Teaching Tips
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Teaching Tip – Games
Welcome to Teaching Tip Tuesday! Every week I share with you a tip that I hope you will find useful in your teaching. You can visit the Teaching Tips Archive to see all of the tips in the order I have posted them over the years. Please check that page as I will continue to…
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We Need to Teach Online Safety and Etiquette
This is a great infographic that I plan on sharing with my students this week. I like how it encourages parents and teachers to join Facebook. I really think we need to be using the same sites and teaching responsible posting and netiquette. It’s pretty hard to do that if we don’t partake in social…
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How Music Can Inspire and Increase Ambition in the Classroom
The power of music can inspire anyone to do great things, or easily draw emotions to create despair. Music can alter the frame of mind in nearly any individual regardless of how they may feel at that particular time. It is the reason that Hollywood includes sound tracks into movies and television. It is a…
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Writing Rap Songs With Students
This is the fourth lesson in my unit on Rap Music. In this lesson, I set the parameters of the rap songwriting assignment, I share a few examples of rap songs, and then I put the students into groups and have them start writing. You can download the Smartboard file of this lesson for free…
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Making Rap Beats with Students
This is the third lesson in my unit on rap music. Today, we are looking at creating a drum beat using a simple and free drum machine that can be easily downloaded. There are several of these programs that you can use. I used Hammerhead simply because it was already installed on our school computers.…
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A Lesson Plan on the Structure of Rap Songs
This lesson looks at the structure of rap songs and gets the students writing their first rhymes. You can download this Smartboard lesson for free and have some fun in your music class. Rap is pretty much based around groups of 4. Here you see a basic drum pattern with the kick, snare, kick, snare.…
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Ice T’s Rap School (Lesson Plan)
Ice T went to a prestigious prep school in New York and taught a group of kids who literally knew nothing about rap music and hip-hop culture, how to write and perform their own rap song. The best thing about the whole experience is that it was filmed for a television series on VH1 back in…
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Failure is Often the First Step in the Learning Process
Tony Hawk is the greatest skateboarder the world has ever seen. But he didn’t get there without some pain, hard work, and lots of effort. He recently posted this on Facebook and I think it serves as food for thought. In everything we do, there is a learning curve. Tony Hawk didn’t fail with this…
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To Flip or Not to Flip (Is a Flipped Classroom the Way to Go?)
What exactly is a “Flipped Classroom?” Why do I keep coming across this term from different blogs and articles I am reading? Is this something I should try to do? These are all questions I have been asking myself over the past few weeks as I have been coming across the term “flipped classroom” more…
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School Struggles – An Interview with Dr. Selznick
Chase: “All right everybody, this is Chase March. I have Dr. Richard Selznick on the phone right now, author of School Struggles: A Guide to Your Shut-Down Learner’s Success. It’s quite the read. I underlined passages and took all sorts of notes as I read it. As a teacher, I think it is important for…