Classroom Tech: When Less is More
What’s the least amount of technology you could use to get the job done?
How to Motivate Students: Researched-Based Strategies
A new CEP report, “Student Motivation—An Overlooked Piece of School Reform” pulls together findings about student motivation from decades of major research. Four key elements of motivation are detailed – Competence, Control/autonomy, Interest/value, and Relatedness. Links to report, findings and suggestions that teachers, schools and parents can use to motivate students.
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Connecting Classrooms with Skype
Here’s a complete “how-to” for creating a Skype classroom connection. The objective of this project was to open the classroom to the world by bringing children from Washington state and North Carolina together virtually to share insights on Native American cultures. Students used presentation and interactive conferencing technology, which allowed in-depth, real-time interaction on shared content. Students prepared short PowerPoint slide shows or posters, verbal presentations and question/answer sessions.
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A Guide to Designing Effective Professional Development: Essential Questions for the Successful Staff Developer
Staff development should model what you want to see in the classroom. Here’s the rules to make that happen.
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Free the Information (in Museums and Schools)
Museums share at least one thing in common with schools. They have traditionally functioned as repositories of information.
Visit a museum and you can view the information (art) that a curator has selected, organized, and presented. Often its significance and meaning will be explained to you in a wall label. In the traditional school, curriculum experts select information that teachers organize and present to students. Most teachers talk a lot, so students spend much of their day being told what information is important and why. Later they sit at their desks and fill out worksheets that reinforce what they just heard.
Schools, museums and other traditional information gatekeepers (think newspapers, publishers, etc) got along fine when they were able to control information and its flow. The one who “owned the presses” decided what was important. Most of us were accustomed to this asymmetry of information production and distribution. After all, it was much easier to read a book than to write and publish one.
