AP Chris Edwards and the staff of Kreps Middle School have been busy working to keep school spirit alive during fall and winter remote learning. Chris shares the school’s videotaped Challenges featuring staff and students dancing, singing, exercising, and more.
Students have all too real tech issues interfering with online participation. But Dina Strasser’s pandemic experience tells her other kids’ black squares in Zoom signal disengagement. Here are 5 ways she’s keeping them tuned in with virtual class management strategies.
Michelle Russell loves teaching statistics and her students enjoy it too. But it took her a few years to find activities that really engage them and that also reinforce the statistics standards they need to learn. Here are three ideas she recommends for the middle grades.
In Metacognition: The Neglected Skill Set, Robin Fogarty and Brian Pete offer 30 grab-and-go strategies to help students create a new habit of mind, writes middle school director Jeny Randall. Along with tools for teaching, they invite us to hone our own metacognitive skills.
Over the life of our nation, history has been recorded from a singularly white perspective. Pablo Wolfe, Mary Ehrenworth and Marc Todd suggest ways we can create truth-seeking communities in our schools and “inoculate our students against the viral spread of falsehood.”
If you find yourself in a school situation where a parent or community member is unkind, unreasonable, or downright mean, principal and NBCT Rita Platt has tips to move beyond the hurt. Here’s what she does to make sure toxic remarks roll right off her back. Like a duck!
The pandemic distances between teacher and student require us to monitor the individual progress of learning even more closely. Teacher educator Curtis Chandler offers a crash course for doing just that – including tips on new apps and tools for summative assessment.
For Megan Kelly’s Ancient Civilizations unit, Grade 7 gamers played her “Ancient” adaptation of Apples to Apples (see her tips), Galactic Mappers and Inhabitation. Along the way they created continents and civilizations, and learned systems thinking and plenty of content.
Noting that Thinking Like a Generalist is “exactly the type of book a busy teacher needs,” educator Michael DiClemente says the book explains how to help students become truth seekers, developing questions and getting answers they need using concrete and practical skills.
Close Reading the Media / Internet Literacy
by Frank Baker · Published 01/26/2021 · Last modified 02/13/2021
New studies continue to reveal that many students cannot evaluate internet information for truthfulness, writes media literacy expert Frank W Baker. “It has become a crisis in American education,” he says, as disinformation becomes industrialized and “truth decay” spreads.
