Tag Archives: creativity

Ready, set, go! Time for another fantastic year.

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4fingersAs we make our final preparations to welcome a new crop of students into our classrooms, I would like to begin the year by sharing a few of the items that I curated over the summer. 

  • Making It Stick. A new book rethinks the hard distinction many teachers make between ‘memorizing’ and ‘thinking’ is an article that was actually published in April on the Chronicle of Higher Education website. I ran across the article after having already found and read the book Make it Stick that is the subject of the article. If you are intrigued by the article, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the book.
  • Four Key Questions about Grading is a piece that appeared on the Faculty Focus website that offers a summary of a longer article that appeared in the summer edition of the Cell Biology Education – Life Sciences Education journal. Given the centrality of grading in education, the article is certainly relevant for most all teachers and their work with students.
  • Giving Student Feedback: 20 Tips To Do It Right is a piece that was actually posted in the summer of 2013 that came across my Twitter stream this August. Good reminders about the purpose and value of giving feedback as we begin the school year.
  • The Five Habits of Creative Teachers is an article that appeared on Education Week website in August that caught my eye. I was particularly intrigued by the link at the end of the article to join in on a free canvas course on the topic starting in October. I signed up and hope that a few of you might join me.

Enjoy the beginning of your school year!

Friday 4 – Catch-Up Day Edition

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  • Do you ever have students watch YouTube or other web-hosted videos for class and want them to take notes on the videos? VideoNotes is a neat tool that allows you to split your screen and watch the video and take notes that can be automatically saved in your Google Drive at the same time. The notes even can be synched with the video so that you can click on your notes and jump to the exact location in the video when you took the note. Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) brought the tool to my attention in a post on his Free Technology for Teachers blog.
  • “How Creativity Works” is a nice piece from NPR in which Johan Lehrer joins NPR’s Robert Siegel to talk about the creative process — where great ideas come from, how to foster them, and what to do when you inevitably get stuck.
  • Here is a post from one of the blogs I follow on the use of clickers in the classroom. “Should students vote individually, should you have a whole class discussion? (#clicker series)” The blog is written by Stephanie Chasteen (@sciencegeekgirl) whose Twitter handle alone got me to follow her on Twitter!
  • There is a thought-provoking series of posts on the Good.is website that explores the “purpose” of education. Regardless of your role in education, there is plenty to ponder and discuss in this series of posts. The first post in the series can be found here. The second piece can be found here.