Term 3 Week 2 - Top 20 websites for teachers & some quizzes for teachers

In the UK and the US schools are starting to gear up for the new teaching year. This website Making Teachers Nerdy has a post about the Top 20 Websites No Teacher Should Start the 2010-2011 Year Without, which shares some great online tools to think about or continue using in our classes.

Take the Quiz: Learn Something New About Yourself

Tech Savvy Teaching: How Do You Rank?
Are tech tools improving your teaching or just a distraction?

What's Your Learning Style?
Are you a visual-spatial learner, musical learner, or logical-mathematical?

What's Your Emotional IQ?
Learn more about how you manage your emotions.

Something extra

An email arrived in my inbox overnight which I really wanted to share and which I think would be something special to share with your form classes, classes or perhaps at year level assembly...

The email is from a website which I signed up to which sends out all sorts of great teaching and learning ideas plus ideas for assemblies every week. This week's idea encourages us to introduce our students to the website 1000awesomethings.com and invite them to end each day on a positive note.

Some days I find I need reminding about all the blessings that I have in my life so from now on if I need inspiration I have a blog (1000awesomethings.com) I can read to remind myself.

Have a great day everyone.

Term 3 Week 1 - starter generator, using rap to improve learning and twitter - what's it all about?

Teaching Tool
Starter Generator - created by Mike Gershon - lots of ideas to use at the start of lessons/ units to engage students. You can use the Powerpoint as a random starter generator or use the contents slide (slide 2) to find specific starters.

Teaching Strategy
In the holidays I heard Kim Hill interviewing Tom McFadden, a teacher who uses rap to teach difficult lesson content through rap. He creates the raps himself but I thought it could be a interesting task for students to create group raps to present to the class for revision of concepts.

Tom McFadden: rapping science (duration: 9′21″)
American molecular biologist who communicates scientific concepts to children and senior students through rap. He is a guest at the New Zealand International Science Festival in Dunedin. Audio from Saturday Morning on 10 Jul 2010



An article from the NY Times on Rappin' for Science.

Twitter
Some slideshows on why and how we might use Twitter in education.

• http://www.slideshare.net/hopkinsdavid/twitter-in-education
• http://www.slideshare.net/smorra/introduction-to-twitter-for-educators

Is anyone using Twitter at SMC??

Professional Reading

• "All our students thinking" (from Educational Leadership magazine) - Any subject—be it physics, art, or auto repair—can promote critical thinking as long as teachers teach in intellectually challenging ways.
• "Oh Behave" (page 1, page 2) - Paul Dix explains how effectively managing your own behaviour will help you keep control and create a better learning environment.