August, 2016

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50 Minute Periods Are Killing Teacher Creativity

Catlin Tucker

“I’d love to do [ fill in the blank with some creative idea or activity ], but I just don’t have time. My classes are only 50 minutes.” I hear this lament frequently when I lead professional development. Teachers get super excited about integrating technology or want details about a project, assignment, or routine I do with my own kids.

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How to create beautiful online courses: colors

Neo LMS

Have you ever bought something not because you really needed it, not because it offered much value to you, but simply because it had a nice packaging? Don’t be ashamed if you did; you’re not the only one. It’s not your fault. It’s your brain’s. We simply have this weakness for beauty. Everyone that ever bought a MAST chocolate bar fell into this trap.

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Against the Flow Leadership

A Principal's Reflections

Change is uncomfortable for virtually everyone. I am the first person who will say that the process is not easy or absent of difficult challenges. The challenge of change becomes even more difficult when the main adversary is always right in front of us – our mindset. Our complex brains often work against our best intentions at times. This is Maslow’s hierarchy at play in a nutshell.

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3 Ways Technology Can Help Students with Autism

EdTech Magazine

By Meghan Bogardus Cortez Digital tools have the power to help students with learning disabilities communicate and gain confidence.

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Enhancing School Device Management for Improved Learning

Schools face increasing challenges as technology becomes integral to education. Efficient device management is essential for maximizing technology use and safeguarding investments. Our article discusses the importance of tracking devices, outlines current challenges, and suggests modern solutions that go beyond traditional methods like Excel. Learn how advanced tracking systems can streamline operations, improve maintenance, and offer real-time updates for better resource allocation.

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A Glitch in the EdReform Matrix: The 2016 EdNext Poll on Blended Learning

Doug Levin

Last year at this time, I had some words about the treatment of technology in the 2015 EdNext Poll on School Reform. My critique (along with that of others who may not have been so public) resulted in a public rejoinder and reconsideration by Paul Peterson and Michael Horn of the magical percent of instructional time that should occur on computers in American high schools.

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3 Ways Teachers Can Say to Parents, “We Want To Be On the Same Team”

The CoolCatTeacher

Setting Up Your Classroom to Win From Day One From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter. As a teacher, I want to have a great relationship with my students and their parents. But there are things I can unknowingly do to sabotage (or improve) that relationship. In today’s show, we’re talking with Mike Hall about how to have the best start of the school year ever with our parents.

More Trending

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20 easy ways to collaborate globally with your class now

Ditch That Textbook

The world is our classroom’s playground. We can see and talk to practically anyone around the world (with an Internet connection) for free. Video calls and collaborative digital tools let us connect in powerful ways. They let our students experience and learn from others in diverse locations in deep ways. Unfortunately, it’s one of the [.].

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Goal: Have a Conversation with Your Leadership

Teacher Reboot Camp

Welcome to Cycle 7 of The 30 Goals Challenge: Make it Meaningful ! “Failure is simply an opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford. Goal: Have a conversation with your leadership about implementing an idea or making a change to the school environment. Many of us have innovative ideas to improve our classrooms or school environments.

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Back-to-School Training Equips Teachers for New STEM Curriculum

EdTech Magazine

By Meghan Bogardus Cortez Project Lead the Way’s summer professional development prepares educators for new school year.

Training 240
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Blockchain Misconceptions and the Future of Education

Doug Levin

Blockchain technology may seem magical, but it is not magic. For every advantage it may offer over traditional approaches to ‘big iron’ centralized, proprietary IT systems, it imposes new requirements on its users. And, while it is reasonable to expect that some technological hurdles will be addressed in the future, the magnitude of some of these hurdles is so great that one is left wondering if some blockchain for learning advocates even understand the underlying technology of which

Education 186
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Quickly Create Personalized Learning Experiences that Work

How can we actively engage learners 24/7, on their level and according to their interests, while respecting their learning styles? It’s not impossible. In this guide: Explore how to transform traditional, one-way videos into two-way interactive learning experiences Understand different types of artificial intelligence (AI), including - Generative vs.

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Making Ed-Tech a Habit Through Student Rewards

Ed Tech from the Ground Up

In my last post , I discussed the importance of finding a cue, or an emotional trigger, to encourage the use of ed-tech as a habit. Equally important is the necessity to incorporate psychological rewards to inspire the feedback loop necessary to foster new habits. The trick here isn’t to introduce entirely new systems of rewards; rather, as Charles Duhigg points out in The Power of Habit , effective habit formation involves pinpointing preexisting psychological cues and rewards and replacing old

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A great website to use when teaching dialogue.

