Teaching Tips
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Look, It’s Me! – Making Our Students Visible in Print
I taught in Northern Ontario on a First Nation Reservation. It was pretty much at the top of the map of Ontario. There were no roads into this community. The only way to get there was to fly on a little charter plane and land on a dirt runway. In the winter, you could drive…
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Why You Should Always Ask for Advice
This is a great video to share with your students. I know many students who are afraid to ask questions in class. They stay quiet and struggle with their work, or worse yet, they don’t do the work at all. It’s always best to build a culture of learning in the classroom that allows our…
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8 Online Tools for Students and Educators
Someone approached me and asked to contribute a guest post for my Teaching Tip Tuesday series. Over the years, I have had some great tips submitted from readers all over the globe. I found out that this latest one though was a thinly veiled attempt at self promotion. Even worse that that, it linked to…
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Schools Can Be So Much Greener
When we think of the cost of school, we rarely think of the buildings themselves. It is important to remember that they have both a financial cost and an environmental one. Energy Use “School buildings are the third biggest energy users. A mid-size school district may spend $1 million yearly on energy, a number that…
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Harriet’s Big Adventure (Children’s Book Review)
Harriet’s Big Adventure by Glenn S. Guiles and Raymond J. Whalen Guiles is a fellow educator who believes in the power of a good story to enrich the lives of children and to help them learn. To that end, he has crafted a series of picture books featuring a miniature donkey by the name of…
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Shake it Up in the Classroom
There are all sorts of things you can do to shake things up in your classroom. But teachers are expected to have a certain level of decorum. That is why I included the first item in this post. From there, it gets interesting. So, read on! Dress Appropriately I think teachers should dress appropriately for school.…
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Teachers are Such Failures
“It seems everybody is piling on teachers right now. We have become fashionable targets.” People aren’t going to understand what we do. We will always face criticism and negative comments. “Honestly, I don’t let it bother me and you shouldn’t either.” Take Risks Knowing this, it might seem easier to play it safe. I know…
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Movie Making in the Classroom
Can it really be this easy to create a free green screen? Apparently, all you need is green butcher paper and iMovie. I don’t have any experience using green screens but I am definitely intrigued! April Kreitzer tried it out and wrote a nice tutorial here if you’d like to learn more. I like the idea…
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Education Outside the Curriculum – A Guide for Teachers
An efficient teacher is the one who opens up the box of creativity and innovation and allows the students to indulge in something totally novel and different. Merely sticking to the curriculum and instructing students from the highlighted box is not at all a competent option. The process of teaching is not at all limited…
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Rita – My New Favourite Show
Rita is a brilliant television series from Denmark that is now available on Netflix. It’s the first foreign language show that I have ever watched. You need to turn on the subtitles, but it is well worth the effort. This is one of my favourite scenes from Season One. The story revolves around the school’s…