Curating resources & sharing stories to empower teacher & student ownership, wonder, and daring.
As teachers, we have heard the dialogue on intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and the importance of instilling authentic passion for learning. But in a day of real-life frustrations and desperation for student cooperation, where is the realistic balance as we apply this important classroom management principle?
Continue reading “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation: 17 Practical Application Ideas”
You braced yourself for difficult student behavior, long hours beyond contract time, and mounds of grading, but your professors didn’t prepare you for everything! Check out some tips that may help ease your first year teaching expectations and planning.
This may seem like an random, less significant tip, but it can be a life-saver when it comes to keeping your never-ending supply of copies from mounting into menacing, unorganized stacks that hijack your desk and sanity! We have found it to be one of the greatest keys to your organization. One of the members of our Honors Grad U family used the following system, but you’ll want to play around with your options to find what will be most effective for your needs!
Find some space to keep 10 hanging files: an open crate of hanging files, or maybe part of a filing cabinet drawer.
Label the files Monday-Friday twice so you have 2 weeks of files ready.
Stick your files in place. Any time you make new copies, check your planner and slide them into the day you’ll need them!
At the end of each week, move the 2nd week bunch of files to the front of your crate or drawer!
It’s possible that your professors did in fact cover this one with you, but given the 21st century technology integration fervor, it’s likely that they strongly advocated for all-digital planners–after all, free apps and programs like Planboard are available for such purposes! However, having tried both digital and paper approaches, we’ve found that digital may not necessarily be the best tool for everyone, even if you absolutely love all things technology. Your planner will be critical in your time organization, so be sure to consider several factors to decide what will be more beneficial for you:
Collaboration: Evaluate how your school or team collaborates with one another. Do you share every detail of your schedules, or is it more general? If the need is more on the side of specifics, you may find that going digital may be more time-effective, especially if everyone else on your team is using the same program! For this reason, it may even be a requirement at your school to use a specific type of digital planner, so be sure to find out!
Schedule Flexibility: Does your principal have a habit of announcing assemblies at the last possible moment? Are constant interruptions to the regular weekly schedule more the norm than a regular weekly schedule? If that’s the case, you may want to consider the wonder of the seconds it takes to pencil in a few arrows to shift around your schedule, rather than minutes (or more) as you try to determine your platform’s ability to edit the template. Paper planners continue to perform reliably when it comes to quick edits!
Internet/Printer Logistics: If you’re more inclined toward the digital route, be sure to consider a couple logistics. Do you plan to keep your planner handy on a tablet or laptop? If so, make sure there are offline options, such as downloading a program to your desktop or an app that will keep things available even when the internet is not! You don’t want your internet dependence to leave you high and dry when it comes to your daily plans if there’s an emergency! If your plan is rather to just print your plans each week, that may be a good solution to these kinds of tech logistics. However, be sure to consider whether you want to rely on printing plans all year long, when you can buy a paper planner that already has all the pages in one place!
Neatness: This is probably a no-brainer, but be sure to examine your own handwriting neatness! It can be frustrating for you to be unable to decipher critical plans in the moment you need them–not to mention for a sub! Typed plans can be a dream if this is an issue for you.
In the overwhelming workload of your first few months, you may be tempted to spend your lunchtimes barricaded in your room to catch some extra grading minutes. We don’t dispute that this may be essential at times. However, we highly recommend taking a break to socialize with your colleagues whenever possible. The reasons for this are varied:
You’ll form relationships that go beyond just professional acquaintance. Not only is this a bonus for the sake of making friends, but for enhancing collaboration experiences as everyone becomes more comfortable around one another.
You will feel mentally refreshed to finish your day when you give your mind a rest from teacher-mode!
You will be able to build solidarity with other teachers as you share experiences with one another–it can be incredibly comforting to realize that experienced teachers are facing your same struggles, along with some of their insights to solutions!
As you plan your classroom design, policies, management, and more, you may get caught in the overwhelming and stressful trap of thinking you need a plan for everything by day 1! While there are some areas that do need to be addressed by then, many others are what we consider to be “fluid,” meaning they will adapt as you go. Here are some examples of what we mean to help you distinguish between the two as you prepare your classroom:
Solid
Disclosure document: This includes policies on homework, grading, and other items that would be stressful for students and parents if they get changed too much. Click here for a sample disclosure document. Work with your team to develop this!