EdTech4Beginners

Today I taught an English lesson which focused on dialogue between characters. I wanted to motivate the students and found an excellent website to do so. First, I paired the students up and they did some hot-seating in character. Next the students got their ipads and loaded ifaketext.com . It is a great website which allows you to create a fake text message conversation – perfect for a whole range of lessons.

Exercises 189
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Let's Make Professional Learning Meaningful Again!

The Web20Classroom

I remember it as it if it were yesterday. The worst professional development session I have ever delivered. It had already been a long week. And this was the last session I was delivering. The participants could tell that this was the last place I wanted to be and really it was the last place they wanted to be too. I trudged through the scripted content with little passion.

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Fun Videos from BoomWriter That You’ll Relate to

Ask a Tech Teacher

One of my new favorite online writing tools is BoomWriter. It is a free group writing website for teachers where their students can develop and enhance their writing, reading, vocabulary, and peer assessment skills through three collaborative tools. I won’t go into detail today–that’ll come later–but I did want to share this humorous video I got from them about the Pre-Conference–that meeting teachers have with the principal before he comes in to observe your class.

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Can Brain Science Actually Help Make Your Training & Teaching Stick?

Speaker: Andrew Cohen, Founder & CEO of Brainscape

The instructor’s PPT slides are brilliant. You’ve splurged on the expensive interactive courseware. Student engagement is stellar. So… why are half of your students still forgetting everything they learned in just a matter of weeks? It's likely a matter of cognitive science! With so much material to "teach" these days, we often forget to incorporate key proven principles into our curricula — namely active recall, metacognition, spaced repetition, and interleaving practice.

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Math Modeling: Why are We Missing it in High School?

EdNews Daily

Young people are frequently exposed to ambitious dreams of changing the world, and a practical way of expressing said interest is through research in science fairs; however, do science fairs provide everyone an equal opportunity to produce meaningful research? One study by the University of Toronto 1 suggests that students who have laboratory exposure typically dominate high school science fairs, such as Intel, Google, and Siemens.

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In the News: On the Future of Maine’s Laptop Program

Doug Levin

As quoted in: Herold, Benjamin. “ Maine 1-to-1 Computing Initiative Under Microscope.” Education Week. 30 August 2016. Such uncertainty speaks directly to the need for better monitoring of technology’s use and impact in K-12, said Douglas Levin, the president of EdTech Strategies LLC, a consulting organization. “It’s an incredible missed opportunity to have Maine run its 1-to-1 initiative for over a decade and to still have so many questions about the efficacy of the program,&#

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A Simple Strategy to Deal With Negative People

A Principal's Reflections

Nobody likes change, but some dislike it more than others. Negative people in every organization can suck the life out of you. These are the people that constantly undermine you and others who challenge the status quo in order to create a better culture. Some have been empowered for all the wrong reasons and take advantage of their “sacred cow” status.

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Visualizing Learning with Infographics: 23 Resources

Teacher Reboot Camp

“Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.” – Stephen Few. This year get your students to visualize difficult concepts or understand a process by teaching with infographics. Use infographics to introduce a chapter, unit, or lesson. Students can work in small groups to decipher the infographic.

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Reimagining Chickering & Gamson's Principles Post-Pandemic: Technology's Central Role in Modern Edu

This white paper examines and proposes revisions to the "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" introduced by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson in 1987 for today's technology-driven world.

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Data Analytics Can Drive Startups in the Right Direction

Ed Tech from the Ground Up

Guest post by Xan Tanner, co-founder of Panorama Education. When you walk into the offices of Panorama Education , you immediately see the two most important forces aligning us as a team hanging on our walls: our values and our performance metrics dashboards. Panorama’s values are the “North Star” for the everyday decisions we make. These statements, such as “Provide equal and equitable access for all schools” and “Focus on impact” represent the philosophical underpinnings of who we are as a tea

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Need an LMS next year? Here are three to consider

Ask a Tech Teacher

An LMS — Learning Management System — is a digital tool that tracks a wide variety of student-teacher interactions such as homework, grading, sharing of resources, parent communication, assessments, and more. It allows teachers to create, distribute and track class materials anywhere, on any device. That means it’s accessible from school or home, with any platform (including Macs, PCs, Chromebooks, and tablets).

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How to Prepare Your Network Before School Starts

EdTech Magazine

By Meghan Bogardus Cortez Schools can get ready for incoming students by testing networks and assessing plans.

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A Glitch in the EdReform Matrix: The 2016 EdNext Poll on Blended Learning

Doug Levin

Last year at this time, I had some words about the treatment of technology in the 2015 EdNext Poll on School Reform. My critique (along with that of others who may not have been so public) resulted in a public rejoinder and reconsideration by Paul Peterson and Michael Horn of the magical percent of instructional time that should occur on computers in American high schools.

