“Instead of asking students what they want to be, we should be asking them who they want to be.” I wish I could give attribution for the above quote. It was something I saw on Twitter a few weeks ago, and it resonated with me. The film called, “The Science of Character” delivers a similar … Read more
This resource was shared by Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher). I am always looking for new ways to bring relevance to math, and I love this idea. The Video Story Problem channel currently has 195 videos created by teachers and students. If you go to this post on “The Tech Savvy Educator” you can get more information … Read more
Last month, I saw a post about TED-Ed Clubs on Richard Byrne’s blog, Free Technology 4 Teachers. Hoping to host such a club next year, I applied. (According to the TED-Ed Clubs site, you may still apply.) This post isn’t actually about TED-Ed Clubs, since Richard and the TED-Ed site have that pretty well handled. … Read more
In his TCEA 2014 presentation, “Failure to Innovate,” Randy Rodgers stated the above quote, and I realized that it really says a lot about the problems in education today. Our students are far too reliant on following directions, and so many are afraid to deviate in order to do some creative thinking. I remember my … Read more
Last summer, I was playing around with ways to spice up my Genius Hour time, and decided to add some of the elements of gamification to the mix. One of these was to create Challenge Cards. At the beginning of each Genius Hour, students have the option to choose a Challenge Card. The higher the … Read more
At the beginning of the school year, I got an idea from an article that I was reading about changing the design of the classroom. It briefly alluded to a class “Genius Bar,” (using the term for the Help Desk in Apple Stores.) I decided to re-purpose the sad-looking classroom bookshelf into a Genius Bar. … Read more