How To Use Chromebooks For Powerful Creation in School

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in classrooms, many schools are choosing Chromebooks because it’s one of the least expensive devices, a big win for schools balancing spending priorities. A 2017 report of the education market found Chromebooks dominate with 58 percent of the market for school mobile device purchases. But many teachers aren’t using these new tools for much more than notetaking and slideshow presentations.

Tanya Avrith is a self-proclaimed techy-teacher. She piloted iPads in one school she worked at and Chromebooks in another. “By January I felt like I hit a wall,” Avrith said. She found the Chromebook more limited for student project creation than iPads and started digging for Google apps and plug-ins that could add functionality.

She teamed up with Holly Clark, an education strategist, to write “The Google Infused Classroom,” a book they hope will help teachers see Chromebooks as more than a testing device or an expensive notebook.

“We’re trying to use the devices to make student thinking visible, to hear from every kid in our classes, and to share work,” said Holly Clark during a presentation at the 2018 gathering of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) in Chicago.

Technology like Socrative can make quick checks for understanding immediately visible so teachers know if a lesson landed, or when shared to the whole class, can offer opportunities for students to compare and contrast answers. The metacognition embedded in that process is the goal, but the technology allows it to happen quickly and easily.

“This is why the people at the district office got you Chromebooks,” Clark said to the audience. “They want to keep the learning going.”

Avrith and Clark focused on two powerful tech tools to bring creation to Chromebook classrooms, encouraging teachers to think beyond the obvious uses for these tools.

BOOK CREATOR

“When people see Book Creator they see a place where kids can write a story,” Clark said. While that’s true, she and Avrith have seen teachers using the freemium tool (the first 40 books created are free, and after that there are fees) in many more innovative ways. (Note: Clark and Avrith are volunteer Book Creator ambassadors, a program through which they receive an upgraded account.)

Avrith recently used Book Creator for a digital citizenship lesson she taught to third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. She didn’t want to lecture students about appropriate online behavior and media literacy because she knows those kinds of lessons are easily forgotten. Instead, she got students creating a collaborative book — 114 students contributed to it — that took on a digital citizenship scenario from four potential angles.

“I want to shift the conversation with my students to being digital leaders,” Avrith said.

Students worked together to come up with solutions to the scenario Avrith presented. They were excited to share their ideas with peers and to read one another’s solutions. The project was memorable and it took only two 40-minute periods.

In another example, Avrith told her students she would be going to Haiti to work with some students there. Her American students were curious about their Haitian counterparts, so Avrith had them post their questions to Book Creator, where she translated them into Creole. When she was in Haiti, she showed the questions to the Haitian students while teaching them how to use Book Creator, and they posted answers. It turns out both Haitian students and American students like soccer and pizza.

“It was a really powerful way of collaborating with another place and building empathy and understanding,” Avrith said.

Clark likes to use Book Creator as a repository for learning over time. “They can show you what they learned from point A to point Z,” she said.

Students can upload videos of themselves reading, for example, and demonstrate improved fluency as the year progresses. Or, when studying the narrative arc, students might write and illustrate a comic book instead of a short story. Clark admits she hates the narrative writing unit in seventh grade because she has to read so much writing on the same themes. But when she encouraged students to represent their narrative any way they wanted in Book Creator, she received a much more varied display of students’ narrative understanding.

Other creative examples for Book Creator include an 11th-grade math teacher who made a supplemental math tutorial book for students, including video explanations. Or a U.S. history teacher who asked students to write their own history textbook in Book Creator using videos, text artifacts and anything else they wanted.

A newer version of Book Creator now allows students to embed almost anything: YouTube videos, Google Maps, Tynker, SoundCloud, Desmos, 360 videos, Flipgrid (now free for educators), Google forms and more.

“You can have them create their own 360 videos that they can then embed,” Avrith said. Then, students can annotate their videos to explain their thinking. “It’s not just the cool factor, it’s the thought processes. Through this tool you’re now able to make their thinking visible, hear from all your learners, and have them share.”

Avrith even uses Book Creator to make coding journals. She loves what students can do in Scratch, but finds managing all the projects cumbersome. Now, students can embed Scratch projects in Book Creator, offering a digital portfolio of their skill progression.
“You can app smash in ways you could never app smash before!” Avrith said.

ADOBE SPARK

Clark and Avrith are also excited about updates to Adobe Spark that allow teachers of students younger than 13 to sign up for administrator accounts that then give students access to enterprise accounts for free. If students are older than 13 they can already access enterprise accounts, which open up features and tools that previously required a paid account.

“Adobe is doing for creation what Google did for collaboration,” Avrith said. “You have this suite of amazing tools that are so simple to learn.” That’s particularly exciting to her because Chromebooks haven’t had many great video production tools. And, she’s found younger students have no trouble figuring out how to use Spark, which allows students to use templates or build their own from scratch.

Students can also upload their own photos or use those supplied by Spark, which are already Creative Commons licensed. The tool also allows students to pull free icons from the Noun Project and it saves automatically as they work, “which is magic because how many fourth-graders remember to save anything? No. never,” Avrith said.

She has seen students make beautiful presentations with video on one side, text on the other. And students or teachers can add audio to every slide to explain the thinking or walk through a learning process.

“That takes creation and digital literacies to a whole other level,” she said. She’s excited to see tools that make it easier and more equitable for “creative problem-solving and telling beautiful stories” so that teachers and students can control the narrative about their own work.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2LRUTlq

Instant Pot Thai Sweet Potatoes with Peanut Drizzle

Dealing with Back Pain: Treatment and Prevention

It’s a well-known fact that three out of four people have suffered a period of back pain at some point in their lives or have had repeated episodes. The pain may be severe or mild, suddenly creep up or build up gradually. Whether it was brought on by a nerve or structural problem, arthritis or …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2ApWxGt

How to Cook Sweet Potatoes in an Instant Pot (Pressure Cooker)

What Makes a Good School Culture?

Most principals have an instinctive awareness that organizational culture is a key element of school success. They might say their school has a “good culture” when teachers are expressing a shared vision and students are succeeding — or that they need to “work on school culture” when several teachers resign or student discipline rates rise.

But like many organizational leaders, principals may get stymied when they actually try to describe the elements that create a positive culture. It’s tricky to define, and parsing its components can be challenging. Amid the push for tangible outcomes like higher test scores and graduation rates, it can be tempting to think that school culture is just too vague or “soft” to prioritize.

That would be a mistake, according to Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, an expert in education leadership and management. As she explains, researchers who have studied culture have tracked and demonstrated a strong and significant correlation between organizational culture and an organization’s performance. Once principals understand what constitutes culture — once they learn to see it not as a hazy mass of intangibles, but as something that can be pinpointed and designed — they can start to execute a cultural vision.

At a recent session of the National Institute for Urban School Leaders at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bridwell-Mitchell took a deep dive into “culture,” describing the building blocks of an organization’s character and fundamentally how it feels to work there.

Culture Is Connections

A culture will be strong or weak depending on the interactions between the people in the organization, she said. In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization.  As a result, knowledge about the organization’s distinctive character — and what it takes to thrive in it — is widely spread and reinforced. In a weak culture, sparse interactions make it difficult for people to learn the organization’s culture, so its character is barely noticeable and the commitment to it is scarce or sporadic.