First two weeks of plans
Fluid
Classroom incentives: Don’t feel like it all has to be set in stone from the beginning for students to be motivated! In fact, an element of mystery may enhance their interest!
Floorplan: especially if you’re an elementary level teacher, you’ll be moving things around all the time anyway! You’ll get a better feel for how you want to move through the space as the year progresses.
Your daily schedule: Obviously, if you teach at the secondary level, this is already determined for you. For elementary levels, however, you may feel strained as you try to make time for everything. However, as you create and try out a basic schedule, you will discover necessary adaptations throughout the year–some things will require more or less time than you planned for! So don’t worry if there’s not a neat time slot for absolutely everything at first!
We don’t mean this in the general, pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-working-hard way. Rather, we mean that your professors probably didn’t warn you that as you prepare for and begin your first year teaching, you will likely (ok, definitely) check out Pinterest for inspiration from time to time. And, just like in the classic, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” if you explore Pinterest for teaching ideas, chances are you’ll find more inspiration than you can handle. You’ll find teachers who craft perfect, personalized student holiday gifts (from Christmas to Columbus Day!); you’ll find teachers who structure every lesson into engaging, hands-on, inquiry based instruction; you’ll find teachers who have built international networks with classrooms around the globe for regular Skype and blogging interactions; you’ll find teachers who have mastered the art of grant-writing so thoroughly that not only is their classroom a floor-to-ceiling library of highest quality literature, but every student is equipped with an i-Pad. Chances are that when you see all this spectacular inspiration, you will get discouraged. This brings us back to emphasize the initial tip #5: cut yourself some slack! You may fall absolutely in love with these experienced teachers’ Polar Express parties, or their inspiring bulletin boards, but the thing to remember through it all is that they are experienced teachers. You have enough to do during your first year of teaching without adding on stress of what else you could be doing, because there’s always going to be something more you could be doing! By all means, keep track of those Pins for future reference, but always keep in mind some perspective in your teaching pursuits!
Featured Image: University of the Fraser Valley
If you’re like most teachers, you have 47 other tabs open besides this one: your grade-book, email, lesson plan resources, and a couple articles on stress management. So how can you implement student blogging without tipping the scale?
The countless benefits of student blogging are likely what led you to this article today! Some that we at the Honors Grad U family have witnessed through experience include:
Authentic audience: Parents, teachers, peers, and even fellow students across the globe can view, comment, and contribute to the learning!
Developing practical tech skills: Besides the obvious benefit of typing practice, blogging is a perfect tool for introducing and practicing skills from copying and pasting to simple HTML editing to maintaining various digital accounts.
Multimedia Literacy: Growing up, we all made dioramas from shoe boxes, wrote 5-paragraph essays, and crafted posters. However, 21st century students can and need to also become fluent in an ever-expanding pool of digital resources. Blogging gives them practice in creating and sharing pictures, Youtube videos, Educreations, Thinglinks, Infographics, Prezi’s, and much more!
Engaging Assignments/Projects Through Student Choice & Variety: It can be difficult to keep the passion burning when you introduce a persuasive writing unit. However, when you also introduce the idea of also including persuasive imagery, as well as actually sharing their work with their intended audience, suddenly things get much more intriguing and personal for each student!
Simpler Teacher/Student Collaboration: You’ve experienced the dredge of writing comments on dozens to hundreds of assignments–and that’s only after deciphering questionable handwriting! Once students have posted various artifacts to their blogs, you can easily type feedback–and depending on your platform, that can even be made private!
Easily Accessible Digital Learning Portfolio: Say goodbye to clunky binders with half-ripped-out pages from September by the time you get to March! If you just consider the use of a few tags, you can already imagine how much easier it would be to navigate the archives of a digital portfolio.
Pick a Platform: Spend time exploring your options, privacy needs, and budget. Most platforms are free on a basic level, but if you want more storage, you’ll want to consider budgeting for your account. You can even try talking to your administration for some budgetary help, especially if they want to purchase a group package for your school! Kidblog, WordPress, and Edublogs are all common options that allow you to add users with you as the administrator and moderator!
