Are Teachers Taught How to Manage Classes?

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report, “Training Our Future Teachers: Classroom Management,” says that teacher education isn’t doing its job when it comes to classroom management. Instead of tackling how to run a smooth and efficient classroom and create a good learning environment, teachers go through programs that emphasize instruction. While learning how to instruct is necessary, if a teacher can’t handle a class, he or she will never make it to the instruction. Notably missing from most teacher education programs were “strategies that impose consistent consequences for misbehavior, foster student engagement, and—most markedly—use praise and other means to reinforce positive behavior.” Other important techniques teachers should include in the management toolbox include: establishing rules, expectations, and routines.

With the addition of technology tools and resources into the curriculum, it seems even more necessary to help teachers learn about proven techniques in order to avoid disruptive behaviors in the classroom.

Did You Code During Coding Week?

As of Wednesday morning, December 11, 2013, almost seven million students, teachers, and administrators had taken part in Computer Science Week’s Hour of Code. If you were too busy with Christmas activities during the week, you can still go to the site and check out the 215,563,747 (and growing by the second) lines of code written by students. Some many unique coding opportunities went on during the week—teaching a robot to play a xylophone, coding BeeBots in Kindergarten, programming with graph paper, developing games, writing songs, creating apps, and practicing with LightBot, Scratch, Python and other programing languages. The hope is that after an introduction to programing/coding, more students will take an interest in continuing on in their field.

Online Tribute to Nelson Mandela

Information on the Nelson Mandela Memorial is available at mashable.com, where you can also see many world leaders who paid tribute to Mandela.

Computer Science Resources Recommended by eSchool News

During Computer Science Week or Hour of the Code Week, whichever you want to call it, loads of great ideas were published to help teachers bring computer science understanding into their classrooms. A good example is an article, by Laura Devaney of eSchool News, who compiled a list of ten resources and facts to help with programming. They include Daisy the Dinosaur (free app), Cargo-Bot (puzzle game), MIT Inventor (build apps), Hackety Hack (learn computer science), Codecademy (learn to code site), Computing in the Core (facts), Computer Science Unplugged (learn computer science without a computer), w3schools (examples, quizzes, tutorials, etc), recruiting girls to computing classes (suggestions), and Dot Diva (suggestions for girls). Devaney offers links to the ten resources in her article.

No More Cursive?

There’s a debate about whether students should continue to learn how to write in cursive. With use of computers and digital devices, the need to learn keyboarding is evident. —But, should students learn both keyboarding and cursive? Cursive instruction is not required in Common Core Standards, but questions remain about problems that may arise if students aren’t taught how to read and use cursive. For example, on standardized testing such as that required by Advanced Placement, students are better able to complete written questions if they use cursive. —And, how about reading documents written in cursive in the past and signing documents?

Art & Technology

We Are Teachers offers excellent ideas for integration of art into the curriculum. You might try taking art “out of the box” by displaying a cubist painting on an interactive whiteboard and having students check out and draw over geometric shapes in the painting. After the lesson, students might create their own Cubist paintings using digital art programs or by creating shapes on paper. Make use of document cameras when studying how light and darkness interact. You can “manipulate light and color in your classroom by covering the bulb on your document camera with a piece of colored cloth.”  As you do this, “place various objects under the camera” in order to investigate changes in appearance that are dependent on different colors of light. Check out the article, “4 Ways to Take Art ‘Out of the Box’ Using Technology” to find more suggestions for the use of art in technology and in other subjects such as science, math, and social studies.

The Future for Teachers

Marc Prensky, best known for his advocacy of games in education, refers to the traditional curricular subjects—math, English, science, and social studies— as MESS.  In the future teachers, Prensky suggests, will be teaching “motivation, respect, empathy and passion” because, although technology can do a good job of teaching content, it doesn’t do so well with personal qualities.  Prensky calls educators today, the last pre-Internet generation and tells us that we need to prepare our students for the future by stressing “effective thinking, effective action, effective relationships, and effective accomplishment.” —And he believes we shouldn’t  “judge the new generation based upon our old ideas and beliefs.”

Tech and Curriculum Development

In a poll of readers of SmartBrief and EdTech, teachers were asked what types of resources they used when developing curriculum.  Over 80% of teachers responded that they used online resources for developing core subject courses. Textbooks were used about 15%, with software programs, coming in at 4%. Only about 5% of the teachers in the poll said they did not use online resources in curriculum development.

As for how teachers share what they do in curriculum development, most suggested in-person meetings over professional networks and social media.

 

Does Tech in Education Help Students Learn?

Carnegie Mellon University wants to know how educators can best use technology with their students, and to find out, the university has announced the Simon Initiative, called the “world’s largest database on student learning.” Researchers at Carnegie Mellon will use the data to find out what are actually the best practices in using technology in the classroom. Most educators are convinced that technology in classrooms works well in helping students learn. We see it every day in our schools; The Simon Project is designed to use a multitude of data to prove that we are right.

The project proposal has the following goals: “sharing rich data globally, helping teachers teach, acceleration innovation and scaling through start-up companies . . . .” This will be an interesting project to watch, since its outcomes will certainly be of use to all our schools, PK-college.

Top Ten Tech Skills for Teens

With all that teens are learning as they use digital devices and the Internet, it is difficult to sort through what they actually need to know. Cindy Donaldson in her article on Education.com (August 2013), polled companies in Silicon Valley to find what their leaders thought were skills all teens should master. The skills recommended are typing, word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, eMail, electronic calendars, Netiquette, social networking, basic computer upkeep, using Internet searches properly for research, and use of databases. Other skills suggested are related to blog making, photo processing, and making a Web page. 

It seems to me that using critical and innovative thinking skills, learning to work collaboratively, and adapting to new technologies should be added to the list, because these skills will certainly be needed.