What zone are you in?

The Learning Zone or the Performance Zone?  What are the characteristics of each?  Where does your classroom fit?  In this brief TED talk, Eduardo Briceño shares how you can really make improvements.

Teaching Tolerance

Looking for lessons to help your students understand diversity, equity, and justice?  Try Teaching Tolerance.  This site contains professional development as well as classroom resources.

For the complete post from TeachersFirst, please click here.

Moving History

Want to make history really come alive?  Consider History in Motion.  Here you can not only annotate the map but add images and links.  It is a free site (but no Google sign in- your students will need to create usernames and passwords) that has potential.  The video above will help you get started.

For the complete post from TeachersFirst, please click here.

Google Docs and Literacy

Eric Curts has several literacy ideas in his blog post on 4 Fun Literacy Activities with Google Docs.  His post includes several webinar archives with support material and ready to use templates (take the quiz after you watch and earn PD hours!)

Highlighting with word problems

Eric Curts shared a technique for helping students work their way through word problems.  Please see his blog post Solving Story Problems with the Highlight Tool Add-on for Docs.  It also includes this link to highlighting tools.

Know Recorder

I recently read about this free app on Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers.  I made a quick sample.  You can add images, annotate, and export the video.  I would love to try it with a class- any volunteers to try KnowRecorder?

Commitment is good

But connections are better.  This interesting blog post by Matt Miller (Ditch that Textbook fame) really hit home for me.  It’s a quick read and you will find it here.  If you are interested, you can sign up for his blog posts on the same page.

Videos in Google Slides

Up to this point, you could only insert, ouTube videos in Google Slides.  But now you can insert videos from your Google Drive!  But think short clips (and you can set the start and stop times)- you cannot insert a long video. You can find more details here.

Student Feedback

Looking for ways to give student feedback? Check out these suggestions in an ISTE blog post here.

Black History Resources

If you are looking for high-quality resources, please check out the Discovery Education sites.  They have curated top resources in their Content Collection.