Permission: Make sure you discuss your school’s privacy policies with your administration before you get started, especially if you’re the first teacher at your school to start student blogging! You may just need to make a permission slip from parents for each student, or you may find that media permission slips have already been submitted to the school!
Carve out class blogging time: This is probably the hardest step of all! However, if you are an elementary school teacher, just a weekly 30-45 minute time slot should be enough to get them started! For secondary levels, you may be able to do more at-home blogging assignments, but you’ll still want to establish at least a little class time for modeling how to use the resources (see below).
Internet Safety & Respect: Before students enter their blogs for the first time, make sure they are all familiar with basic safety rules, including sharing their personal information (this website is full of teaching ideas). Also, practice proper etiquette in commenting on paper (see lesson ideas here), before launching into the real deal! Creating and signing a class blogging contract for future reference is always a plus, too!
Establish clear expectations: Decide what’s most important to you for their blogs. If you expect capitalized titles, tags for every post, and a reflection, make sure it’s clear from the beginning. Let students know you won’t publish any posts missing basic expectations (but make sure they are reasonable for your students’ level as well)!
Choose a few resources: While you’ll definitely want to introduce them one at a time (see below), spend some time beforehand identifying and familiarizing yourself with the main resources you want to teach your students to use. We recommend choosing one resource for each subject you want your students to be able to exhibit.
Math: Educreations is fantastic resource that allows students to explain their thinking as they draw while also recording their voice!
Reading: You can use Audioboo to have students record their reading skills throughout the year! Particularly for younger students, it would be powerful for them to literally listen to their progress from September to May. For a free option (Audioboo maxes out after 3 minutes), you could also use Youtube, even covering up the camera so it just records their voices.
Writing: Obviously, the simple text of a blog post is a great way to share student writing throughout the year. However, you can easily liven things up by introducing a word cloud maker like Wordle. Not only would it add some beauty to their published piece, but it can also help students visualize their most common word usage in essays!
Art: Older students will likely already be familiar with Photobooth to simply take pictures of their art pieces, but you may need to spend time teaching younger students how to take and upload photos to their blogs.
Science/Social Studies: Thinglink allows students to collect several online articles, videos, and photos into one beautiful interactive presentation!
Introduce one at a time: Even if it takes several months, it is worth teaching and practicing just one resource at a time! Before moving to the next resource, thoroughly familiarize them by allowing them to explore several examples, create a few of their own on their blogs, and collaborate with one another’s work through commenting. We’ve also found it effective to print and display a board of step-by-step guides for each resource for students to reference in the future.
MODEL, MODEL, MODEL!! Every chance you get, model how you would like them to use each resource. Using your own blog account, create multiple examples of each resource for them to reference. Remember to also model quality comments on their own blogs throughout the year!
Make sure it’s accessible to parents: One of the most rewarding aspects of student blogging is to watch parents connect authentically with their child’s work! Make sure links to student blogs are available on your classroom blog, and/or email reminders to parents after students have finished blogging projects!
Once you get into a groove with blogging, here are a few other ideas to consider to keep things exciting for your class:
Student Blogging Challenges: Websites like this one offer wonderful challenges for students to tackle in their blogs! You can always get creative and craft a few of your own! For high schoolers, this can even be in the form of working on scholarships, such as our very own Honors Grad U Scholarship, as students share their progress on their blogs!
Quadblogging: This is one of the best ways to connect globally with classrooms just like yours! Four classrooms form a quad, with each class taking turns being the highlight classroom, while the other three visit their blogs and leave comments! One member of our Honors Grad U family has experienced connecting with classes from the U.K. & China!
Consider social media: Another way to break down your four classroom walls is social media, including Twitter (Click here for our post on Twitter for teachers)! Educational hashtags can allow your students to quickly find feedback from around the world. For example, #comments4kids is specifically intended to post links to student work for others to leave comments!
Badges: www.classbadges.com is a fun way to motivate students to work to visually earn various achievements! You could also use them in conjunction with your student blogging challenges!
Hopefully, these steps allow you to tackle student blogging in a manageable, practical way! Leave a comment if you have any questions or additional ideas as you get started!
photo credits: DeathToTheStockPhoto (featured image)