• Beliefs, values, and actions will spread the farthest and be tightly reinforced when everyone is communicating with everyone else. In a strong school culture, leaders communicate directly with teachers, administrators, counselors, and families, who also all communicate directly with each other.
• A culture is weaker when communications are limited and there are fewer connections. For example, if certain teachers never hear directly from their principal, an administrator is continually excluded from communications, or any groups of staff members are operating in isolation from others, it will be difficult for messages about shared beliefs and commitments to spread.

Culture Is Core Beliefs and Behaviors

Within that weak or strong structure, what exactly people believe and how they act depends on the messages — both direct and indirect — that the leaders and others in the organization send. A good culture arises from messages that promote traits like collaboration, honesty and hard work.

Culture is shaped by five interwoven elements, each of which principals have the power to influence: 

1. Fundamental beliefs and assumptions, or the things that people at your school consider to be true. For example: “All students have the potential to succeed,” or “Teaching is a team sport.”
2. Shared values, or the judgments people at your school make about those belief and assumptions — whether they are right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust. For example: “It’s wrong that some of our kindergarteners may not receive the same opportunity to graduate from a four-year college,” or “The right thing is for our teachers to be collaborating with colleagues every step of the way.”
3. Norms, or how members believe they should act and behave, or what they think is expected of them. For example: “We should talk often and early to parents of young students about what it will take for their children to attend college.” “We all should be present and engaged at our weekly grade-level meetings.”
4. Patterns and behaviors, or the way people actually act and behave in your school. For example: There are regularly-scheduled parent engagement nights around college; there is active participation at weekly team curriculum meetings. (But in a weak culture, these patterns and behaviors can be different than the norms.)
5. Tangible evidence, or the physical, visual, auditory, or other sensory signs that demonstrate the behaviors of the people in your school. For example: Prominently displayed posters showcasing the district’s college enrollment, or a full parking lot an hour before school begins on the mornings when curriculum teams meet.

Each of these components influences and drives the others, forming a circle of reinforcing beliefs and actions, Bridwell-Mitchell says; strong connections among every member of the school community reinforce the circle at every point.

Leah Shafer is a staff writer for Usable Knowledge, which translates education research and well-tested practices so they’re accessible to practitioners, policymakers, and parents. Usable Knowledge is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2Am9HEh

How Restorative Justice is About More Than Just Reducing Suspensions

This story about restorative justice was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

With just two words, a classroom can be thrown into chaos. Anne Gregory, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, recalls just such a scenario when an angry high school student shouted an expletive (“F— off!”) at his teacher, bringing class to a halt.

Gregory, who studies school discipline, wasn’t present for the outburst itself but she saw its aftermath. At many schools, she explains, the response would be simple: send the student straight to an administrator to mete out punishment, probably a suspension.

Instead, the vice principal came to the classroom. He dismissed most students for their lunch break while inviting anyone who felt personally affected by the incident to remain in the room with the teacher and the outspoken student. Then that smaller group, under the vice principal’s guidance, discussed what had just happened.

Gregory was witnessing a restorative circle. It’s a practice derived from a movement in education known as restorative justice, an approach to discipline that replaces punishment with repairing harm. And it is sweeping across schools nationwide.

In the classroom Gregory observed, all those gathered shared their perspective. The teacher expressed remorse for reacting to the student’s outburst with so much frustration. Another student reflected on her own struggles with anger management. And the young man whose words sparked the incident apologized and described how the stress of a difficult morning had boiled over in his behavior. He then agreed to help his teacher set up her Powerpoint and distribute textbooks at the beginning of each class as a way of compensating his classmates’ lost instructional time. 

The incident neatly illustrates how the restorative process brings a community together at a moment when, traditionally, conflict might divide the classroom. But is it worth all of that effort? Evidence from the court system, school surveys and controlled experiments suggests restorative justice can indeed do a lot of good. Although more studies are needed to explore its full effects on schools, the research thus far hints that this approach to discipline helps people feel respected and that they, in turn, show greater respect for rules.

To understand restorative justice, it’s worth looking at its roots. About forty years ago, criminal justice scholars and reformers in North America and Europe began exploring justice across cultures and studying the perspectives of perpetrators. “Eye for an eye” thinking, they found, may be a longstanding part of Western society, but that’s not true everywhere: some communities place reconciliation above retribution. Inspired by this realization, the restorative justice movement was born.

Restorative justice courts in countries including New Zealand, Rwanda and South Africa, for example, developed restorative practices based on the traditions of indigenous communities to address issues as diverse as genocide and petty theft. Much like the restorative circle Gregory witnessed, these courts bring victims and offenders together in dialogue to discuss each person’s perspective. Offenders have to take responsibility for their actions and commit to a plan to mitigate the damage they’ve caused.

Behavioral science hints at many advantages of this approach. First, although punishment has its uses — for instance, it warns everyone in a community that there are consequences to bad actions, which in turn make us more willing to cooperate with one another — it is also an imperfect deterrent. In criminal justice, after all, experts broadly recognize that people convicted of crimes have a high likelihood of reoffending.

Furthermore, research reveals that punishing offenders may not necessarily meet victims’ needs. Oriel FeldmanHall, an assistant professor of psychology at Brown University, has discovered — using simple scenarios where a person cheats another out of a payout — that most “victims” would rather receive compensation than see offenders punished. (In fact, it’s often third parties who were not personally harmed that are most eager for punishment on the victim’s behalf.)

Restorative justice, meanwhile, with its emphasis on community, empathy and perspective-taking, may make up for some of the shortcomings of traditional disciplinary action. In the U.S., for example, juvenile courts that practice restorative justice have significantly reduced recidivism compared with those using traditional approaches.

“It’s incredibly amazing what can happen in these courts,” FeldmanHall says. “They’ve been very good at keeping young teenagers from going back to jail.” The thinking goes that the highly participatory process that characterizes restorative justice requires offenders to engage with and understand how their actions have affected others; in turn, the community has to reckon with what drove a perpetrator’s behavior.

Encouraged by such successes, psychologists and educators have attempted to translate this work to school discipline. One such translator is Kathy Evans, an associate professor of education at Eastern Mennonite University, co-author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education. She sees three central priorities at the movement’s core: relationship-building, repairing harm and creating more equitable environments.

“Restorative justice can’t just be a set of things that we do,” Evans says. “It has to be a framework for how we view teaching and learning.” For example, whereas traditional school discipline emphasizes managing bad behaviors, restorative approaches start by encouraging students and teachers to embrace the idea that all members of the school community should be treated with dignity and fairness. The circle process, in which every voice is heard and multiple perspectives considered, is one example. As a result, proponents argue, students take the school’s rules more seriously because they feel more invested in that community and their school relationships.

And there’s evidence for that effect. In 2016, a study led by Jason Okonofua, a professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, found that a brief empathy training program for middle-school teachers not only changed their behavior but shifted student perspectives. Post-intervention, the team found, middle schoolers felt more respected and motivated to behave better.

