Looking for Teacher Grants for your Classroom? Grant Wrangler is a free site that offers a bi-weekly newsletter delivering the latest grants and awards directly to your email box. Grant Wrangler also offers grant writing tips and many other grant-related resources.
Teacher’s Website Full of Practical, Helpful Tips Ms. Powell created this her website several years ago, “for sharing tools to overcome discipline issues, disorganization, paperwork overload, and the regimented, boring curriculums that drive so many teachers from the classroom each year.” I found some terrific math games as well as some great ideas about organizing materials and your classroom. It is definitely a great resource for both new and experienced teachers. Check it out!
Connect|ED Conversations
Recently a member of our community started a new discussion regarding “Bridging the Gap” Here is a little of what this member has to say:
“My annual review interview with the principal always revealed how differently the administration of the school viewed student learning from my own way of seeing it. I would always be presented with cold facts and statistics showing the progress my students had made purely in academic terms. My standardized test results (always high and very satisfactory) were seen as a measure of my teaching competence. That was not (and is still not ) the way I measure an educational process. I would leave the interview with the principal’s congratulations in my ears and yet I always felt something was out of kilter. The way to get kids turned onto learning is to get yourself turned onto teaching. Let the curriculum be the basis for your own creativity and guide the students as the discover their own ways to learn material.
The most creative group in any school are the teachers. They work extremely hard to make meaningful and pertinent learning experiences available to their students in a variety of creative ways. Given the current trend of test centered evaluation the way in which teachers, their students and the schools perform, it seems to be back in the principal’s office for that annual interview all over again only this time it’s nation wide.
I am currently pursuing two trends of exploration for myself. One is to try and examine the relationship between effective teaching and effective learning. The other is to create a group (or groups) of colleagues, current and former students to examine the human element in the humanistic approach to educational processes. When I think about it, my whole professional life has been the pursuit of these two trends.”
Want to join this conversation?Leave your thoughts here!
Another member has started a discussion about “Blogging Research“. This member is the creator of a free blogging service available to teachers and their students called ClassChatter.com. Although I have never used this service, it has been recently upgraded and looks like a great place to have your kids blog. The creator of ClassChatter is a teacher and he designed this blogging tool with a teacher’s mind and with safety features that teacher’s need! Check it out!
I created a site, Blogging in the Classroom.com to help support teachers who are interested in starting to blog either personally, professionally, or with their students.
In the “How to Start” section of Blogging in the Classroom I list four great links to help you get started with your students using an activity called “paper blogging”. I just added a short video of my students participating in the “paper blogging” activity on Connect|ED. Whether you intend to blog or not, this activity is a wonderful, interactive way to write and build community with your students. I highly recommend it.
Timez Attack is an unbelievable, new multiplication tables game. You have to see it to believe it!! If you know of a student that is struggling with learning the multiplication tables, or you just want to offer some variety…check this out! I think it is pretty neat.
I showed my third grade students this game today and they instantly were engaged and wanted to play. We have a video projector hooked up to the computer so the screen is huge. I had one student demo the game (he learned instantly on the spot) and all the kids were cheering out the multiplication facts, helping him defeat the number troll that is part of the game.
I encouraged the students to download the free version at home as another way of practing. The great thing about the game is that the free version works on both Mac and PC computers and teaches multiplication tables 1 - 12! Click here to learn more about the game!
CONNECT community is live!
I need your help. I have just started our online community for teachers. This is a place to connect, learn, and grow with other educators from around the world.
For the past two years I have been running and creating my own professional development process by reading educator blogs from around the country. I have found that educational conversations that often don”t happen at our schools, DO happen online.
I’ve decided to add a couple past newsletters to the blog. In the future I will add all newsletters here as well.
Academic, Arcade-style Games Online and Free
I found this website tonight and it looks like a good site to use as a center or to recommend to your students and their parents for some fun basic skills practice at home.
From the website, “ Our educational video games offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills by incorporating features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will motivate, intrigue, and teach your students.”
Join our Online Community of Educators!
I am just launching Progressive Educator’s online community for educators. I need professional teachers to contribute your ideas. Will you take a minute and join today?
New Content on Our Blog
I have added a couple new articles on our Blog, including a video about what a social network is and why they are important!
Did you know I send out a semi-regular newsletter? This week’s e-newsletter contained the following links. Want to get this e-news too? Subscribe here!
Free, Open Source Learning? Free-Reading.net is an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it’s open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It’s designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program. The state of Florida has added FreeReading.net ?on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. Not that Florida should be considered a model for education reform, but this site looks full of great resources. What if this model were copied for math or science or some other content area. Anyone interested in starting a project with me?
