Whip kids' behavior into shape with Class Dojo!

If you haven't seen the Class Dojo site/app, I would encourage you the look at it. It is fun, a little corny, but it works! Yes, even with high school kids! I am using it in my Geometry Support class to help with classroom management and to encourage students to stay on task. I also invited all of the parents so they can see how they are behaving/working in class. It is a tough class and in just one day I saw a huge turn around! When you add positive feedback, it dings and adds a point to the student's score. They love to see it and when one gets points and others don't, they want to know how they can earn points. You can customize the feedback to fit the needs of your classroom and the students can customize their avatars.

http://www.classdojo.com/

Even More Books Available to Borrow

As you start thinking about your summer reading, you might want to consider borrowing something from my growing library of educational materials.  (Of course, that's after you've finished your beach reading, whether it's Dan Brown's latest, or Fifty Shades of Beige, or whatever Sue Grafton writes after she gets through the alphabet.  Numbers, maybe?)  I've previously listed available books here and here; I just received six more that I'll list below without comment, because I haven't personally read them yet.

Curriculum 21 edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs	Blended Learning in Grades 4-12 Catlin R. Tucker	Teach Like a Pirate Dave Burgess
Transforming Learning through 21st Century Skills Lydotta M. Taylor and Jill M. Fratto	Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis	Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works Howard Pitler, Elizabeth R. Hubbell, Matt Kuhn

Let me know if you're interested in borrowing any of these.

For trig and physics teachers

http://www.businessinsider.com/7-gifs-trigonometry-sine-cosine-2013-5


This page features 7 animated gifs dealing with trig.

My favorite has a sine wave, a cosine wave, two triangles, and a circle that is being, well, circled.  You have to see it for yourself, which is the point.  I can't describe it well enough, you just have to see it, which you can, thanks to the magic of the internet.

I am not good at drawing at all and I was very relieved when I got a projector for my classroom so I can show pictures instead of drawing on the board.

These 7 animated gifs show pi, sine, and cosine very well.

The gifs were found at imgur which the district software has blocked as "adult".  They were brought to imgur from reddit, which has a Math subreddit, described in this article as "peerless".  Hopefully the blocking software will be improved so that students can access approporiate material from sites that also have material we don't want students seeing.

Project Tomorrow Report from 2012 Survey

Last month, Project Tomorrow released their report from the nationwide Speak Up Survey of educators and parents.  Titled "From Chalkboard to Tablets: The Digital Conversion of the K-12 Classroom", the report is available for download from the Project Tomorrow website.  The report is only 17 pages long and well worth reading in its entirety, but I want to highlight a few points that jumped out at me.

The report lists five "transformative factors" that are increasing the demand for digital tools and resources within classroom instruction:

1. The influence of the Common Core State Standards movement;
2. Increasing use of mobile technologies by teachers, administrators, and parents;
3. Stagnation in ed-tech funding is leading to a search for innovative, low-cost strategies;
4. Digital tools and resources are becoming more common outside of the classroom;
5. Pressure from employers for better skilled employees.

I found the third of these factors confounding, initially.  Why would continued stagnation in ed-tech funding lead to increased demand for digital tools and resources?  Their explanation is that many districts have abandoned plans that were developed in the days of more abundant funding and held on to in the hopes that budgets would increase soon.  Recognition that technology funding is still insufficient and will be for quite some time is causing districts to re-think old plans and search for new ones.  The example they give is administrators' attitudes toward bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies.

"When asked in 2010 if they would allow their students to use their own devices at school for academic purposes, only 22 percent of principals said that was likely, 63 percent said it was unlikely for their school. In 2012, we see proof of this mobile device style digital conversion happening right from the principal’s office. Today, over a third of principals (36 percent) say that a new Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to school policy for students is likely. The opposing view has now dropped to 41 percent. At the district level, an even more dramatic shift has taken place in the views of administrators on these BYOD policies. In 2011, 52 percent of district administrators said that they did not allow students to use their own mobile devices at school. This year, only 35 percent are still holding on to that district wide policy statement, with 32 percent saying that the use of student owned devices should be at the discretion of the classroom teacher." (Page 8)

The 2012 survey also asked about teachers' use of digital content in their classrooms.  One interesting result is that middle- and high-school math and science teachers have a much greater use of items such as online curricula, animations, digital textbooks, videos, virtual labs, and simulations.  While there are many reasons for this difference, it parallels a greater adoptions of "flipped" learning strategies among that same group of teachers.  The report calls middle- and high-school math and science teachers "the new pace cars" for the adoption of digital content.

Finally, a chart that needs almost no explanation:

On Not Being the Expert Anymore

I was at a workshop today with teachers from around the county who are learning how to use iPads and how to integrate them into their instruction.  Part of our discussion was about how 21st-century education requires teachers to allow students to learn for themselves; teachers are not and cannot be the "holders and distributors of knowledge" any more.  I've written about this previously, in my description of my address to our school board.  While our current school system was designed in an age of information scarcity, we now live in an age of information glut.  Students carry around powerful (and nearly-always connected) computers in their pockets and can look up almost any information.  Our job as teachers must transform from "giving out knowledge" to "helping students learn what to do with the knowledge they get".

It struck me during the group conversation in the workshop this morning that elementary-level teachers are much more comfortable (or perhaps less uncomfortable) with this idea than are middle-school or high-school teachers.  If you teach a particular subject in secondary school, you are accustomed to being the subject-matter expert.  That's why you got hired in the first place, right?  Primary teachers, on the other hand, have always had to teach a wide range of subjects, including some (or many) with which they are not very familiar.  Combine that with a greater emphasis on students acquiring skills in elementary school (as opposed to in middle or high school), and it seems that elementary teachers have a smaller leap to make in adjusting to Common Core and 21st-century education.

To be clear: I am not for an instant denigrating elementary teachers, or suggesting that they are not subject-matter experts, or even dismissing the significant work they will have to do to implement the Common Core.  I'm trying to work out in my own head why it seems that my conversations with high school teachers about 21st-century skills so often come to a grinding halt.  All teachers are being asked to make major changes in the way they instruct students; I suspect this will be the most difficult for subject-specific teachers in middle and high schools.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE)

http://www.jove.com/

This a scientific journal with videos of lab procedures ranging from using a balance or centrifuge to cutting edge procedures used in academic labs.

It is useful for chem, bio, and biotech classes.