I remember how Jason Fritze used to assign one person in the class to say, “How disgusting!” in Spanish whenever he pointed at the person during class. It is really quite amusing and a good way to both lighten up the class and teach the phrase. Paul asks: I read a blog post by Michael […]
PLC Goal #5 for this 2014-2015 academic year: Share more video. The success of the War Rooms this summer lead to this comment from James Hosler: …I am feeling more comfortable with the idea of sharing videos of my classes now that I know so many people from the War Room. Maybe others are, too,
SchoolTube is temporarily down for repairs and there is nothing we can do in DPS. What is on SchoolTube are the videos from 2011, filmed in six DPS classrooms. We will be putting the (2013) San Diego iFLT videos on Vimeo but they are still being compressed and edited. The Denver 2014 iFLT videos will
One of our PLC members – Brian Peck – living in a deeply stressed American town, Detroit, with no classroom budget to speak of, wants some financial help in getting the things he needs to fully put into practice in his classroom some of the things he learned this summer. My position is that it shouldn’t all be about suburban white kids,
Our first goal this is year is to challenge unconscious teaching assumptions. I was thinking there about how we keep teaching to their conscious minds, involving them consciously against all the best research and what we have proven in our classrooms to be true about the supreme and majestic role of the unconscious mind in
Here is John telling us in Latin about Putin in the tent a few weeks ago in Denver. That’s Carly being the left half of the tent. James Hosler is Putin, who is the right half of the bridge? Who is standing on the right? That guy with his back to the camera is David
Hi Ben, Not sure if I posted this to the PLC already (it’s from last year), but I think it’s a good reminder, and connects the dots with what does not seem like a FL activity at first glance. Begin the Year with the Name Game: a reflection on the first weeks of school. For
Goal #4 for this 2014-2015 academic year: Address the bad apples right away. Paul brought up the idea of how we all seem to have such a hard time clearing our classrooms of the kids who, if not cleared out, can then go ahead and ruin our classes for the entire year. I addressed this
Here are the names of some interactive whiteboards that are currently on the market: Explain Everything ($2.99)* Doceri ($4.99) ShowMe (free) Whiteboard HD ($4.99) Syncpace ($8.49) Jot! (free) BaiBoard (free) Groupboard (free for 5 students) Educreations (free) *David Talone says about this app: …Explain Everything allows you to narrate over each individual slide, and you
When students watch the projected image of a student-created story that was created on an interactive whiteboard, and (1) see the changing comic strip panels, and (2) read it, and (3) listen to it, and (4) hear any emotion in the reader’s voice (without probably even noticing it), we at that point are approximating for
I have always favored delaying the reading of novels as long as possible so that there is no struggle for our slower students when they do start novels. There is nothing as defeating as not understanding what you are reading in the novels. Factored into this is that we sometimes are guilty of asking students
In the little stories made on interactive whiteboards that review the stories created in class we have: 1. changing images 2. printed words 3. spoken words 4. emotions When we learn from a textbook or a chapter book/novel, we don’t have all those things. We have no or very few static images, and therefore little