Another study from Anne Gregory and her colleagues surveyed 412 students across 29 classrooms where teachers had received restorative justice training specifically. The researchers found that the more teachers immersed themselves in restorative practices, the better students rated their relationships with these teachers. And the strong relationships in turn linked to a greater sense of respect between teacher and student and fewer disciplinary referrals.

Given these findings, it’s perhaps unsurprising that restorative practices are popular with students. In fact, at least some teens and kids adopt the techniques for their own use. A 2016 study from researchers from the University of Maine at Farmington and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that many students liked restorative circles so much that they used circles as alternatives to fights in out-of-class disputes.

However, further study is needed to explore all of the possible effects. For example, supporters of restorative justice sometimes tout its potential to reduce racial disparities in discipline. Recently, Gregory and several colleagues studied suspension data from a Colorado school district to explore that question. They found that schools employing restorative responses to disciplinary problems issued fewer out-of-school suspensions than those without such interventions. Yet restorative justice did not, in fact, alter the fact that black students receive disproportionately more suspensions. Additional research will be needed to suss out why.

One factor that co-author Yolanda Anyon, an assistant professor at the University of Denver School of Social Work, flags is that schools implement restorative justice in various ways. “What’s happening that’s unfortunate is that restorative justice is being seen as just an alternative to suspension,” she says.

Instead, because restorative justice is really, fundamentally, meant to entail a shift in mindsets, it’s a substantial investment of time and energy. “People at every level of the school community need to be on board and fully immersed in both the practice and philosophy of restorative justice,” Gregory says.

Or as Evans points out: “We define restorative justice as a shift in culture. We don’t change culture quickly.”

This story about restorative justice was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

 

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2LOgsA4

3 Tips for Removing Pet Hair at Home

Pets are lovely creatures that bring limitless happiness into any home. But no matter how much you love your furbaby, it’s normal to feel frustrated because of the amount of hair they shed. Good thing there’s a number of solutions available. Here are some:

Photo by Gulyás Bianka on Unsplash

Adhere to a regular cleaning schedule

A regular and thorough vacuuming is the best way to remove pet hair from your home. Start high and work low, using proper attachments to run the vacuum over walls, into corners and over draperies and window sills. Static electricity and low humidity in a home can help pet hair cling to surfaces. Running a humidifier is good for you and makes breathing easier, skin feel more hydrated and it helps keep tufts of loose pet hair from clinging to surfaces. If you have a pet, keep a schedule of regular vacuuming to maintain a home free of pet hair. Source: SheKnows

Use a squeegee

You can also use a dry rubber squeegee or rubber broom to lift up any pet hair from carpets. It might freak you out slightly and cause slight rage at your vacuum (why is it missing so much?!), but man, does it ever work. Just “rake” an area with the tool in short, fast strokes and you’ll see hair peeling up off the carpet. Source: CleanMySpace

Don’t forget to groom your pet

Don’t duck your grooming responsibilities; embrace them. Giving your dog or cat a quick one-minute brushing outdoors or in the garage every day will save time and effort spent dusting, sweeping and vacuuming every week. With a little hair off the dog (or cat) at a time and place of your choosing, you’ll soon see a reduction in the number of fur bombs you find around the house.

Bonus: Your cat won’t hack up as many hairballs for you to step on before you’re fully awake in the morning. Source: VetStreet

Don’t be afraid to let your pets roam around inside your carpeted home. If ever your carpet needs deep cleaning or repair, you can always call us. We’ll have it sorted for you in no time!

The post 3 Tips for Removing Pet Hair at Home appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.

from Curlys Carpet Repair https://ift.tt/2NKVsLj

Trying To Get Your First Job? There’s A Class For That

Look people in the eye. Smile. Shake hands. Sit up tall. Speak clearly and confidently.

That’s the last-minute advice professor Paul Calhoun gives a handful of college students before they head off for a series of job interviews. The Skidmore College juniors and seniors he’s talking to are dressed in suits and button-downs; dresses and heels. They stand out in a college library swimming with other finals-takers, most in sweatpants or leggings and T-shirts.

There isn’t an actual job on the other end of these interviews, just a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade from a class called Presenting the Brand Called Me at this liberal arts college in upstate New York.

Calhoun created the popular, semester-long course 10 years ago. He’d spent more than three decades working in the banking industry, where he saw the importance of presentation skills: “A lot of it is acting.”

When he came to Skidmore as a business professor, he noticed a lot of students struggling with self-confidence and public speaking. “Students just plain don’t like to talk about themselves,” Calhoun says. “Some students have never had to.”

He enlisted the help of theater professors to help him shape what eventually became this class, in order to give business majors “the same training that the theater department gives to actors.”

Over the 13 weeks, there’s some role-playing with improv — “Talk for a minute about anything — go!” There are dance classes, and a slew of guest speakers who talk about cover letters, resumes and personal branding. By the end of the course, students leave with a polished “STAR” story — the short story you craft about yourself and your abilities that’s designed to help land you a job.

“People don’t remember when you tell them you’re good at something,” Calhoun explains, “they remember when you tell them a story that proves you’re good at something.”

I took this course my senior year at Skidmore and my mock interview ended up landing me my first job. I’m not the only one with a story like that, and the students wrapping up the course this year are anticipating that it will have that power for them, too.

Dante Delemos is a junior business major, soft-spoken but confident. In his mock interviews, he tells a story about losing the election for class president, back when he was in high school.

Is he nervous? After all, he’s had only one other job interview before today.

Yeah, he says, a little bit. But it could have been much worse: “Being able to put myself in a headspace where it’s just for a class and it’s a learning experience,” he says, “that definitely helps it not be such a nerve-wracking experience.”

Delemos is originally from the Bronx, and he’s the first in his family to go to college.

“I like to use that as an advantage,” he says. “I come from a place where people aren’t very successful, and that makes me want to drive to be more successful.”

He says this class has helped him realize that telling a story — his story — has value, so he uses it whenever he can: in cover letters, to shape his resume and during interviews.

And it worked. Delemos is spending the summer working in finance, with an internship in Manhattan.

To land internships like that, students need these skills. And yet, there’s a big divide between folks who just know them — maybe their parents or guidance counselors or others taught them — and those who don’t. Often, that divide widens for students who come from low-income families.

Course in high school, too

“I didn’t know what a resume was at one point in time and I didn’t know how important they were,” Tytianna McClenningham, a recent high school graduate, says in the sun-drenched cafeteria at Ballou Senior High School in Washington, D.C.

In her sophomore year, she took a class called Tenacity that’s in a handful of the city’s public schools. In addition to making resumes, the class created professional-sounding email addresses for themselves. Say goodbye to “Bubblegum123.”

“You can’t email your future boss with some really odd email name,” she explains. And there’s email etiquette, too. “I didn’t even think it was important to use a subject in an email,” McClenningham says. “But now I know.”

The Tenacity curriculum is filled with lots of useful tips, from how to dress professionally to how to code-switch under pressure. But McClenningham says the biggest thing she learned was confidence. She’s straight-up cocky about her stellar resume, and maybe she should be: Most of her friends didn’t take the class, so they look to her for help and edits on theirs.