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Behind the Bell: The Underlying Impact of Tardiness in K-12 Schools

Managing a K-12 campus with constant pressure to meet performance metrics is challenging. And tardiness can significantly limit a school from reaching these goals. Learn more about why chronic lateness matters, and key strategies to address the following impacts: Data errors caused by manual processes Low attendance and graduation rates that affect a school’s reputation Classroom disruption, which leads to poor academic performance High staff attrition and “The Teacher Exodus” Unmet LCAP goals t

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A Digital Promise for Professional Development in Adult Education

Digital Promise

Just over a decade ago, June Rall, Director of the Institute for Professional Development of Adult Educators (IPDAE), was working as an executive in a major U.S. apparel company. She was at the pinnacle of corporate success, yet something was missing. A few years later, after staying home to raise her daughter, June knew she wanted to find some way to give back to the community.

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Six Sigma in Education - applying quality control systems in education

Educational Technology Guy

Six Sigma was first introduced in 1986 by an engineer at Motorola named Bill Smith. Six Sigma is a methodology that focuses on measuring quality and aiming for perfection. The techniques and tools used for process improvement and eliminating defects are the core of Six Sigma. While the methodology began in the manufacturing industry, today the Six Sigma techniques are used in virtually every type of industry.

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Misplaced Priorities: Education’s (Mostly) One-Sided Digital Investment

EdNews Daily

Guest article written by: Bob McDonald. . Year after year, educational institutions continue to pour funding into digital technologies, updating classrooms and curriculums for a heavily digitized 21st-century. While it often seems that each new semester brings another digital arts endowment or emerging technologies grant, very few of these investments focus on actually updating campus-wide technological frameworks.

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Tech Ed Resources for your Class–Lesson Plans

Ask a Tech Teacher

I get a lot of questions from readers about what tech ed resources I use in my classroom so I’m going to take a few days this summer to review them with you. Some are edited and/or written by members of the Ask a Tech Teacher crew. Others, by tech teachers who work with the same publisher I do. All of them, I’ve found well-suited to the task of scaling and differentiating tech skills for age groups, scaffolding learning year-to-year, taking into account the perspectives and norms of all stakehol

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The Battle of the Authoring Tools: A 10-Point Comparison for Picking the Right One

Speaker: Chris Paxton McMillin, President of D3 Training Solutions

There are plenty of great authoring tools for developing eLearning, but the one you select could directly impact your course's outcomes. Depending upon your learners’ needs and your organization’s performance goals, you could be overlooking considerations that impact the both effectiveness of your courses and how long it takes to finish them. From general capabilities to specific workflow structures, some aspects are critical when it comes to learning objectives and deadlines.

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The First Days of School: Setting the Climate for Year

User Generated Education

I have written before about the beginning of the school year, Beginning the School Year: It’s About Connections Not Content. I begin all classes focusing on having the students make connections between each other and with me. I want students to learn about one another in a personal way. I want to learn about my students so my instructional strategies can be more personalized and tailored to their needs and interests.

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Let’s Get Real: Virtual Reality is Here To Stay

EdTech Magazine

By Amy Brown Beyond field trips, headsets can enhance education like never before.

Education 237
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Designing Your Own Home of Learning

Education Elements

My Education Elements teammates and I recently compared our work with school districts to building a house. We traditionally start our work by building a strong foundation around what personalized learning is and what it can look like for a school district. Similar to finding the perfect home for a family, our first step is clearly defining the vision of personalized learning in the school district.

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Free eBook of Back-to-School Tips and Resources for Teachers, by teachers

Educational Technology Guy

Apperson Offers New Free eBook of Back-to-School Tips and Resources for Teachers. This is a great, free, eBook that offers more than 50 ideas and free, downloadable activities to help teachers kick off the 2016-17 school year. To download the eBook, visit [link]. These are teacher-provided strategies, tips and activities, organized into an informative, easy-to-read PDF file that teachers can download and share.

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The Roses and Thorns of an LMS Strategy: How to Flourish with the Right LMS

Speaker: Amanda Davis, Chief Experience Officer and Liam O'Malley, VP of Association Solutions

The "new normal" is now a little less new, a little more normal. Does that mean your current LMS strategy is in need of a refresh? Is your organization or association leaning into the always-evolving eLearning environment to ensure you have the tools and content to remain relevant through all this change? There are many complex decision-making processes within your learning & development strategy and LMS lifecycle management, including: Selection.