It’s back to school time, again! It still feels like summer, but vacations are ending and kids are heading back to class. With school comes school supplies, and maybe a new book bag. Students are transporting a variety of tech with them each day, and this can include laptops. Rather than just shoving a laptop…
Dreaming big dreams and desiring to achieve something worthwhile is natural to people. Setting the concrete goals to achieve these dreams is a skill that everybody of all ages needs to learn. It’s not natural for adults; neither is it natural for kids. A study done at Dominican University showed that people who had written…
The below ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ template is published under Creative Commons. Feel free to share on your own blog, school site or social network. Over a 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln said “a goal set properly is halfway reached.” However, it’s harder to set a actionable goal rather than express a feeling or dream about the future….
My passion of philately for over fifty years has led to me to this engaging endeavor. An inheritance of a splendid collection of pre-WWII Japanese postage bequeathed to me during childhood initialized my curiosity and spirit of inquiry about collecting which I now consider my own archive. Upon completing this course, I have gained a…
Bryan likes to tell his children – unlike a diamond, what you do on the internet remains intact forever. The web is a tool – one that leaves a lasting impression with your actions, both good and bad. Whatever you do online is for the world to see. What is the digital legacy you will…
Educational technology: it’s the hottest movement out there in education, and has been for some time. In fact, there seems to be a rather non-discriminating admiration for anything edtech among many teachers today. You can’t open an educational journal, print or online, without being bombarded with ads and articles extolling the virtues of the “latest…
The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel they’re valued. ~Sir Ken Robinson I am a middle child and relished the role of “leading” my younger brother. He, however, wasn’t a very cooperative follower. :) While I was…
Every year for the past twenty the Saint Thomas Academy Experimental Vehicle Team (STA EVT) has built a new vehicle from the ground up to give our students the best engineering experience a high-schooler can get. The internationally recognized program started in 1997. My fellow moderator Mark Westlake and I believe in the importance of…
What is your preferred platform for regular digital work? What makes it your favorite? I learned how to use Microsoft Word and Appleworks (yes, I’m old) in high school. I continued to use those tools for basic word processing tasks through my first few years of teaching. At some point, Appleworks went away. Not a…
A teacher’s stakeholders’ satisfaction with their course is an important measure of instructional effectiveness that is too often overlooked or outright ignored. Of course, it’s absurd to hope to satisfy every young adult’s needs and wants equally throughout an academic year, but to endeavor to do so seems a requisite to respecting student voice in…
When we teach, we hope and believe our instruction is making a difference. But is that always true? This was the question I wanted my third-year pre-service teachers to think about as they participated in a five-week, full-time field placement. For those not in the US, field placements involve a college student who wants to…
—Every day, I want to grow and become better. Through every task and experience, I am pushed as a leader. How will this decision affect kids? What impact will this have on our school? What is our next step to make the most of what we do to help our students be successful? How do…
I recently had a small administrative problem with an institution I sometimes teach for, that ultimately made me realize for the first time why I feel uncomfortable with the term “Progress Test”. For some time now, I have generally avoided using the term Progress Test, favoring instead something more general like “Midterm” or “Module/Unit Assessment”,…
When I was seven-years-old we moved from the United States to Switzerland because of my father’s job. I was born in Brazil, but having left it just two years old, I didn’t really know anything other than the U.S. I didn’t even realize I was Italian, not American. From the moment we stepped off that…
F. One simple letter. The grade we never want to have to give. Are some students simply doomed to low marks forever? Can their brains only struggle to deliver D-level work? Why do some students sail through courses, while others struggle? While elements such as intelligence, aptitude, and memory play a role, surprisingly, something else…
As a Principal you are plopped down into a building tasked with one of two scenarios: maintain the status quo or upset that status quo. In order to accomplish your own goals within one of those two frameworks you must be able to influence your staff. From the very beginning of your tenure you must…
As a new principal managing your way through your first year, you should have one main goal: Building your credibility as the school leader. The quickest way to do this is not through regaling the staff with the high points of your resume. They care little about that. They want to know they can believe in you….
“Leadership is needed for problems that do not have easy answers” (Fullen, 2007, p.2). Numeracy and literacy for the priority learners is one of the main problems I have identified in our Community of Learning (CoL). This is a massive problem faced by educators worldwide and has had teachers scratching their heads for decades. As…
In a flipped-classroom, blended learning environment with team-based learning it is important to consider the formation of students teams. For students who are first year undergraduate students, freshmen, it can be a much longer and more difficult task to form teams of their own. First year students do not tend to know other students well…
Mindfulness, defined simply, is the act of being aware of your thoughts, feelings and sensations in the present moment. Mindfulness is a trendy topic in education because it’s been shown to have numerous social-emotional and cognitive benefits for kids. And in addition to the growing body of academic research, many educators and parents find mindfulness…
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