That resume helped her land a summer internship. And when she starts college at Central State University near Dayton, Ohio, this fall, she says she’s actually looking forward to interviewing for jobs and work study.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2OdLjrE

Peanut Butter Frozen Yogurt Dots

How Genrefication Makes School Libraries More Like Bookstores

Do you have a strategy for improving your ability to move?

If you move better, you’ll feel better… when you feel better, you think better! And when you start to think better, well, life just starts getting a lot more awesome! Don't believe me?  Give me 25 minutes to take you through this full body mobility routine, and you'll be convinced… it's the compound effect in …

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2zV3qPH

Four Qualities of The Most Useful Apps For The Classroom

Smartphones and tablets have quickly become a permanent part of students’ daily lives. Kids up to 8 years old spent almost an hour a day on mobile devices, Common Sense Media reported last year.

And the amount of time kids spend with screens only increases as they get older. On average, 13- to 18-year-olds spend about nine hours a day on entertainment media, much of which is on tablets and smart phones.

But mobile devices don’t have to be a distraction. When they are used for project-based learning, research has shown they can improve classroom engagement and student learning across grade levels.

“What you have is an increasing number of schools that are requiring their teachers to receive professional development in technology integration,” says Dee Lanier, a program coordinator for EdTechTeam, an international company that trains educators on how to use technology in the classroom.

When teachers ask Lanier what they should look for in an app, he tells them to keep four values in mind: cost-effective, cross-platform, cloud-based and collaborative. Much like the “four C’s of credit,” he writes, there are “four C’s of app selection.”

Cost-effective means an app should be affordable for students and their families, Lanier says. He encourages teachers and schools to choose free apps that are accessible to everyone.

Even in schools where every student is given a device or can bring their own, not every student has the same access to apps and programs. Because of that, an app should also be “cloud-based” or “cross-platform.” Both phrases mean that an app works on a variety of devices. Cloud-based, or web-based, programs work on desktops and laptops, while cross-platform apps function on mobile devices.

Finally, he says, collaborative apps allow more than one person to interact with an application at the same time. Collaborative apps let students to work together and respond to one another.

Educators use mobile apps for everything from grading homework to communicating with parents. Here are five that our readers say they love.

Kahoot!

Kahoot! is a quiz game app. It’s like a customized round of Jeopardy that the whole class can play. Teachers and students make quizzes (called kahoots) which can be used to review material or assigned as homework, but the game is best when played together.

Questions are displayed on a shared screen, like a smart board, so everyone can join in. Each student can answer questions from their own device and they each earn points based on who answers the fastest and most correctly. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

“The students like it because it is interactive, fun, fast-paced, and a bit competitive,” says Alyson Solomon, a high school biology teacher in Pennsylvania.

There are other popular quiz apps, such as Quizizz or Quizlet, but with over 70 million users, Kahoot! is one of the most popular. It hits all four C’s and “is great from a review standpoint,” Lanier says.

Remind

Another popular app is Remind, a program specifically for school communication. With it, teachers can send messages to an entire class and their parents without exchanging personal information. Users can also send documents and photos, set automatic reminders and create groups.

Remind has been a staple in many classrooms since it came out in 2011, and can now to communicate within an entire school or district.

Liz White, a library media specialist in Tennessee says most of the teachers and staff at her high school use Remind — to talk to each other and to talk to students. The principal uses it as a substitute for intercom announcements, teachers, like White, use it to answer students’ questions, and the college advisers use it to send reminders about FAFSA and college applications.

“Not everyone checks their email on a regular basis but most teachers have their phones nearby and can reply instantly,” she explains. Plus, she says, teachers can talk with parents and students without giving out their personal phone numbers.

G Suite Apps

Formerly known as Google Apps for Education, the G Suite apps are a service many people know well: Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. — all of the programs that make up your Google Drive account.

G Suite for Education comes with the addition of Google Classroom. It allows teachers to distribute, collect and grade assignments online.

Mike Pauldine, a seventh grade math teacher in upstate New York, likes using Google Classroom because it is flexible and accessible, making it easy to integrate technology into his lessons.

He uses it to create quizzes, give feedback, and collaborate with other teachers. Other programs require his students to remember a different password for each class, but Google Classroom creates a central place for their work that can be accessed anywhere, Pauldine says.

Lanier at EdTechTeam is a Google Certified Trainer and Innovator — so he’s well-versed in the G Suite applications. He recommends using Google Slides instead of Google Drawings for accessibility reasons. They have very similar functions, he says, but Slides has a mobile app while Drawings does not.

Padlet

Think of Padlet as a collaborative, virtual bulletin board. With it, teachers can make a “wall” where students post their responses to a question or assignment. The responses can be text, a drawing, or a video. “That’s why Padlet is beautiful,” Lanier says. “It gives students agency in how they do their work.”

The background, layout and privacy of the board can all be set by the person who creates it. Students can work with people in the same class or from across the world.

Padlet fit all four of Lanier’s criteria for app selection until a paid version was released in April.

Now, Padlet users can have only three free “walls” — if they want any more, they have to pay for them. This can be problematic for middle and high school teachers who teach more than three classes.

Despite hearing mixed reviews from colleagues, Lanier still likes the app.

For teachers looking for an unlimited option without a subscription fee, he recommends Flipgrid. “It’s 100 percent free and you have unlimited grids that you can use, but it’s going to be limited to video responses,” he says.

Seesaw

Seesaw creates a digital journal for every student. They can add pictures, text or video to their profiles. Parents are notified every time a teacher approves a child’s post, and they can see a personalized record of all of their child’s work.

“Seesaw was really early at giving students the ability to give direct responses to assignments,” Lanier says.

While Seesaw is similar to Padlet because it allows for a variety of responses, it doesn’t have the same open collaboration that learners at higher levels need. But Lanier says the app comes highly recommended for younger learners.

Madeline Mendon, a second grade teacher in Oregon, says her class uses Seesaw to make learning more visual. For example, her students record their own math tutorials to show understanding of a skill they learned. Students can see each other’s creations and choose which are posted to their class blog.

What’s the next big thing going to be in this age of rapidly changing technology? Lanier suggests educators keep their eyes on Augmented and Virual Reality (AR/VR).

Many of the apps teachers use serve as digital substitutes for things that used to be done by hand, but AR/VR prompts teachers to think about technology in a whole new way, he says. “What kind of experiences will students be able to have that they never could even imagine?”

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2LamS0b

Why Stepping Back Can Empower Kids In An Anxious World

Rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According to one study, nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32 percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.

And there’s more bad news, grown-ups: The authors of two new parenting books believe you’re part of the problem.

“Kids are play-deprived nowadays,” says Katherine Reynolds Lewis, a journalist, parent, parent-educator and the author of one of those two new books, The Good News About Bad Behavior. And by “play” she means play without screens or adults keeping watch.

“Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised,” Lewis says. And this kind of parent-free play helped them develop important skills they’d use for the rest of their lives. “They were able to resolve disputes. They planned their time. They managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds self-esteem and mental health.”

These days, though, free play is on the decline, Lewis says, and so are the social and emotional skills that come with it. Part of the problem, according to Lewis, is parents who worry that unsupervised play is just too risky. But the risk is part of the point — for kids “to have falls and scrapes and tumbles and discover that they’re okay. They can survive being hurt.”

