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Ideas, reflections, and links from a 3rd grade teacher in a 1:1 environment
BetterLesson.com: Want $30K?
I recently received an interesting email from BetterLesson.com. Although, as a third-grade math teacher, I don’t qualify for their offer, I thought I’d pass this along to others who might be interested: Dear Mark, Join The Master Teacher Project! BetterLesson has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to scale the successes of some […]
Posted in: Common Core
How Children Succeed
September 17, 2012
Has anyone out there read How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character yet? I am pretty excited about this book — it talks about the biological effects of both poverty and unrelenting home life stresses on children. It also makes it clear that (A) character development matters more than test scores, […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
Math Facts Made Simple
September 12, 2012
I love the new intro video over at TheMathFacts.com! If you missed my previous post about it, themathfacts.com is designed to replace paper/pencil timed tests and to motivate students to have fun while learning their basic math facts. It features 25 different varieties of timed tests to choose from, it automatically tracks students’ scores and […]
Posted in: Math, math facts
“Closing the gap” should NOT be the goal
August 2, 2012
Today, the State of Michigan released a new list of “focus” schools meant to punish those schools whose top 30% of students greatly outperform their lowest 30% of students on the official state standardized test. Let’s think about the absurdity of that for a moment: Schools with diverse student populations, especially socioeconomically, will be overrepresented […]
Practicing Math Facts Online
July 24, 2012
This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, where I talked about my four-month journey creating www.themathfacts.com. As a third grade 1:1 teacher (meaning that I have a class set of computers available for use whenever needed), I believe that technology can do amazing things in the classroom. Math, however, might be the one subject […]
I’m Done Giving Paper/Pencil Timed Tests
July 23, 2012
After 14 years of teaching, I have finally found the solution to one of the biggest annoyances of my third grade math classroom: paper/pencil basic math fact timed tests. Before I describe the solution, though, here’s what has annoyed me in the past about these tests. They take too much class time. Although the timed […]
Consumptive Technology vs. Creative Technology
May 21, 2012
One of the arguments I hear from time to time against the expansion of 1:1 technology in the classroom is that too much technology will turn students into passive learners who have their eyes glued to a screen all day. I think it’s helpful, therefore, to consider the difference between consumptive technology vs. creative technology. […]
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December 16, 2012
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