Steampunk Across The Curriculum
By Phil Nast February 12, 2013 9:39 am
I was too young to see Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954) in a theater. I saw it first in B&W on Disney’s hour-long TV show. I saw it in color only after I bought a VHS copy for …
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Homework — what works and what doesn’t
By Phil Nast February 7, 2013 10:07 am
One year during a parent conference, an angry mother threatened to shoot a fellow teacher. Her daughter chased a sub around the room wielding a clarinet like a club. I had a girl in sixth grade two years in a …
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Mathematics and Snow
By Phil Nast February 5, 2013 10:50 am
Just before Christmas 2005, a radio I’d left playing in a back room shorted out and started a fire. Fortunately, I was home. Though most of the damage was caused by smoke, the room needed to be gutted, which exposed …
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Video Games: The Good, The Bad, The Utility
By Phil Nast January 17, 2013 9:40 am
When my son first started playing video games, I was unsettled. Gaming is sedentary, the imagery often grotesquely violent, the activity a time-sucker. In the end, one consideration outweighed my misgivings: childhood has enough trials without adding pop-culture cluelessness, take …
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ASL and Hearing Students
By Phil Nast January 8, 2013 10:07 am
My youngest daughter was in no hurry to begin talking. Maybe it was because she had an older sister who did the talking for her. (and occasionally still does much to her sister’s annoyance) It was probably developmental. My youngest …
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How Tall Is That Tree? Practical Math
By Phil Nast January 3, 2013 3:17 pm
I taught in a school district at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers. Remains of ancient Hopewell mounds remained in the town, though many of the structures there when the area was first settled as part of the …
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Sledding and Physics
By Phil Nast December 6, 2012 10:04 am
It’s almost time to take the toboggan down from the garage rafters. My son is like Calvin. Any snow is enough snow. I hope for enough snow to cover the bracken on our favorite hillside. Any less than full cover …
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Making Holiday Ornaments with Students
By Phil Nast November 27, 2012 10:16 am
One Christmas we decided to make tree ornaments as gifts and bought a sheet of 1/4” plywood and spent hours cutting out simple trees with a jigsaw. We sprayed them dark green and used brushes to add festoons of popcorn …
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“Poorer and less served schools need the best teachers”
By Pat Byrne November 19, 2012 10:37 am
I’m in the middle of my ninth year teaching, and all nine years have been at Wheaton Woods Elementary School in Rockville, MD. I’ve taught 4th grade general ed; 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade accelerated math; 1st and 4th …
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Drive: What Makes Students Want to Learn?
By Phil Nast November 16, 2012 9:44 am
The other day, I watched an animated mini-lecture about motivation on the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) website. The lecture was called Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. The speaker, Daniel …
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Teach This! Teaching with lesson plans and ideas that rock 02/25/2013
Grades 4-5 Student Center Activities: Literature (CCSS) The Florida Center for Reading Research has created an incredibly useful set of downloadable activities aligned to common core standards for fourth and fifth grade students. If you're teaching reading, you'll want to …
Get a distance away and start a new habit today.
"Every now and then, go away, take a little relaxation, because when you come back to your work, your judgement will be surer. To remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgement. Go some distance away, …
Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 02/25/2013
achievethecore.org / Steal These Tools Free tools for implementing common core standards in the US. tags: education news free common core K4STEMLAB | Fueling students' love of learning through Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (S.T.E.M.) at Northfield Elementary School I …
Teach This! Teaching with lesson plans and ideas that rock 02/24/2013
ICTs in Science Education - GIS.GPS Virtual Field Trips Geocaching and GPS are important parts of today's nature-based field trips. This is a useful website for this. Of course, now many of us are using smart phones for this capability …
Don’t Click ‘Share’ To Save A Copy of My Shared Google Docs
It's good to know many teachers are getting use out of the documents I've shared on Google Drive. I know this because I get an email every time someone clicks Share…, because that button is a bit misleading. When
Even Oscar Winners Want to Matter
We continue to develop the infrastructure for Choose2Matter, busily preparing a re-launch this spring. This week, we’ll launch a fund-raising campaign to support the Quest to Matter, a five-week program that will launch on April 15, in which K-12 students …
18 Ways to Secure Parent Permission to Use Technology
Child Art Aged 4.5 Person 1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia…) Get parent permission for artwork, photographs, and use of technology. Here are some samples to get you started. Many of you have asked for permission form samples, so here is
First World Education Problems in Detroit (Part II, Catherine Ferguson Academy)
School closing protests--a first-world ed-problem, if there ever was one--are everywhere these days. In crumbling rust-belt urban centers and leafy suburbs, we're closing, consolidating, belt-tightening. It's hard to argue with population migration--Detroit lost a quarter of its citizens in …
“I Apologize”:An Open letter to My Students!
Dear Kids, I am sorry. I am sorry that, yet again, I am placing another test (or assessment if you like using big words) on your desk. I am sorry that I am, again, forcing you to take another test.…
Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 02/23/2013
Virtual Participants for Flat Classroom Conference 2013 Japan - Sign up Here The Flat Classroom conference is coming up March 7-10. We have an option for receiving credit (if you're international) and also for full participation. Virtual participants are an …
