Happy New Year! The January return to school is always accompanied by resolutions and energized educators looking to continue to make that difference in the lives of their students. It’s also a time when people are determined to take time to take care of themselves: going to the gym, daily meditation, reading more novels, etc. […]
Innovation requires a shift in mindset and action, sometimes taking you outside of your comfort zone. As you design a Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, you will no doubt find times that you are outside of your comfort zone. Your tendency might be to drop a structure that doesn’t seem to work for you or your students. Don’t […]
If you want to build literacy skills, leverage the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom as a social learning environment. Consider that students engage in problem-solving as part of a learning community in which they engage with teachers, outside experts, and one another. They spend their day speaking, listening, reading, and writing! It’s a veritable literacy playground, if you […]
Teaching should not be transactional; it should be transformational. The goal of teaching is to ensure that students gain a level of understanding of content that enables them to apply it to new situations, thus transforming them. Learning comes from making sense and meaning of content (Sousa, 2011) and is enhanced when students have: a felt-need for […]
The Zephyrhills Free Press in it’s November 10th edition describes how second grade students at Chester W. Taylor Jr. Elementary School in Zephyrhills, Florida created dozens of “unique, handmade brochures” to help encourage tourism to their city. The brochures are the end product of an authentic and relevant problem-based learning unit developed by teachers during […]