Getting your history geek on

I love history. I love reading it. I love talking about it. I love arguing about it. So when 40 middle school history teachers show up at my door for four days of talking and reading and arguing history, it’s like the best day ever. We started our Century of Progress Teaching American History summer [...]

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10 Tips for jump starting the school year

Several months ago, I had the chance to listen to and meet Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss at the Laptop Leaders Academy at Mitchell, SD. They are doing some incredibly cool stuff with PBL around the country and so I’ve been following their blog these last few months. A recent post at Reinventing Project-Based Learning [...]

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Five great ways to start the school year

With many teachers heading back to the classroom this week, several recent conversations seem appropriate here. I spent some time talking with secondary social studies teachers and a few elementary teachers about the kinds of things they plan on doing during the first few days of school. I’ve posted five of those ideas below. 1. [...]

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Tip of the Week – Lectures in 60 seconds

Micro-lectures have been a bit of a buzz word in higher ed the last year or so. It seems like something K-12 people should take a look at as a possible strategy to extend learning. Micro-lectures are simple multimedia presentations that can be as short as 60 seconds to 5 minutes or as long as [...]

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Tip of the Week – Word Pictures

Some students, especially younger ones, can have trouble with vocabulary words. Finding methods to help them remember and understand deeper concepts can also be difficult. But we know that combining ideas with images can give kids a handy way to connect with your content. So how to do that? Have kids create Word Pictures. I’m [...]

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