Interactive Vocabulary Website for English Learners This site is great for vocabulary development for English Learners! Click on a word collection. It loads a sound file and an interactive picture that allows you to move the cursor over any of the circles that point to parts of the picture to see and hear the word for that part. It’s hard to describe. You’ll have to take a look for yourself.
Don’t forget to join our professional community.
Blogs are basically interactive communication tools that people use for both personal and professional reasons. Did you know there are tons of great professional blogs for teachers?
My school district offers almost no professional development opportunities and also rarely pays for teachers to attend workshops or conferences (unless you’re an administrator). So, for the past two years, I have been growing as a professional educator almost exclusively by reading other teachers blogs and listening to educational podcasts.
Here’s a little bit about the K12 Online Conference:
This is a conference by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. A goal of the conference is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape.
There is also a website that tracks conferences and resources just for teachers. It’s called HitchHikr and here is a blurb about it:
We live in a time of rapid change, where few of us are doing what we learned to do in college. Few of us are doing what we did three years ago. Our work becomes obsolete, or it gets insourced, outsourced, or even mobsourced to others, as we find new and more exciting niches of expertise to serve through.
In changing times, we need to raise our heads out of the water every once in a while, take a drink of kool-aid, network, learn, and energize. Yet, we can’t always make it to the conferences we need to attend to mix with the people we need to see — face-to-face. This is why Hitchhikr was invented, to provide you with a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.There are many great resources out there, blogs among them.
Here is another creative video from the folks at Common Craft explaining more about blogs:
This video (created by Common Craft) is for people who wonder why social networking web sites are so popular. One reason is because they solve a real-world problem: they make the invisible visible. We’ll let the video explain how it works.
I would add that networks like Progressive Educator’s Connect can create a virtual space for teachers to share and grow professionally. For the past two years I have created my own professional development by reading educator blogs from around the world. It is some of the most thrilling and exciting professional development I have come across. The best part is I can participate at any hour of the day or night — in sweatpants and slippers — and I can do it all from the comfort of blue sofa in my living room!
I added a widget to the right sidebar from Grant Wrangler. Grant Wrangler is one of many sites that keep track of grants available for teachers. I recently re-discovered it. If you sign up for their newsletter Grant Wrangler will email you about once a month with updates on grants! Maybe you can find funding for that project you have always wanted to do with your students!
I need your help in building a dynamic network of teachers from around the country! Will you join Connect and share your teaching with others?
Here is a copy of a post I just added to our new network. It explains more:
Okay, I had this idea to create a social networking site for teachers at least a year ago. I fiddled and faddled around, trying to create something on my own and worried about so many little details and tried different solutions and…and…and.
This is where my perfectionism is annoying. In looking for web software to create my own social network I stumbled across Ning many, many months ago. I even found a very new and very small (maybe like 20 people) educator/technology-based network.
I thought, “Oh Ning would be easy, but its not totally right and honestly I think it looks kinda lame. Instead I fumbled with Joomla and Drupal (and learned a ton in the process) and then ultimately I came back to Ning this past summer to find it has some great features and found that really small educator/technology network was now huge! After tweaking with things off and on for months I have given up.
Progressive Educator Connect is not my network. It’s yours! It will never be perfect (at least I can’t make it so)! But, it doesn’t have to be. I just wanted an organic community where teachers could collaborate online in a way that often doesn’t happen in our schools. Add your stories, photos, videos of you teaching…share your teaching life, struggles and all. Together we can move forward!
I guess as a teacher I have control and perfection issues. I know the lesson I am constantly re-learning is the need to jump in with a new idea and new lesson…even when it is not perfect or totally complete. If I wait and wait and tweak it and work on it two things happen. One, the lesson never happens. Two, if the lesson finally happens, it needs to be changed a lot and a lot of my work was in vain because I was not creating it and working it out with my students, only myself. Teaching is such a relational thing and we (at least I) need to be connected and working with my students to be able to be the coach and guide they need.
So anyway, here’s to opening up the Connect community…finished or not…perfect or not…compete or not. Now, it is up to you to make this a great, vital resource for teachers everywhere!
Progressive Educator believes relationships are the bedrock of teaching and learning. We create opportunities for connecting, learning and sharing so that together we might transform our classrooms, schools, communities and public education.
Through the use of innovative tools and technologies Progressive Educator is dedicated to inspiring, training, and energizing teachers for the long haul so that we may flourish in this challenging and vital profession.
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