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How Interactive Play Can Improve Academic Performance

As the pressure to perform academically rises with each passing school year, students are seeing less time in their days for movement and physical activity. Teacher accountability for student test scores is at an all-time high — making it difficult to allow the creative play time researchers insist is important to developing minds. Finding creative ways to allow kids some physical freedom but keep them on academic tasks is something most teachers really try to do — but it comes with challenges. One innovative concept that I recently learned more about is from MotionMagix™, a company that has developed an Interactive …

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6 Best Practices for Internal Communication in Public Schools

Written by Eric Walters and Karen Gerberry Internal communication may be more important than many think. 42% of communication is  delivered   through   other   people.  Whether  it  is  information   needing  to  be communicated  to  teachers,  students  or  administration  a  student  success  is highly dependent on the frequency and quality of communication. Successful communication between teachers and parents is most common in schools with well-informed, effective educators. Schools, realizing this, have implemented practices to communicate valuable information within their school systems. What are some of these strategies and what benefits do they provide to these school districts? Developing New Policies School systems …

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K-12 Online Learning as a Life Skill

Online learning is more than a fad. The facts are staggering: According to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, there are nearly 1.9 million K-12 enrollments in online courses every school year, up from under 50,000 in 2000. The current number does not even include students enrolled in primarily online schools. Thirty-one states have full-time online schools that serve on a statewide basis. The top reason that districts give for offering online options is for credit recovery, with 81 percent of urban schools citing this reason. Are online courses really equal to ones in the classroom though? It really …

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Education Should Begin with Problem-Solving

When schools compete, who wins? That depends partly on how they compete. In the world of higher education, universities compete for enrollment: more students, and more funding. They compete for prestige: better students, and more acclaimed faculty. They compete for funding: more research, more graduate students. Do they ever compete to solve real world problems. It is easy, amid all the competition for these benchmarks, to forget that the mission of any school–university or otherwise–should be to solve problems, and to teach students to do the same. Solving Problems, or Hogging the Spotlight? You can see the difference when it …

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Cheating and Technology – Unethical Indifference

Academic dishonesty is nothing new. As long as there have been homework assignments and tests, there have been cheaters. The way that cheating looks has changed over time though, particularly now that technology has made it easier than ever. Perhaps the most interesting caveat of modern-day cheating in U.S. classrooms is that students often do not think that what they are doing is wrong. A study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics interviewed 23,000 high school students and asked them a variety of questions about academic ethics. Of the teens surveyed, 51 percent said that they had knowingly cheated at …

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Diversity at College Level Bolstered by Online Offerings

Each year online learning initiatives becomes less of a fringe movement and more of an incorporated, and accepted, form of education. More than 6.7 million people took at least one online class in the fall of 2011 and 32 percent of college students now take at least one online course during their matriculation. It is even becoming commonplace for high schools to require all students to take an online class before graduation as a way to prep them for the “real world” of secondary education. The flexibility and convenience of online learning is well known but what is not as …

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6 Strategies for Creating a Nurturing Classroom for Your LGBT Students

As a teacher, odds are that you will have at least one student who is gay or lesbian in your classroom. Regardless of how you feel about the LGBT community, as a teacher you have an ethical duty to protect and nurture all of your students. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create a nurturing environment for your LGBT students. Here are several strategies that you can use to accomplish this: 1. Let all of your students know that they are protected in your classroom. No bullying or harassment will be allowed, no matter what. This …

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Strategies for Seamlessly Integrating Technology into Your Classroom

Words like “technology,” “digital devices,” and “modern media” sound flashy and attractive. Of course teachers want to have those buzzwords in the classroom! But when it comes from moving to virtual reality to concrete curriculum, what does introducing technology in the classroom actually look like? What do all those buzzwords really mean? Technology-focused education is based on a constructivist approach to learning. As described earlier, the teacher in a technologically advanced classroom is seen as a facilitator rather than a pure instructor. A teacher’s function is to help students use the technological resources appropriately to find the information rather than …

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Closing the achievement gap using iPads

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding a P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.** By Kristi Meeuwse, ADE Where’s the Beef? Show me the money! What’s the bottom line? In today’s results-oriented, data-driven mentality in education, we all fall under the large accountability umbrella of test scores. Certainly, there are skeptics who question putting iPads in the hands of young children. It is asked, “How can we justify …

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3 Drawbacks of Bringing Tech to the Classroom

As much progress as technology can help a classroom make, it isn’t always a positive force. There are some drawbacks to trying to introduce technology into classrooms, even when the implementation is done in the most thoughtful and well planned out of ways. Most dramatic shifts in how humans act and interact are accompanied by difficulties, especially at the outset. Though these difficulties may not outweigh the benefits of the new paradigm, they are nevertheless real. Technology in schools is no exception. Here are some of the problems associated with technology: Technical difficulties. We all have memories of a teacher …

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