In many families, Lewis says, play has also been crowded out by parents’ increased focus on schoolwork.

William Stixrud is not one of those parents.

“When my kids were in elementary school, I said, ‘You know, I’m happy to look at your report card, but I don’t care that much. I care much more that you work hard to develop yourself,'” says Stixrud, a neuropsychologist and co-author of the other new parenting book, The Self-Driven Child.

He says academics are important, but that, in most cases, kids should be in the driver’s seat, learning to manage their work, their time and, ideally, being able to pursue their own interests. That freedom, Stixrud says, helps them develop internal motivation in a way that rewards and grades just can’t.

Stixrud’s daughter, Jora LaFontaine, who now has a Ph.D. in economics, says she still remembers first grade, when she brought a paper home from school. Her parents were supposed to sign it every day, proving she’d read for fifteen minutes. The first day, though, Jora says her father looked at it, laughed, “signed every single line on it and said that he did not want to turn reading into homework or a chore.”

When she was an A student in high school, Jora attended a talk her dad gave about why parents shouldn’t focus on grades. William Stixrud remembers his daughter pushing back that night in the car.

“Driving home she said, ‘You know, I liked the lecture, but I don’t really believe that you believe that stuff about the grades,” Stixrud remembers.

“Most people I tell this to laugh,” Jora says, laughing herself. “So, I said to my dad, ‘If you don’t get [good] grades, you’re not gonna get into college. Or at least you won’t get into a good college.”

… and if you don’t get into a good college, you won’t get a good job …

“So my dad said, ‘I will give you a hundred dollars if you’re willing to get a C in one of your classes,'” Jora says.

A hundred dollars.

Stixrud says, his daughter already took school seriously, and he wanted her to understand that “one thing that seems like a disaster is just not that big a deal.”

Jora didn’t take her father up on his offer, but she says it meant a lot, knowing that the only person really pushing her to succeed … was her. In that way, she embodies the spirit of both books’ message to parents:

As Lewis writes, “to build self-control, we need to stop controlling children.”

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2Lsdwco

Superfood Pecan Energy Bars

Why Critical Hope May Be the Resource Kids Need Most From Their Teachers

Tupac Shakur has been dead for over 20 years, and yet his music and lyrics are still popular with young people today. Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade thinks Tupac remains influential all over the world because he writes about some of the essential truths young people still experience. Duncan-Andrade even named the elementary school he helped start Roses in Concrete after the Tupac poem “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” The rapper’s metaphor for young people in tough neighborhoods trying to grow toward the light, despite a toxic environment, feels exactly like what Duncan-Andrade has seen in Oakland schools throughout his career.

“We see them [students] for their damaged petals instead of their tenacity and will to reach the sun,” said Duncan-Andrade at the final keynote of the 2018 Deeper Learning Conference. In addition to his academic research and writing, Duncan-Andrade still teaches at the Mandela Law and Public Service Academy at Fremont High School in East Oakland. For his students, violence is one of the most persistent toxic stressors. Most of them know someone who has died, often by gunfire. But in Tupac’s metaphor, the concrete isn’t just violence. It’s institutional racism, patriarchy, gentrification, poverty in the face of great wealth — it’s inequality.

“The concrete is real and it’s multilayered and it’s toxic,” Duncan-Andrade said. “If schools are not aware of the concrete and that students are showing up with damaged petals, then we can’t see those roses.”

Duncan-Andrade is the first to admit that students need to learn to read, write, think and do math — he has a doctorate, after all. But he doesn’t think educators can close the opportunity gap if they don’t stop pretending that the conditions students live in, and what happens to them outside of school, isn’t part of being a teacher. Those experiences are a critical part of whether kids are prepared to learn or not.

As with so many things in schools, Duncan-Andrade said this comes back to measuring the things we value. Schools measure numeracy and literacy and truancy, but not less tangible things, like hope. That sends kids the message that teachers care more about reading and math skills than they do about whether their students have eaten or not, if they feel safe, if they have somewhere to sleep at night.

“There are a lot of other things that we’re not attentive to enough, and that we’re not measuring, to make it important in schools,” Duncan-Andrade said. Educators have known about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for decades, but Duncan-Andrade contends it has to be at the center of everything educators do. He’s found it essential that students believe he cares about them on that basic level before they’ll be willing to learn from him.

Research coming out of the medical field about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) fuels Duncan-Andrade’s argument that inequality has a huge impact on the health and learning of children. Some researchers estimate that one in three residents of urban areas with high rates of violent crimes has post-traumatic stress disorder. But even worse, these young people aren’t “post traumatic” because the trauma they experience is ongoing, around them always. Researchers have come up with a new name for this disorder: complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The symptoms are more complex than what they’re seeing in the military,” Duncan-Andrade said, and schools are not equipping teachers to handle this health crisis. “The best I see in schools is a one-off training on trauma, and now you’re trauma-informed and go help those kids.” That’s nowhere near enough to equip people to show up for kids in the difficult but necessary ways required.

THE ROLE OF HOPE

“Hope is the best indicator for the degree to which kids will successfully navigate toxic stress, and the degree to which kids are less likely to engage in self-harming behavior,” Duncan-Andrade told me in another interview. But he warns the hope he’s talking about can’t be a false hope — kids see right through that.

Too often, he said, teachers send the message that if students come to class and study hard they will succeed. The problem is that’s often not true, and kids know that. It’s a type of hope that comes from outside the community, based on assumptions that aren’t rooted in the reality that many of the most struggling students experience. Parroting this message devalues the lived experiences of kids by ignoring them.

But there’s another kind of hope that’s equally bad — deferred hope. This is when people know better than to blame the kids, so they blame the system instead. “The problem with this is, of course, that their critique never results in a transformative program for the kids,” Duncan-Andrade said in a talk he gave at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Blaming the system defers a solution for the kids in school right now, waiting for a utopian society where inequality, racism and poverty don’t exist. Kids need hope now.

That’s why Duncan-Andrade advocates for something he calls “critical hope.” To achieve critical hope educators have to combine material resources, like great teaching, with fierce love for students demonstrated with actions, not words. This is incredibly hard work, but through all its ups and downs critical hope requires educators to continue believing they can do what they’ve never done before. Duncan-Andrade knows what he’s asking is hard, but he also knows that students are watching the adults.

“Wounded children tell the most truth,” Duncan-Andrade said at the Deeper Learning Conference. “And they tell it in the most raw ways. And it’s painful to hear that.” But when teachers send those wounded children out of class, passing them off to someone else in the building, it sends a message that they’re too difficult to love. He’s clear that fiercely loving students does not mean there is no conflict. Any good parent knows sometimes doing what’s best for kids doesn’t make them like you, but it should always show your love.

“You win the heart to get to the head,” Duncan-Andrade said. “We keep banging on their heads.”

The most “hopeful” teachers for Duncan-Andrade are the ones who see their classrooms as microecosystems. Teachers have no control over the institutional racisms kids face, the families they come from, where they live, or what happened on the way to school that day, but they can control the conditions of their classroom. They can create a new kind of soil for the roses to grow in, soil that isn’t toxic, that allows them to flourish.

