Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Volume 11, Issue 48, December 3


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December 3, 2013
Volume 11, Issue 48

This Week's Featured Story:
Does Classroom Technology Make a Difference?


Sections

Lesson Plans
Professional Development
Technology
Administrators
Education Headlines

This week's newsletter is brought to you by the University of St. Thomas.

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This week's newsletter is brought to you by Ready®.

Ready® makes a huge difference in student proficiency.

Recent research shows that in one urban community in New York with more than 250 schools, the ones that used Ready® for only a few months had a significantly higher percentage of students achieving proficiency on the 2013 New York State Assessment—a measure of student mastery on the Common Core— than schools that did not use Ready. See why it works—download a sample lesson.



Lesson Plans

Timely and Practical Lesson Ideas

Best Instructional Videos: World War II
The most widespread war in history, as well as the deadliest, World War II forever changed America.

Podcasts for Every Subject: Science
Find the best science podcasts for all grade levels, including some of the best video and audio for K-12 science educators.

December: Multicultural Holiday Celebrations
December offers great opportunities for teaching about our multicultural world.

Exploring the Outdoors: Mammals Lesson
Snow and animal tracks make for a great K-8 life science lesson.

Show-Biz Science: Frozen Bubbles
Kids investigate how freezing temperatures affect bubbles.

Printable: Winter Holidays Around the World
Students research lesser-known winter holidays with this worksheet.

Search for more lesson plans by subject.
Explore our full collection of Lesson Plans of the Day.


This Week’s Teacher-Submitted Lesson Plan

Snowy Similes
Students work cooperatively to understand similes and how they can improve writing. (Grades 3-8)

See more Teacher-Submitted Lesson Plans.


This Week’s Early Childhood Resource

Remember Our Helpers This Holiday Season
Remind children of the people who help them all year long. Ask, What can we do for the cafeteria workers? Custodian? Others?

See more Early Childhood Activities.

Bookmark our home page, EducationWorld.com, and come back often to find new content posted daily.


Professional Development

Featured

Ask Dr. Lynch: Does Classroom Technology Make a Difference?
Technology can improve student learning, but is it really as important as we think?

Flipped Classrooms: Why and What?
Learn how this pedagogical strategy affects student efficacy and self-determination.

Handwriting Practice Made Easy
Students use lined whiteboards as tools for learning and practicing handwriting skills.

Information at Their Fingertips
Should we accommodate 21st-century students’ expectations of immediate gratification?

Me? A Teacher-Researcher?
Are you willing to openly question your practices and test research-based techniques to improve your instruction?

Revisiting Shared Reading
Try following shared reading with guided reading.

To access more great content, check out our Professional Development Archive and our Professional Development Channel Page.


Highlighted Columnist

Wendy Petti: Teaching Place Value With Arrow Cards
Kids organize the cards horizontally or vertically to represent numbers in expanded notation.

See more Professional Development Columnists.


 Explore the Education World Community

The new Education World Community, a FREE professional network for educators, offers teachers and administrators the opportunity to meaningfully interact with others in the field. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out this powerful resource.

 Join today!


Technology

Featured

How To: Expand Storage on iOS Products
Third-party manufacturers are producing devices aimed squarely at Apple’s fixed storage mandate.

iPad App Review: Whirly Word
How many words can you make from six letters? That is the challenge presented by this cool app.

iOS7 Can Run Smoother on Older Devices
CNet has come up with a few workarounds that could help older devices run iOS7 like it was designed for them.

Tech in the Classroom: Sparkfun MiniBot
Here’s a low-cost introduction to robotics for middle- and high-school students and educators.

Gadget of the Week: PollDaddy
Create and administer a one-question poll.


Administrators

Featured

Recognize Your Staff's Stars
How do you recognize teachers who go above and beyond? Get ideas here.

Great Meetings: Are You a Facilitator?
Facilitators help groups get the most out of their meetings by keeping everyone on track.

How I Handled: Streamlining Instruction for Special Education and Low-Performing Students
To minimize time spent gathering students from multiple classrooms, we streamlined the way we grouped kids.

Bulletin Boards: Powerful Teaching, Community-Building Tools
Principals speak about the power of bulletin boards from the primary grades to high school.

Four Corners
This staff getting-to-know-you activity offers a lot of fun with little preparation.

Passport to the World
Students explore countries and cultures within their school walls, including hands-on activities.




Education Headlines

Parents Of Sleep-Deprived Teens Push For Later School Start Times
Cristina Sevin knows the drill. Her 15-year-old son Isaac's first alarm goes off at 6:05 a.m.

Urban Schools Aim for Environmental Revolution
Nothing seemed special about the plates from which students at a handful of Miami schools devoured their meals for a few weeks last spring - round, rigid and colorless, with four compartments for food and a fifth in the center for a carton of milk.

Georgia School Lets Kids Decide What They Learn
A private school in Atlanta is home to "un-schooling," a concept where there's no curriculum or tests, and adults are just there to watch as kids decide exactly what and when they want to learn.

School Districts Should Raise the Drop Out Age
Two school districts in Catawba County are set to raise their mandatory attendance age from 16 to 18 - it's time that the rest of North Carolina school districts follow suit.

Are School Teachers a Dime a Dozen?
Today I read this comment about teachers - School teachers are a dime a dozen - and I realized that if one person expresses this idea out loud in print then probably tens of thousands more quietly express it in private. Given that this is presumably the case, it's no wonder our society relegates teaching to an inferior status. Why treat teachers like professionals if in fact they are a dime a dozen?

Technology Showcase Highlights School Benefits
Watauga County Schools held its first Technology Showcase on Nov. 19, demonstrating some of the ways teachers are using technology to enrich classroom learning.

Gov. Jan Brewer to Make 2nd Try on Performance-Based School Funds
Gov. Jan Brewer is expected to request $40 million more for schools in the coming fiscal year tied to student performance.

What Does It Take to Get Kids to Stop Skipping School?
When it comes to tackling the problem of chronic absenteeism, students who already have a track record of skipping class can be a particularly tough crowd to sway. But a new report out of New York City-where one out of every five students missed a month or more of school last year-suggests an intensive community-wide initiative is gaining ground.


Other Items of Interest

Community Discussion of the Week

How do you structure shared reading in your classroom?


Want to be considered for Teacher of the Day?

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Schoolnotes.com
School-To-Home Communication

Now, New.SchoolNotes.com is the FREE platform that can help keep you, your students, and their parents "on the same page."

You can post homework, create and share flashcards, keep a calendar of upcoming events, and upload documents, images, and favorite URLs all to YOUR page! Students and parents can automatically receive notification when you update your SchoolNotes page.


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