GreyED Solutions is pleased to partner with SmartBrief to provide busy K-12 education technology innovators with “Tech Tips Tuesdays.” Published every Tuesday in the SmartBrief on EdTech newsletter, Tech Tips are written by educators for educators to boost their know-how and expand their skill set. Read Tech Tips here on our site or subscribe to SmartBrief on EdTech to get them delivered directly to your inbox.
If you’re an educator and would like to contribute to Tech Tips, let us know!
Connecting educators to each other has a huge impact on the learning environment. As educators build relationships, they can then share knowledge and learn from each other. And when this happens, learning improves for all students.
How can you get started? The key is to start small. Here are some ideas:
Create a Pinterest account. Search for educational topics. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking system. You see pictures that link to websites containing lesson plans, articles and ideas for your classroom and curriculum.
Set up a Twitter account and follow educational people and organizations. (No need to tweet, just lurk.) Suggestions: @edutopia, @ASCD, @eduleadership, @GustafsonBrad, @ShakeUpLearning, @jmattmiller.
Check out Tweetdeck to organize incoming tweets. Search for and follow hashtags. Suggestions: #edchat, #mnlead, #tlap, #edtech, #edchat.
Participate in a Twitterchat. Go to Education Chats and look for a Twitterchat that pertains to your classroom. Follow the Twitterchat during the specified time. If you see something interesting that looks like a link, click on it.
Looking for the best ways to use technology to enhance learning? Ask a teacher. The best ideas for integrating technology in the classroom often come from teachers. In their quest to use technology to create amazing learning experiences, these innovative educators take risks, embrace challenges and push themselves to learn new skills.
But these innovators often operate in pockets, while the majority of teachers stick with the status quo out of a perceived lack of expertise and a fear of failure. How can we nudge the tech-wary educators out of their comfort zones?
Recently, I listened to a number of teachers share passionately how their classroom practice has evolved as a result of professional development. What common PD experience catalyzed so much reflection and growth? Coaching.
Effective coaching – literacy, math, technology or data – impacts classroom instruction. Here are three keys to know when implementing a coaching program:
Create a climate where teachers are comfortable sharing openly with their peers about instructional practice. In this climate, teachers recognize that being an effective teacher involves adapting and learning from others. They benefit from the collaboration as well as the collective knowledge and experience.
Last year, a generous donor gave our school five high-definition flat screen televisions to use as display monitors for promoting school activities, events and news around our campus. But, when we researched companies that produce signage software, we discovered that the cost was more than we could afford. What to do?
Today’s educators are inundated with requirements and activities that eat up every bit of time they have available. With these demands, it can be difficult to find time for personal improvement. And when they do find time, finding quality resources can be a chore. Here’s how school districts can help fill this gap.
The profession of education is going through unprecedented change. Many aspects of teaching and school will eventually never be the same again — nor should they. Although wholesale and fundamental change is slow, there are some things that educators will have to accept and embrace, if they plan on being successful and staying in the profession. They are:
At some point we have all had to provide “How to” instructions to friends and colleagues on navigating a website, sharing a document, or on the latest tech tip. You may have tried listing the directions. You may have been a little more adventurous and taken screenshots and added some arrows to help the user see where they should go and what they should click. You may have even combined the two methods. Somehow, you still face the dilemma of not being sure your friend or colleague fully understood what to do.
Striving to build and maintain high-functioning teams of people in our schools is a layered and complex task, especially when asking our teachers to implement new and fast-changing technology. Even when we bring together the most brilliant minds in our spaces, it can be an art to create a space where those people are pushing themselves and one another to achieve elevated levels of greatness. When a leader pushes for innovation and new practices, we need our teachers to not only take risks, but share in honest reflections about these experiences and plans for continued growth.
Technology is mainstream in education today. Students have a number of devices and applications available to them, at their fingertips, and engagement is up.
But what about the work they’re doing? One way to boost engagement and make learning more relevant is to bring in an authentic audience for your students. Give them opportunity to share their work beyond their classroom walls.
The Web is a great place to start. Help your students to create Web pages for their work. Weebly and Wix offer great platforms for students, plus they’re free and easy to use. Students can build pages, post their work and then share it with family, friends and – with parent permission – others around the world.
Introverts are students who are bright and capable of communicating, but class discussions feel unnatural or uncomfortable for them. Sharing via technology is more comfortable, and it can benefit all students since everyone is heard. Here are a few ideas for using tech tools to draw out these learners:
Backchannel. There are a few platforms, like TodaysMeet and Backchannel Chat that allow your classes to backchannel, or have an online discussion while watching a video or presentation in the classroom. Participation is as easy as typing and hitting “send” so it feels less threatening and unnatural to an introvert. The transcript of the chat can also be saved as collaborative class notes. Here is an example from a 9th grade class that watched a YouTube video on the Whiskey Rebellion recently.
GreyED Solutions is pleased to partner with SmartBrief to provide busy K-12 education technology innovators with “Tech Tips Tuesdays.” Published every Tuesday in the SmartBrief on EdTech newsletter, Tech Tips are written by educators for educators to boost their know-how and expand their skill set. Read Tech Tips here on our site or 