How to engage students

Alice Keeler shares her brief reflection on how we can work to engage our students in the classroom,  You can view it here.

10 tips to engage students

In this blog post, Alice Keeler shares simple suggestions to engage students in your classroom.  By making it relevant, using technology, and offering choice, you can help to deepen student interest.  In a kindergarten class this morning, I gave choice to several different videos- I was teaching skills and it didn’t matter to me which videos they watched.  The students were engaged and on task (and they demonstrated the skills).  And they asked me to come back!

Do you see the rigor in your classroom?

One of my snow day activities (while waiting to shovel) is keeping up on archived ed-Web webinars.  This morning I watched Rigor is NOT a four letter word with Barbara Blackburn. (If you want to watch the webinar, please click here.  Join the ed-Web community and take the quiz to get a PD certificate.)  She shared her website (barbarablackburnonline.com) and mentioned the Free Resources tab (screenshot above)- there you will find ideas on how to increase the rigor in your classroom.  Recently, I’ve seen the term rigor getting a bad name (the dictionary definition is the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.)  Yet Barbara defines it as high expectations for all students with the proper support and demonstration of their learning.