Girls and STEM

This article addresses programs sponsered by Microsoft that keep girls interested in STEM. By the time they are in their teens, most girls have lost interest in STEM fields. Microsoct has develped two programs, #WhatsNextCampaign and DigiGirlz to encourage young ladies to pursue careers in STEM.

Does your school have a STEM program? Do you find that boys are more interested that girls? What can you do as a school to encourage girls to stay interested in STEM as they get older?

Promoting Kindness

In the article "Creating a Culture of Kindness in Your Classroom",  Shari Carter discusses several ways to promote kindness between students and teachers. My students struggle with being kind to one another, so we tried "Secret Encouraging Pals" for about 5 weeks. Each student had another student that they were supposed to do something kind for over a period of about 2.5 weeks. I think it worked well, I would like to do it again next year.

What do you do to promote kindness in your classroom?

Alternatives To Homework

I will be honest, I would rather my students spend 15 minutes reviewing what we covered in class than doing a worksheet, but sometimes homework is inevitable. In history, I try to assign homework no more than 2 times a week. (I don't count studying as homework). I am going to be covering the material in class, and most of the times they don't do it anyway, so I have decided that there are better ways to assess learning. In English, I do assign homework on a regular basis, but it is usually reading a story at home that way we have time to discuss it in class. If I didn't teach multi-grade classrooms I probably wouldn't assign reading homework. 

I came across this chart about alternatives to homework, and I really liked some of the ideas. 

click on the picture to be taken to the source.

Would you incorporate these ideas into your classroom? I would like to use some of them once a week to replace a traditional assignment. 

Low Tech Accomodations

While teaching in a Christian school has many benefits, one of the struggles can be access to technology.  In a world where many accommodations are provided through technology, it can be difficult to come up with effective differentiation strategies that don't require technology. Here is a list of some low tech or no tech options for accommodations that work to provide differentiation in the classroom.

1) Cooperative Learning- Students work together in small groups. Students share strengths and develop weaker skills. Promotes interpersonal skills and interdependence

2)Highlighted text- One of the easiest accommodations. Highlight key points in text. Allows students to focus on main ideas and not get lost in the details. A very good accommodation for ESL students.

3)Guided Notes- Handouts with blanks for key points and spaces for diagrams. The handout increases student understanding because less time is spent trying to organize information.

a sample of guided notes

4)Sentence strips/Sentence Starters- The beginning of a sentence to help students begin their ideas. This can help improve student writing and language proficiency by using starters that are just above their current comfort level.

5)Goal Setting—Goal setting promotes motivation and self-regulation, two of the major concepts of providing multiple means of engagement. Students work together with the teacher to set academic of behavioral goals. A worksheet is often used to list the steps needed to accomplish the goals.

A sample goal setting worksheet

What low tech or no tech accommodations do you use in your classroom?  What have you found that works best?

Social Media in the Classroom

Students are connected through social media more than ever these days, and often social media can be our biggest competition to hold student attention. Can social media and instructional time exist in harmony? I say a wholehearted YES! Social media can be a powerful tool to engage your students, but you have to know how to incorporate it in a meaningful way.

Instagram

A fellow teacher I know is on Instagram as @grammarqueen1. She posts pictures of grammar errors in public to let her students see how uneducated you look when you make these types of errors. She even lets her students turn in photos to her to post. Her students love it when their picture is shared, but they love it even more when they are the first one to identify the error.

Facebook

The same teacher mentioned above also has a bell ringer activity that she has named "Facebook Friday." On Fridays (obviously) She posts a series of real Facebook comments and/or post that have come across her newsfeed with spelling and grammar errors. The names are blacked out to protect the innocent. Her students must find and correct all of the errors. She has said that sometimes she will even put a Facebook Friday question on a test. I love this application of  Facebook in a practical way.

Facebook could also be used to connect with students (or parents depending on the age of your kids), but personally, I like to keep my school life and my personal life a little more separated than that. I would rather use Edmodo or Google Classroom to connect with my students.

Twitter

I used twitter in my student teaching classroom, and my students loved it! I used it mainly as an exit slip where students summarized what they learned from that day's Socratic seminar. As a class, we would come up with a hashtag for the novel we were reading. I required that I be tagged in tweets and that they include the novel hashtag. Students told me that it could be challenging to summarize with only 140 characters, but it made them think carefully about their word choice, and the tweets were usually very creative.

In this article, Kristen Wideen shares how she created a class Twitter account and allows her students to post what they are learning. I found the article to be super inspiring, and I am considering incorporating Twitter into my classroom in this manner.

YouTube

YouTube is by far the social media channel I use the most in my classroom. I use it to show TED Talks, poetry recordings, music that connects to the theme in literature, etc. Basically, if there is a video in my lesson it generally comes from YouTube.

This year, though, I want to move away from just using YouTube as a way to show videos to enhance learning. Yes, I will still use it to add multi-media to lessons, but I want it to be more focused on my class. I am planning to create screencasts of presentations and upload them to a class account so that students can review material. YouTube can also be a great platform for students to create and share their own videos.

What social media do you use in your classroom? Has anyone found a way for SnapChat to have a place in your teaching? I am interested to hear and learn from all of you.

Classroom Managment Tips

This past Monday I completed a classroom management webinar hosted by Linda Kardimas at Teach4theHeart. The webinar provided 5 basic tips for regaining control of your classroom.

1. Don't be a friend, Be a mentor--This one is probably the hardest for me because I am so close in age to my students and I knew many of them before becoming their teacher. It is hard to find a balance. Somedays I feel I am too hard and other days too soft.

2. Develop systems to get attention and eliminate distractions--This tips included using callbacks, elements of whole brain teaching, and using a warning system that doesn't disrupt the flow of teaching.

3. "Shake-up" problem areas--This means identifying the area of your routine that causes the most behavioral problems and completely changing them up to get the attention of students. This allows for reteaching and practicing of procedures.

4. Deal with problems when they are small--Small problems become big problems when left unchecked. Dealing with the problem could be as simple as a warning as long as you follow through the next time. I know this is an area that I struggle with.

5. Build strong relationships with students: Often behavioral issues go deeper than disobeying. As teachers, we will only get to the root of the problem if we have the relationships with students.

This webinar was a brief refresher on classroom management. Linda also offers a classroom management course. It is a paid class but right now it is on sale. I signed up, and I can't wait to start watching the videos this summer when life slows down a tad.

Answering "Why?"

"Why do I need to learn this?"  

All teachers hear this question. I know some days I hear it more than others. In lower grades an answer such as "Because I said so" might work, but as students get older answers of that type will only frustrate students even more. 

It is true that you can look up basic facts on Google. I am really bad about whipping out my phone and googling something in the middle of a conversation. But can Google teach students how to think? 

Education  is more than just learning a collection of facts. It is what we do with those facts that is important. Facts are good, but if you do t know how to use them they become worthless. 

So fellow teachers, take the time to ask yourself why your students are learning this material. If it isn't relevant past a chapter test, is it really worth spending a majority of your time on? Evaluate what you are teaching. Make it relevant to your students. 

Students, trust that your teachers have a purpose for what they are teaching. Put your best effort into learning what they have prepared for you. If you aren't sure why something is important, it's ok to ask, but make sure you do it in a respectful manner. You never know what God has for you. The information you are learning now could become vital for you down the road.