Tips For Education

Consistent and relevant parent communication is essential for a good school year. Luckily, there are many great tools that make communicating with parents relatively easy. First, Remind101 provides a free and safe way for teachers to communicate with students and parents. After signing up for a free account, you create your classes. Remind101 then  provides you with a phone number and a separate code for each class. Parents and students simply send a text message with the code to the number given by Remind101. They are then subscribed to any messages you send out for that class. Parents and students can also signup for email updates, but this is not as obvious. If you click on the print button on the left hand side of the screen, it will create a PDF with the instructions for signing up for text messages and email messages. Now you are ready to send out alerts to parents and students. Just click on a class, type a message, and then hit send. It is blasted out to everyone who is subscr

One of the goals set out in the Common Core standards is to make students better and more discerning listeners. More specifically, the standards require students to "Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric" (CCRA.SL.3). This standard considered in isolation can appear daunting. Put in exaggerated terms, it would require a regular round of speakers invited into the classroom and/or a heavy dose of student presentations. Both of these options are important in developing students' listening skills, but neither can happen on a consistent enough basis to provide the repeated practice students need to master this standard. But students can receive a steady diet of engaging presentations through online resources like  TED.com  and  iTunes U . In addition, when videos from these online resources are embedded into units focused on Big Ideas or Big Questions, students are motivated  to do the hard work it takes to delineate a speaker'