Languages, ICT, education

Edutopia blogger Vicki Davis asks her students for professional development help, ending the year with in-class focus groups, a survey, and a call for anonymous notes that will guide her in improving her practice next year.

Vicki Davis: I thought I could read my students' body language. I was wrong. As an experiment, I used Socrative when I taught binary numbers. What I learned forever changed my views on being a better teacher.

With tools like Socrative, Kahoot, Zaption, Chatzy, and Plickers, teachers can use tech for immediate feedback about how students are learning and understanding the lesson. ...

Teacher feedback must be informative and encouraging for students to fully understand whether they're learning and what they can do to improve the learning process.

A backchannel -- a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face-to-face activity -- provides students with an outlet to engage in conversation. Every time I think about this tool, I remember my student, Charlie (not his real name). Given his learning challenges, he struggled to keep up during class discussions. Long after his classmates grasped a concept, he would light up in acknowledgement and then become crestfallen as he had no way to share his revelation. Charlie needed an alternative means to participate, and a backchannel would have provided him with that outlet.

Providing timely and effective feedback on student work is a critical component to any classroom. As students increasingly operate and create in a digital environment, emerging tools provide unique new opportunities for teachers to provide feedback on both written work and video projects.   Feedback on Written Work With the increased adoption of Google Apps …

Discover why every teacher should be giving feedback in this easy-to-read feedback infographic.

Evidence based teaching strategies have a far larger effect on student results than others do. Discover the top ten, evidence based teaching strategies in this article.

Peer observations seem to be both under-valued and unwelcomed.  Are we as teachers simply protecting our oversized egos from being judged in our own classrooms? ...

Kim Hoffman Kanof: "You know the feeling--that “gotta-get-this-grading-done” robotic trance. The blinding feeling of grading close to 180 essays. The guilt of balancing meaningful feedback without taking three weeks to do it.I have graded essays for years. I have tried all the tricks to get through my stacks of essays.

Google scripts and add-ons to Google Drive drastically changed my approach to giving writing feedback. ..."

During the summer, you'll want to improve your teaching and lessons, but how do you decide where to start? Your students! 

 Submitted by: Anita Swigart - English Teacher from Ohio You've heard the question, "Why can't my students write?"  It seems that question is being universally asked.  However, the answer is less universal.  Some would like to blame it on too much t

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Socrative is designed in such a way to help teachers make classes more engaging and interactive.It also helps teachers initiate activities and prompt students with questions to which students can respond using their laptops or smartphones. .