8 Tips to Create a Twitter-Driven School Culture
8 Tips to Create a Twitter-Driven School Culture
Twitter is one of the most powerful tools that you can use for your professional development — 24/7. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of educators around the world are currently using Twitter to connect, share, and collaborate. While it’s fantastic that educators are flocking to Twitter, many of them still feel even more alone and isolated within their own school and district.While it’s fantastic that educators are flocking to Twitter, many of them still feel even more alone and isolated within their own school and district. There’s an unfortunate inverse trend I’ve noticed in education: the more connected you are on Twitter, the less support and collaboration you tend to have within your school.
Read MoreHattie Ranking: Influences & Effect Sizes Related To Student Achievement
John Hattie developed a way of ranking various influences in different meta-analyses according to their effect sizes. In his ground-breaking study “Visible Learning” he ranked those influences which are related to learning outcomes from very positive effects to very negative effects on student achievement. Hattie found that the average effect size of all the interventions he studied was 0.40. Therefore he decided to judge the success of influences relative to this ‘hinge point’, in order to find an answer to the question “What workAs best in education?”
Read More5 Tools for Helping Students Find Creative Commons Images
Photos, logos, graphics and images are an important part of any multimedia creation that students produce. A few well placed, high quality images can transform class work from amateur to spectacularly professional. So, unless you plan on taking your own photographs or creating your own artwork, finding legitimate Creative Commons images is an essential digital skill. To help students (and teachers) navigate and understand the often confusing space that is digital copyright, here are five tools that we recommend using to to search, reference, attribute and download Creative Commons images.
Read MoreA Straightforward Guide To Creative Commons
Way back when, research meant going to the library, finding something in a book, and indicating what book you found the information in when you created your bibliography. The internet has brought a significant amount of grey area to the world of citations and bibliographies. Students need to understand how to distinguish relevant, reliable material from the wasteland of trash that otherwise litters the internet. How do you cite a tweet, or other social media post? Is that considered ‘reliable’? And when it comes to sharing that information – especially on the internet- things get even hairier.
Read More24 Video Games You Can Say Yes To After School
Summer’s over, and school’s back in session. Time to pull the plug on your kids’ video games, right? Not so fast, Mom and Dad. To the great relief of kids everywhere, it turns out video games and school are not incompatible. New studies on the effects that playing games has on kids indicate positive benefits for learning, thinking, social-emotional skills building, and, yes, even school performance. Games provide new ways to engage with various subjects, whether it’s learning about math through an air-traffic-control simulator or practicing musical timing with a dance app. So the next time you see your kid playing a strategy or music game, know that he or she may actually be learning history or working on physical fitness.
Read More5 Steps To a Problem-solving Classroom Culture
Problem solving is one of today’s top skills—students who apply problem-solving strategies in the classroom are building important talents for college and the workforce. The math classroom is one of the best places to help students build these skills. Creating a culture of problem solving in a math classroom or in a school involves prompting students and educators to think a little differently and systemically. “The world does not need more people who are good at math,” said Gerald Aungst [2], supervisor of gifted and elementary mathematics in Pennsylvania’s Cheltenhamn Township Schools. “What the world needs are more problem solvers and more innovators.”
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