Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit

I’ve attended this session for the past few years and always find something interesting.  Please see the information below- the sessions are online and since they are pre-recorded, you can watch them at any time.  Just be sure to finish by January 8th. Below is the information from the site.

Get registered for free at: DitchSummit.com.

HOW IT WORKS: New presentations are released every day from Dec. 14-22. They remain available until Jan. 8 so you can re-watch or catch up on any you’ve missed. They’re pre-recorded, so you can watch them whenever you want until Jan. 8. After that, the summit ends and the videos are unavailable to watch anymore.

FREE PD HOURS: You can get FREE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CREDITS for watching the videos. There’s a form to fill out after each presentation, and you’ll get an automatic PD certificate emailed to you.

Sign up for the digital summit at DitchSummit.com.

This year’s new speakers include: 

• Dr. Lindsay Portnoy, cognitive scientist, professor, and parent

• Knikole Taylor, educator, lead learner, and Google Certified Innovator

• Dee Lanier, educational technologist, equity enthusiast, and Solve in Time Creator

• Dr. Desiree Alexander, education consultant, presenter, and speaker

• Esther Park, high school ESL / ELA teacher

• Maria Arfanakis (Galanis), innovation curriculum specialist, Google Certified Trainer

• Paula Martínez, designer and slide template creator, Slides Mania

• Nyree Clark, curriculum program specialist, culturally responsive teaching advocate

• Matt Miller, author of 5 books, Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit host

BrainPOP and Family Engagement

Here are suggestions to use BrainPOP with your families.

Family Engagement

Family engagement in student learning leads to advances in cognition, language, and social development. Visit BrainPOP’s Home-School Connection to find out how families can use BrainPOP. 

What’s new in BrainPOP?

Click here for a list of new BrainPOP features.

Media Literacy for All

In his blog post, Frank Banker (writing on the Middle Web site) clearly outlines 7 steps to help your students become more media savvy.  From who paid for the message to what is omitted- he clearly demonstrates how you can improve your students’ critical thinking.

Gettysburg by the numbers

TeachersFirst recently share this infographic on Gettysburg.  It explores a variety of content areas and works to help students understand the significance of the battle.

Teach the Constitution?

Here’s an article from Edutopia from Benjamin Barbour using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to teach the constitution. It might be a good start to look at differentiation and scaffolding options for your students.

Try the new Kami Dashboard

 

Kami has a new dashboard feature- click here to see the details and how you can turn on this Beta feature.

What you might not know about BrainPOP!

 

Get to know BrainPOP beyond our movies and quizzes—each of our 1,000+ topics are embedded with a suite of activities, fun challenges, and creative projects. Learn more about our most-loved features:      Make-a-Map   Make-a-Map invites students to make meaningful connections between concepts and reinforces understanding using BrainPOP images, keywords, and movie clips.         Make-a-Movie   Help learners apply knowledge and encourage higher order thinking by creating their own BrainPOP movies. Make-a-Movie cultivates planning, organizing, writing, collaborating, and analyzing skills.          Creative Coding   Provide students with 21st century-ready skills! Each coding project is scaffolded with support and is flexible so beginners can be successful and advanced programmers can create more sophisticated projects.     ...And there's even more to explore!  Whether you’re teaching remotely or in-person, these powerful features are a great way to make lessons more interactive, provide students with voice and choice, and build higher-order thinking skills. How can these features boost your curriculum? Get to know all the possibilities! EXPLORE ALL TOOLS P.S.: Don’t forget to take advantage of your Assignment Builder! Use it to create custom learning pathways with our movies and features and assign them to individuals or groups.

New Dashboard features in Screencastify

 Screencastify recently introduced interactive questions-now you can create a video and add your own questions. (Need more information on interactive questions?  Click here.)

Now they have revised the dashboard to make it easier to see and interpret student results.  Please see their directions here.

Are you thankful?

Here’s the latest from BrainPOP- November is for gratitude.

Theme: Gratitude

November is National Gratitude Month and we just want to say thank you for your continued partnership!  As we move into the holiday season, we wanted to remind you to explore our collection of fall resources including movies, activities, games, planning guides, and video tutorials.