“No master gardener blames the seed for not growing,” Duncan-Andrade said. “They know they have to change the soil. You’ve got to license yourself to be audacious.”

Students will make mistakes on this journey; they’ll lose all the progress they’ve made when another destabilizing event happens. And it will be incredibly frustrating to the teachers that love them. But, “We have to learn to love that about kids. And when we learn to love that about kids, we can remain audaciously hopeful,” Duncan-Andrade said.

As a high school teacher, college professor and founder of the Roses in Concrete Community School in Oakland, Duncan-Andrade tries to embody the tenets of effective teaching that he champions. He admits he doesn’t have it all figured out. He has never had a perfect day, but he hopes that approaching teaching as “radical healing” will start to heal the community, too.

He doesn’t want the battered roses growing up in his square of Oakland concrete to get transplanted to a rose garden, never to return. He wants them to go off to institutions of higher education and take advantage of the knowledge, resources, opportunities and access found there before coming back to reinsert themselves into the concrete. Because when the people who “got out” come back, they widen the cracks for the seeds coming up behind them.

“So much of what we teach our young people is that those battered petals are bad, as opposed to that’s what enabled them to reach the sun,” Duncan-Andrade said. He thinks young people still love Tupac because his narrative is about staying connected to the concrete — the parents, community and places of one’s childhood — even when one has become a healthy, thriving rose.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2LlrWOz

How Writing Can Help You Overcome Math Anxiety

Do you remember the day you decided you were no good at math?

Or maybe you had the less common, opposite experience: a moment of math excitement that hooked you for good?

Thousands of studies have been published that touch on the topic of “math anxiety.” Overwhelming fear of math, regardless of one’s actual aptitude, affects students of all ages, from kindergarten to grad school.

This anxiety extends to the daily lives of grown-ups; we put off planning for retirement, avoid trying to understand health risks, try to get out of calculating a tip. And even teachers suffer from math anxiety, which has been shown to hurt their students’ scores, especially when the teachers and the students are both female; the theory is that anxiety interacts with negative stereotypes about women’s abilities.

At Evergreen State College’s Tacoma Program in Washington state, faculty member Paul McCreary assigns students to write a “mini-memoir” of their experiences with math.

He estimates that, on average, 23 students out of a class of 25 enter not liking math. (That’s 92 percent, if you’re keeping track at home. In other words: a lot.)

“In the memoirs, I find: ‘I loved it until sixth grade and after that Mr. Hanrickhan made it impossible,’ ” says McCreary. “So they remember the name of the individual, and sometimes they describe the day that it happened.”

A turning point, that is, where “their interest and love of math fell away.”

Writing it all down helps students put their bad experiences in the past. It also demonstrates, to their instructor and to themselves, that the students have other skills.

“Math has been one of my biggest fears in life,” reads one mini-memoir from a women’s studies student. “I studied in an education system that said science and math are the important factors … and each student was analyzed and measured by their math and science grades.”

A social work student remembered changing schools when she was in fourth grade: “I would say that’s where my trouble in math stemmed from. I was not comfortable in my new school and didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or asking questions when I didn’t understand. I felt as if there were a few students [who] shined and the rest were left to fend for [themselves].”

McCreary, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree in education from Harvard, says he likes math, but what he loves “deeply” is “how one can actually rise above a feeling of not being able to do it and as a result being an unworthy person, which is how many of the students arrive here.”

His students, who are mainly adults, come from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. The program is specifically designed to serve a diverse population and to offer a rich educational experience while allowing flexibility to work around jobs, parenting and other demands.

What would you write in your math memoir? Email us at NPRed@npr.org.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2zK1gmd

Heat Making You Lethargic? Research Shows It Can Slow Your Brain, Too

Can’t cool off this summer? Heat waves can slow us down in ways we may not realize.

New research suggests heat stress can muddle our thinking, making simple math a little harder to do.

“There’s evidence that our brains are susceptible to temperature abnormalities,” says Joe Allen, co-director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. And as the climate changes, temperatures spike and heat waves are more frequent.

To learn more about how the heat influences young, healthy adults, Allen and his colleagues studied college students living in dorms during a summer heat wave in Boston.

Half of the students lived in buildings with central AC, where the indoor air temperature averaged 71 degrees. The other half lived in dorms with no AC, where air temperatures averaged almost 80 degrees.

“In the morning, when they woke up, we pushed tests out to their cellphones,” explains Allen. The students took two tests a day for 12 consecutive days.

One test, which included basic addition and subtraction, measured cognitive speed and memory. A second test assessed attention and processing speed.

“We found that the students who were in the non-air-conditioned buildings actually had slower reaction times: 13 percent lower performance on basic arithmetic tests, and nearly a 10 percent reduction in the number of correct responses per minute,” Allen explains.

The results, published in PLOS Medicine, may come as a surprise. “I think it’s a little bit akin to the frog in the boiling water,” Allen says. There’s a “slow, steady — largely imperceptible — rise in temperature, and you don’t realize it’s having an impact on you.”

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that documents the effect of heat on mental performance, both in schools and workplaces.

For instance, a 2006 study from researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that when office temperatures rise above the mid-70s, workers’ performance begins to drop off. Researchers reviewed multiple studies that evaluated performance on common office tasks. The study found that worker productivity is highest at about 72 degrees. When temperatures exceeded the mid-80s, worker productivity decreased by about 9 percent.

Another, more recent study compared worker performance in green-certified buildings and typical office buildings. They found a dip in cognitive function linked to conditions in the indoor environment, including higher indoor temperatures and poor lighting.

And, when it comes to performance in the classroom, a study funded by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program finds that taking a standardized test on a very hot day is linked to poorer performance. The study includes an analysis of test scores from students in New York City who take a series of high-school exams called the Regents Exams.

The author, R. Jisung Park, assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes that compared with a 72-degree day, “taking an exam on a 90◦F day leads to a 10.9 percent lower likelihood of passing a particular subject (e.g. Algebra), which in turn affects probability of graduation.”

There’s still a lot to learn about how our brains and bodies respond to heat. “We all tend to think we can compensate, we can do just fine” during heat waves says Allen. But he says the “evidence shows that the indoor temperature can have a dramatic impact on our ability to be productive and learn.”

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2uAO4Kg

Four Inquiry Qualities At The Heart of Student-Centered Teaching

If you have 20 minutes to give me I can make you healthier

You either make time for your health, or you make time for sickness... it's just a matter of time! Here's a 20-minute full-body, feel great workout you can do anytime, anywhere. Join me as I guide you through it.

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2L15ATm

5 Big Reasons Why You Need to Track Your Nutrition Intake

Tracking my food has become my BFF and has changed my body and life. I am happier and healthier than ever. I know it can be a great tool for you too!

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2L5FMEN

Make Sure You Do the Following to Avoid Painful Sports Injuries

Sports-related injuries normally happen as physical activities can be unpredictable. Learn how to prevent these forms of physical damage.

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2uvEAjr

How Social Studies Can Help Young Kids Make Sense of the World

7 Simple Steps to Eliminate Stress from Your Life

You already know that chronic stress is bad for you. You probably also know that stress increases your chance of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks. But do you know that cortisol - a hormone in your body - is largely responsible for stress in our bodies?

