are big fans of the blog and it is one of our go to resources for the latest Apple news.
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Free Technology for Teachers: 12 Alternatives to Google Image Search – Comparison Chart
Unless they’re introduced to other options, Google Images tends to be the default image search tool for students and adults.
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Rethinking How Students with Dyslexia Are Taught to Read
“I was not surprised there was a group of students with dyslexia who were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed,” says Kerry Agins, an Ohio special education attorney who represented the Upper Arlington parents.
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Top Tips for Teaching with Robots (using Sphero) @coolcatteacher
Robots are everywhere, they open our garage doors, vacuum our floors and if you are lucky they even park your car. Until recently there weren’t many robots in the classroom and now I couldn’t imagine approaching STEM without them.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Three Free iPad Apps for Creating Animated Movies
Last night I answered an email from a reader who was looking for a free alternative to Tellagami. Tellagami hasn’t been updated to work with iOS 11 so if you’ve updated your iPad, the app won’t work. Tellagami says that an update is coming, but I’m …
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Free Technology for Teachers: 1766 Free Lesson Plans for Art Teachers
My refrigerator is quickly getting covered with the art my toddler makes with her Crayola crayons and construction paper. Looking at one of her boxes of crayons over the weekend I was reminded of Crayola’s huge collection of lesson plans.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Timelinely – Annotate Videos With Text and Pictures
Timelinely is a new tool for annotating videos that are hosted on YouTube. I learned about Timelinely through one of Larry Ferlazzo’s recent blog posts. I tried Timelinely for myself this afternoon. Timelinely makes it easy to get started.
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The Nerdy Teacher: Student Voice Through Student Led Conferences #StuVoice
One of the many things I love about my new job is that conferences with parents are not like they are in many places. University Liggett Middle School has Student Led Conferences in place and it is one of the best ways to give students a voice in th…
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Free Technology for Teachers: Three Good Tools for Annotating Images Online
Annotating images can be a good activity for students to do illustrate their understanding of a process by adding information to a blank flowchart. Annotating images is also a good way for students to highlight and identify parts of a diagram like o…
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A Deeper Look at the Whole School Approach to Behavior
“Kids had a great time, especially since in the project-based learning they had to produce something in the end,” Essien said.
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10 Things Parents Should Know About ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ – GeekDad
Disney’s live-action version of Madeleine L’Engle’s science-fiction fantasy classic, A Wrinkle in Time, is a cotton candy movie: brightly colored, a treat to look at, but ultimately not as satisfying as one might hope.
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Easy Tutorial: How To Make A New Blog Header – The Edublogger
This is a guest post from Stef Galvin. Stef is a Year One teacher from Melbourne, Australia.
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3 Tips to Hook Your Reader’s Emotions
Probably like most authors, I read as often and as much as I possibly can, but lately I’ve been noticing something about my reading habits: For every book I finish, there are probably five or maybe even more where I download the free sample onto my …
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Students Learn More When THEY Do the Work |
A major barrier to innovation in the classroom is teacher exhaustion. I regularly work with teachers who like the idea of trying new teaching strategies, blended learning models, and technology tools, but they don’t have the time or energy to experi…
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On Certain Books for Certain Kids |
We spend a lot of time in bookstores and libraries. So much so that my own children at the moment are playing library downstairs. We go for the inspiration, for the support of booksellers, to find new must-have purchases.
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What Breaking the 4-Minute Mile Taught Us About the Limits of Conventional Thinking
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A Principal’s Reflections: Empowering Learners to Think with Performance Tasks
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What Differentiated Instruction Is–And Is Not: The Definition Of Differentiated Instruction
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Here’s How To Prevent The Next School Shooting, Experts Say : NPR Ed : NPR
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Teaching Your Students About Fake News – Listenwise Teacher Support Center
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Less is More #IMMOOC #LCInnovation – Annick Rauch
Time. Time is something that most of us wish we had more of. The reality is that we all have the exact same amount of time in one day.
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EdTech is Not Scary: 5 Things to Start With – Teacher Tech
The world interacts digitally. We are failing our students by not helping them to be users of digital technology. As we debate the value of teaching cursive it is undeniable that students will be using technology outside of school in the real world.
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Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Monday’s Temperatures Will Amaze
Temperatures got into the upper 50s today across western Washington…but you haven’t seen nothing yet. And unusual easterly winds will really rev up during the next 24 hours or so.
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The Importance of Assessment AS Learning
So here is where I struggle with this concept of “common assessments”.
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A Principal’s Reflections: Change the Narrative
No matter our level of digital proficiency, educators grapple with the rough-and-tumble pace that professional connectivity demands in our new age. A change of thinking is in order if we are to face a hyperlinked world of education.
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· 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…
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