Scott Grapin shares some important video with us: Hey Ben, It was so great meeting you and the other PLC members in Chicago. Hope you are doing well and enjoying some time off. I want to share with the PLC some SLA primer videos I’ve put together for my own district. The primers currently on […]

Greg posted this comment about three days ago. I was thinking about it this morning and realizing that no matter how we prepare in terms of how we teach, the classroom management piece that Greg addresses here must be at the forefront of our attention now in August. I should post this article here every

Eric has written a tour de force comment-turned-article on reading this morning. It is because he is both a classroom teacher and a scholar/research based person. That is a powerful combination and so we ought to read what Eric has written here with special attention. He has shined flashlights on what has been over the

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