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2maie3m

If I help you move well, you’ll live better

When we go to the gym, the main focus is usually on losing weight or getting more toned and more fit in general. However, few of us concentrate on flexibility and mobility, and this is an extremely important aspect of general well-being, period. The more flexible and mobile you are, the healthier and fitter you will be throughout your life, particularly when you get older. Here are some quick and easy ways you can increase your flexibility and mobility. Here are 5 Ways to Improve Your Flexibility Alongside Your Fitness...

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor https://ift.tt/2N3xM4c

Inexpensive Kitchen Flooring Options

They say the kitchen is the heart of the home. So, if you’re designing your kitchen, think carefully about which kind of flooring you want. Here are bang for the buck options that you’ll surely like:

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

Vinyl Planks

You’ll be amazed by the quality and appearance of today’s vinyl planks, which closely resemble hardwood flooring. With vinyl planks, you don’t have to worry about scratches from furnishings and grit or stains from spills. With looks that mimic maple, cherry, and even reclaimed oak, there’s a cheap vinyl flooring option to enhance every kitchen style. Source: BHG

Plastic Laminate

Laminate has a rightful place among cheap kitchen flooring options, but it must be said that it’s not the most durable choice for this room. The hard resin surfaces of the planks are plenty scratch- and stain-resistant for kitchen traffic and abuse, but the seams between planks are vulnerable to water damage. A leaky dishwasher or forgotten spill can cause the planks to bulge along the edges, so you must be mindful of standing water, and avoid wet-mopping altogether. For a kitchen, choose a flooring designed to be moisture resistant.

That said, a laminate floating floor in the kitchen is a doable day-long project, and lots of people don’t seem to notice that it’s not really hard wood. If you’re willing to spend more, you might look into “water-resistant” laminate, which is guaranteed to resist standing water for a specified period (such as 24 hours).  Source: TheSpruce

Carpet Tiles

A fun and practical addition to the kitchen, carpet tiles can create customized rugs to add softness to work spaces or highlight eating areas. Choose from a variety of colors, patterns, and styles to produce any look. The backing inhibits mold and bacteria, and the tiles can be easily removed, rearranged, or replaced. Source: HGTV

You think carpet’s too difficult for a kitchen? It’s not. We got you covered! Call us for any of your carpet needs.

The post Inexpensive Kitchen Flooring Options appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.

from Curlys Carpet Repair https://ift.tt/2L89vtm

Grilled Teriyaki Mango Skewers

Will New Standards Improve Elementary Science Education?

How Struggling Readers Benefit When Teachers Receive Quality Coaching

Dark Chocolate Tahini No Bake Cookies

How to Boost Math Skills in the Early Grades

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

BERWYN, Ill. — In the last decade, educators have focused on boosting literacy skills among low-income kids in the hope that all children will read well by third grade. But the early-grade math skills of these same low-income children have not received equal attention. Researchers say many high-poverty kindergarten classrooms don’t teach enough math and the few lessons on the subject are often too basic. While instruction may challenge kids with no previous exposure to math, it is often not engaging enough for the growing number of kindergarteners with some math skills.

During the last school year, only 40 percent of fourth-graders nationwide scored at a proficient level in a nationwide math assessment. Even more alarming, just 26 percent of Hispanic students and 19 percent of African-American children tested proficient in fourth-grade math. That is significant because strong math skills are needed for some of the fastest growing jobs of the next decade and are requirements for many of the highest paying jobs. Understanding and being able to work with numbers “is a fundamental skill for success in almost any occupation you might choose,” said economist Greg J. Duncan of the University of California Irvine’s School of Education, whose research examines child poverty and education. “It leads to the analytic, higher-level thinking that’s increasingly important.”

One district that is steadily ratcheting up its achievement levels, with a focus this year on mathematics, is located in a small Chicago suburb. Two years ago, just 14 percent of third-graders in Berwyn North School District 98 — a high-poverty, mostly Hispanic school district about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago — were able to do grade-level math. That was the district’s first year taking the PARCC assessment, a college- and career-readiness test mandated by the state of Illinois, and the results were dismal, though not exactly surprising. “When we started here in 2012, our district was the lowest performing in math and reading of all the schools that feed into Morton West High School,” said Carmen Ayala, Berwyn North School District 98’s superintendent.

Ayala, the district’s first woman and first Latina in the top spot, rolled up her sleeves. “Turning this around isn’t something you can do during a couple of workshops,” said Ayala. “For us, the focus had to be on equity because our district is 96 percent children of color, but 90 percent of our teaching staff is white. It’s not just about teachers teaching. It’s how we recruit, how we use resources, how we conduct business in the district.”

Although Illinois adopted Common Core standards in 2010, Berwyn North, a kindergarten through eighth-grade district with 3,084 students, had not yet incorporated the standards when Ayala and her new assistant superintendent, Amy Zaher, were hired in 2012. “When I started, the consistent word was how inconsistent we were,” said Ayala.

Ayala and Zaher created a set of goals for fixing Berwyn North that included an entirely new, district-wide Common Core standards-based curriculum that aligned through each grade, fixing the district’s special education inclusion program, upgrading programs for English learners and better integrating technology into schools and classrooms.

These goals still guide the district today. “We’ve become laser-focused on these areas in order to really bring up the achievement levels,” said Ayala.

In a district where almost 30 percent of the students are learning English, these goals have meant a radical change in how math is taught in the early grades. Ayala said that before she took over, math lessons were basically one-size-fits-all, making it especially difficult for kids learning English to absorb what was being taught. “We needed to change how we’re teaching math, especially for our English-learners, so that we were paying attention to language development and communication skills — how our teachers are helping our students express themselves and connect their experiences with what they were learning,” said Ayala.

This connected closely to the common core mandate that children learn to discuss their thinking about math problems, and to approach problem-solving in a variety of ways, rather than simply producing the correct answer. One way the district is applying this standard is via “number talks,” a math practice that encourages students to discuss and critique math solutions, helping kids develop into flexible and creative mathematical thinkers.

On a recent spring day, Maritza Cleary’s third-grade class at the district’s Prairie Oak Elementary School tackled math pictographs. Children sat together in small groups at tables and on the floor with large sheets of paper and markers spread out between them. Cleary was not the only adult in the room: Four adults — teachers and administrators from the district there to observe Prairie Oak teachers at work — meandered between the groups, scrawling notes onto clipboards, sometimes kneeling beside the children to listen as they worked out the problem.

A pictograph query, a way of showing information using images, was projected onto a whiteboard at the front of the class:

“Mrs. Cleary is having a last-day-of-school ice cream party for her third grade class. She did a survey to find out what flavor each student preferred. There were 10 votes for chocolate, eight votes for vanilla, four votes for strawberry, and three votes for coconut. Use the information from the survey to create a pictograph that shows the preferred ice cream flavors. Create an ice cream symbol for your pictograph that represents two students.”

Students quietly discussed possible solutions, and sketched out ideas on small dry-erase boards before drawing their solutions on the poster-size sheets of paper. Cleary pulled a chair close to a group, listening intently as her students debated the ideal ice cream cone data layout strategy — an opportunity to flex their math skills and, in the process, become stronger communicators and mathematicians.

