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.
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:
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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