Beyond Integration

Come join other educators on June 12-13, 2019 for 2 days of fun learning. Numerous choices of sessions, you are guaranteed to learn something new. Check out the sessions and register today!  Earn up to 12 hours of recertification hours. http://www.scmidlandssummit.com/p/sessions.html

Source: http://dailyutahchronicle.com/2015/11/29/a-brief-history-of-memes-and-how-theyre-destroying-our-political-culture/ Everybody loves a good meme.  From teachers to students, these days memes provide a lot of entertainment.  Have you ever thought about assigning memes as student work, though?  Asking kids to make and share memes could get us further in the engagement battle and really the kids are doing much more than creating memes.  See some examples below: My Favorite Mistake Meme So often teachers spend tons of time reviewing student work and providing feedback only to have it be ignored by the kids.  What if you asked students to meme their favorite mistakes?  This would force them to review the work and the feedback, and if you as a teacher only identified where the mistake was rather than what the mistake was, it could force them to do some focused error analysis.  Teachers can then anonymously share memes that address common mistakes or misconceptio

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Gone are the days that students must memorize facts, dates, and people. Nowadays most educators would agree they want their students to not only “know” the information but be able to do something with the new knowledge. Simply put, students need to be able to critically think about the content and put it into application. However, as a veteran educator or even a novice educator, what does that type of “active” learning look like? It was certainly not how we learned when we were going through school, nor did our colleges prepare us for this type of teaching. I want to share a few strategies that can be applied in any subject and any grade, though you may need to modify them to meet the needs of your students in order to get your them critically thinking about the subject matter. “ Tweet This ” Bring the idea of social media tools to help students formulate their own understanding or opinion on a topic they are learning. At the end of your lesson, ask students to create a “tweet” r

See part 1 here and part 2 here . Learning from slide decks Slide decks are an often-used choice for online content for teachers who blend instruction.  Using these resources that have already been teacher created is an efficient choice.  Just asking students to review the deck, however, may not ensure that students learn as deeply as you need them to.  Consider supplying one of the following strategies next time you ask students to review a slide deck to power up the learning. Internal summaries in the comments Every slide deck in Google slides has a notes section available if the slide deck is distributed to students as editors (use “make a copy for each student” in Google Classroom).  Requiring students to summarize the content on each slide in the notes section gives them opportunities to summarize and make connections. Sketch it out After students review an entire deck, assign them the task of sketchnoting the key concepts.  They can sketchnote on paper or d

See part 1 here . Learning from online text Routine reading of subject specific text is always an important part of content delivery.  Online reading, however, has its challenges.  Luckily, there are plenty of supports you can provide students to ensure they engage deeply with the text. Reading in Google Docs If you’ve assigned a Google Docs reading, ask the students to engage with the text by using the highlighter tool to identify important information (you may scaffold it further by telling them to look for topic sentences, evidence, details).  Then, students can share texts with one another and review each other’s highlights.  Students can add comments to analyze why their peer highlighted a certain portion of text or compare a peer’s highlights to their own to determine if the correct information was selected. If students highlight in black, you can create a “reverse highlight” effect.  Tell students to black out extra, irrelevant information to create a document that o

So, you've moved the learning online...have you prepared your students with strategies for how to learn from online materials? Combining face to face instruction and online materials, or blended learning, is a great strategy to provide more choice, access to content, and differentiated learning experiences to our students.  Sometimes, though, we make the mistake that because students are so good with technology, they’ll be able to extract the information we expect them to from online materials such as videos, slide decks, and articles.  In the next few posts, we will provide some strategies that will help you prepare your students for what they need to learn. We will share some select strategies for when you assign videos for learning, online texts for learning, and slidedecks for learning. Learning from Video Videos are perhaps the most stimulating of all online content.  With sound, images, and often added text, videos provide a lot of potential for learning and a lot of