Shortly after this classroom visit, 30 teachers and administrators who had spent the day visiting the school’s classrooms — including the four adults who observed Cleary’s class — sipped coffee and nibbled pastries in a windowless conference room in the basement of the school. It was the second and final instructional round of the school year at Prairie Oak (the first was last fall). Instructional rounds, modeled after medical rounds, are an opportunity for educators to observe classroom instruction, and then address problems together in an effort to improve their teaching. This year, the district’s instructional rounds focused on the quality and depth of math instruction.

At this Prairie Oak session, educators looked for improvements on math-related issues identified last fall during the school’s first instructional round. Were teachers working more closely with instructional coaches? Were lessons rigorous enough? Was classroom management stronger? Were students willing to take risks? In a post-rounds wrap-up session, teachers and administrators discussed positive growth, including greater student participation and more productive math talks between students. The group also noted areas requiring improvement: Teachers needed to use classroom wall space to better promote mathematical thinking, for example, and they needed to step back more frequently to allow students to work out their own creative solutions.

Instructional rounds, first brought to the district by Assistant Superintendent Zaher, who learned the practice at her previous job as a Chicago Public Schools administrator, are clearly an effort to unite a formerly disjointed, low-achieving school district around a common vision — 100 percent of students meeting high academic standards — and, importantly, to adopt a cohesive curriculum, connected grade-to-grade and school-to-school.

That push for a common, connected curriculum also includes what happens before, and during, kindergarten. Until recently, researchers believed that instilling strong foundational math skills before children enter kindergarten was the best predictor of success in school and life. For those children who missed out on a quality preschool experience, especially poor children of color, catching up in the elementary years was considered unlikely. Today, this thinking is evolving, putting into question just how permanent the advantage may be for children who benefit from rich math curriculums in high-quality preschools. The reason: The early-math boost tends to fade out once children enter elementary school classrooms where teachers often focus on helping students who did not benefit from preschool prep, neglecting to teach more advanced skills to the advanced learners.

Last year, 43 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Guam, poured $7.6 billion into publicly funded preschool. In the past few years, researchers have begun exploring how to take advantage of that powerful preschool bump, especially in math, while also ensuring students who didn’t go to preschool could catch up. One of the biggest roadblocks, experts say, is the disconnect between preschool and elementary school math curriculums.

UC Irvine’s Duncan, co-author of a seminal study linking early math and reading skills with later academic success, noted that recent research using strong math curriculums in preschool or Head Start programs showed it is possible to level the math-skills playing field among low-income and middle-class children in the early grades.

The weak spot occurs once kids enter elementary school and kindergarten teachers become absorbed with teaching students who don’t yet know their numbers. “There’s really not much point [to high-quality preschool] if we don’t work on this task of aligning kindergarten and first-grade classrooms — setting them up to take advantage of the skills built up in the preschool year,” said Duncan. “If most children benefit from preschool or Head Start before heading to [a] kindergarten where teachers are skilled, and coached and supported to build on those gains, then you’ve got a situation for low-income kids that’s on par with middle- or upper-middle-class kids who come into kindergarten knowing their letters and numbers and teachers just take off from there.”

Another neglected area contributing to the national math achievement gap, is the lack of math emphasis at home. “Parents focus on reading to their child much more than they do on math skills. We’ve not been very successful so far in convincing parents — as we have with reading — to ‘count with your child’, ” noted Deborah Stipek of the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

In Berwyn North District 98, math scores are steadily creeping upward. Last year, 33 percent of Hispanic third-graders met or exceeded math grade-level expectations on the PARCC test — nearly double the percentage from 2015. Berwyn North recently turned another stat on its head: Of the four districts that feed into the local high school, Berwyn went from dead-last to leading the pack in both math and reading achievement.

This story about early math instruction is part of a series about innovative practices in the core subjects in the early grades. Read about reading, science and social studies. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

 

from MindShift https://ift.tt/2KKQjFR

Puppy Love

Oh Shih Tzu! How cute are these puppies?! I made these for my mom’s birthday this week. She’s been wanting me to turn her little puppy pie into a cake pop and I finally attempted them this past weekend. Surprisingly, they ended up being way easier than I thought they would be.

But first I needed reference so I made a quick pencil sketch of the sweet little baby face in question.

And because I wanted to get as close to her likeness as possible, I worked the sizing out on the computer starting with different size circles. I took a picture of my sketch and emailed to myself to lay over the circles in a graphics program called Indesign. The faces are slightly larger than the circles to allow for the size increase when the round cake balls are dipped in candy coating. Once I had all the sizes, I picked the one that would work best with the sprinkles I had on hand.

In this case, black sugar pearls for eyes, brown rainbow chip sprinkles for noses and pink confetti sprinkles for tongues.

Now to make the cake pops. First mix crumbled cake and frosting together and then roll into balls based on the size you need.

Here are my basic cake pop instructions if you need them.

Once I had the starting size, I used the puppy drawing as a guide to hand shape the puppy heads. Just lay a sheet of wax paper over your reference and shape the cake ball to fit. I also used a lollipop stick to press holes into the shaped cake balls where the eyes would be. I did this for reference after they are dipped.

The slight impression helps me know where to quickly place the sugar pearls for eyes because you want to do this while the candy coating is still wet.

Then place the rainbow chip sprinkle in position for the nose and the confetti sprinkle in position for the tongue. (You could do these two steps after the candy coating sets by attaching them with a dot of melted coating, but the eyes look better if they are inset into the coating slightly as opposed to sitting on top of the surface if that makes sense.)

Holy Shih Tzu. The before and after. Now let me show you how easy it is to go from one to the other.

This is all done with toothpicks and a little time. Start with the mustache and eyebrows area and dip your toothpick in coating and draw on the pop to build up dimension. Do all your pops and let them dry before layering on more as needed. Fill in around the nose and overlap the top of the confetti sprinkle. Then just keep drawing on lines of coating with the toothpick. Once you’ve built the face up to look like your pup, then apply more coating with a toothpick on the sides for floppy ears. Let dry.

And if you have a little Maltese, you could stop right here. : )

But my mom’s Shih Tzu has black markings like a little mask. This is the fun part.

All you need is a black edible ink pen. Maybe two if you are making a bunch. Just use the pen to draw on top of the pop mimicking your dog’s markings as much as possible.

(These are Americolor Gourmet Writers and you can get them in brown if you need them, too.)

Usually when I use these pens I recommend drawing on the surface very lightly like use a paint brush, because when you press down too hard, the candy coating can start to clog the pen.

But for these pups, I like how it looks when the pen is not solid black. It helps give the illusion of different shades of black hair. So I wasn’t as worried about the pen clogging up.

And if draw too much on, you can use a toothpick to gently scrape some of it away.

Look at these little baby boos. To finish the look, just dot the eyes with more of the melted white candy coating.

I’m so happy with how cute they turned out.

And … they’re puppy approved! Sweet little Sugar Pie loved them. And my mom did, too!

Enjoy!

from bakerella.com https://ift.tt/2zjWpYr