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 goals, were committed to achieving the goals and had an accountability system in place, achieved more than those who didn’t have written goals. Like any […]
Category: College
SMART Goals Template
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. The attached SMART Goals Worksheet can be used to help set a goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. Utilizing this framework, […]
Archived Confederate Postal History Reflects an Ideology of Nationalism
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 deeper understanding on how the archives have enriched, enhanced, and contributed to an understudied part of our American past from this course. My naïve behavior […]
Why Teach Digital Citizenship in 2018
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 leave behind? What are you doing online today that will impact your future? Are you a good digital citizen? Every decision you make, no matter […]
Adding EdTech to Your Classroom? 3 Non-Negotiable “Old School” Components to Include in Every Lesson
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 and greatest” technological tool for the classroom. And many of these tools are great, but we have to be careful anytime we decide to add […]
Leading In And From the Classroom
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 somewhat shy as a child, I could organize my group of friends at recess like it was my job. I lived in the country without […]
Ultimate Project Based Learning – How Student Teamwork Built a World Championship Car
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 learning from mistakes. That the most important life lessons come from experience, that science is not always easy and that the answers are not always […]
EdTech Comfort Zones – From G Suite to Office 365
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 big deal. As a second-grade teacher with just a few old iMacs in my classroom for kids to play games on, I didn’t need very […]
Utilize Your Students and Surveys to Measure Your Teaching Effectiveness
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 the classroom. We educators all know sometimes young adults simply don’t know what they need as well as we often do—our experience, credentials, and wisdom […]
What Difference Does Instruction Make?
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 be a teacher spending time in a classroom with a state-licensed “cooperating” teacher. In the case of my university, students experience a five-week placement during one […]
Striving to be a Strong Digital Leader
—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 we prepare our teachers and our students for the world in which we live and the world of tomorrow? As a principal of an elementary […]
Progress Tests… Are They Reliable?
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”, but I have never really known why. I am a keen proponent of regular assessment, though I prefer practical rather than formal/standardized examinations. Of course, […]
The Carrot and The Stick: Are American Schools Actually Teaching Us?
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 massive airliner in the dark on that freezing winter’s morning, I thought I had arrived in a fairytale. The mountains and the lake snugly nestled […]
Discipline Outdoes Talent—Here’s How
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 is a greater indicator of the success of students. “In…studies of both secondary school and university students, self-discipline has surpassed intelligence test scores to better […]
3 Superpowers of the Principal: E.V.E
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 interweave at least three types of power to set your agenda. 1. Entry As a principal you have an easy entry point to your central […]
3 Quick Tips to Build Staff and Teacher Trust
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. Check out these three tips to get a jump start on building mutual trust. Rinse and Repeat When the building staff know you’ll do what […]
Using Swift Playgrounds to Collaboratively and Creatively Code
“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 a college English teacher, my proposed plan is as far out of my comfort zone as I can get, namely to introduce coding into all […]
The Secret of Team Allocation in a Flipped Classroom Environment
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 enough to determine whether they will work well together, i.e. information asymmetry between students. This was something I sought to address through allocating teams in […]
Got Calm? 3 Tech Tools That Make it Easy for Educators to Try Mindfulness
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 to anecdotally be a powerful tool for helping young people calm down, regulate emotions and focus on learning. Not to mention the benefits for adults […]
7 Tips for Creating an Irresistible Curriculum
I’m never going to use this in real life! Every student has made this claim at least once before. As students make their way through their academic career, they often question the importance and applicability of their lessons. It is not only evident in this common statement, but also in the many blank stares and falling heads as students fall asleep. Is our content doomed to boredom? How can we present it so that students are excited to learn? Below, […]