These little incentive punch cards were created for one of our Spanish teachers. They were really basic and quick to make using Word. They are made to print onto 8×5 note cards. Feel free to downloadthis oneto modify it to suit your needs.
Don’t forget about Word. It may be not be as flashy as an Adobeoffering but it is fast, easy to use and gets the job done!
Why buy something when you can make it yourself and get exactly what you want!
Ms. Johnson does a lesson on inferences every year. She provides students with this page that shows some animal tracks on it and asks the students to infer what happened in the picture. I’ve seen her teach this lesson before but this year she brought in some laptops. Now the initial thinking was that students would use the laptops to capture their thoughts about what they were inferring (in MS Word). However, what happened changed the way this lesson could be taught. I made a few observations while I was in checking it all out. First, all the students were really engaged… I mean they were into it! Second, the students realized at some point that they had Internet access and started leveraging that tool to determine what animals could have made the tracks - you can imagine what this did to their inferences (some clever students found the url on the bottom of the page and used that). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ms. Johnson was able to collect inference observations from EACH student (since they typed them in word). Check out the pictures and video… the video ends with a fire drill
So, don’t be afraid to use the laptops in your classroom, you might be surprised with the results.
There are lots of ways to teach the nuances of the ruler. I caught Ms. Blandford using her Visualizer (ELMO) to project up one of the classroom’s rulers. Since she was beaming right onto the whiteboard her students were able to come right up to the board to answer questions. I think of the times I tried to teach a similar lesson with all of us crowded around a small foot-long ruler. This seems MUCH better. Cool! I bet you could use this same strategy to teach all sorts of things:
Parts of a text book (table of contents, index, etc.)
My classes are only 45 minutes long and so I need to make the most of the time. I’ve started using this online timer to help the class keep track of their “work time”. If I say they have 7 minutes to work on something, I pop this timer up on the big screen and let the students monitor how much time is left. I’ll leave the timer running in the background if I’m working on other applications (like PowerPoint). A ringer goes off when it is finished so keep the volume turned up (but not too much).
During our recent Professional Development this game was shown, we played it and had a blast! It can be adapted to any subject. I have attached the one I just prepared for math 7. I have played this with 3 classes and they love it. The excitement level was high and some of the clues from the students were awesome!
Example: Rectangular Prism - Clue from one student: It’s shaped like a shoe box, Answer: Rectangular Prism
As students create presentations, webpages, and other publications they often need pictures and images to go with them. There are many place students can go to find high quality, educational pieces. Here are two good ones.
How cool is this? The first 30,000 pages have been unveiled of a vast encyclopedia which aims to catalogue every one of our planet’s 1.8 million species.
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) - described as the “ultimate field guide” - is to encompass all six kingdoms of life, and even viruses.
This is definitely an educational tool worth checking out!
So, I was over at shirt.woot today - too late to buy this shirt
But it got me thinking. Jeanne just got a new printer that makes super high quality t-shirt decals (as good as what you can buy in a store). We should have a contest where students design their own Math Happening shirts (or Language happening, science happening, etc.). I would definitely buy one of those. Incidentally, this one explains (mathematically) how a year is not 365 days long.
Sure, you could sleep in, watch TV, maybe in surf the web today. It is a free day after all. Or, you could learn something new that might just change your life and in less than 20 minutes. How? Head on over to TED (a conference of really smart people who also happen to be extraordinary presenters) and watch something - anything. I don’t think you will be sorry. You might even consider showing a video or two to some of your students. These are, after all, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers.
I’ll suggest one of the Deputy Head’s favorites to get you started. In this video, the speaker says
The ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual (@7:25)
This reinforces a large part of my pedagogical beliefs:
Miss White has created a new blog as a follow-up to her success over at mswhitelovesmath. As she says…
This blog is a chance for me to share articles that I come across or have been sent to me. They have been interesting to read and have made me really think about teaching, education, and mathematics.
My classes are only 45 minutes long and so I need to make the most of the time. I’ve started using 
