Keep Your Students On The Hook: Subject Them To Random Choice

When you call on a student who has raised her hand to answer your question, you might be signalling to other students that they don't need to think when you ask questions in class.

Why? When we ask a question in class, we want all our students to think about an answer.  But if we routinely call on students who volunteer information, then other students quickly learn that they can let their more eager peers do the thinking for them.  They just have to wait it out.  And just 'cold-calling' kids out of the blue may catch a few kids who weren't thinking, but it won't necessarily make your whole class think.

But we can up the stakes for the whole class by deliberately calling on students randomly.  And there's a Notebook tool that does the grunt work for us:  it's called the Random Word Chooser.

An Easy Way To Add Urgency + Focus: Explode Something

There's nothing like a deadline to focus our attention.  How many of us have become incredibly efficient at 3:00am, the night before a paper was due in our college English class? How many athletes have pushed themselves beyond what they thought possible in the last seconds of a close game?

You can create 'mini-deadlines' in your class for students that will help them focus and work efficiently for small bursts -- just use a timer.  This is an excellent way to set clear boundaries around many classroom tasks -- transitions, journal writes, group work, etc.

Why go electronic?  After all, teachers have used egg timers and stopwatches effectively to organize time in their classroom for years.  But the advantage of a timer on your computer is that you can project it large enough so all students can see it and know exactly where they stand.  They can monitor their own progress.

You can use any of the 3 SMART Notebook timers that are already on your computer.

Your Students Can Get Expert Help at 10:00 At Night

A student, Heather, came to see me in the library, extremely excited about an online tutoring service called Tutor.com. She was working on it as we talked -- chatting back and forth with an unseen, online geometry tutor ("Mark I"), who led her through a proof, drawing figures, circling important aspects on her screen, and prompting her to think with questions.  It was a remarkable interaction.

However, this sort of access is a bit pricey -- for $1200 a year, students can have online access to a tutor for a maximum of three hours per month.

But how incredible would that be if all of our students could have instant live tutoring, as long as they needed, in any subject?  

Well, it turns out they can.  For free.

The Metaphor That Ate A City: How Figurative Language Is More Persuasive Than Political Ideology

Is crime a virus, or a beast?

We all like to think that we respond primarily to facts and statistics when we're analyzing controversial problems, but some recent research suggests that we don't -- and that we're much more swayed by figurative language, even when we think we're responding to cold, hard facts.

In fact, the use of a metaphor to frame a problem seems to affect how we diagnose and solve the problem even more strongly than our own self-professed political ideologies.

Tech + Teaching Tip: Search Smarter

Most of us use Google all the time.  And use it badly.

What Would You See If You Could Speed Up Human History?

Want to see human populations grow like bacteria in a petri dish?

Melissa Lewis shared this great video with me, and I thought I'd pass it on (though in her incarnation here she teaches English, she used to teach History in Yuma):

Population Connection: World Population

A Good Kindergarten Teacher Is Worth $320,000 Per Year

Wiese, Brent. Class Adventure. Digital image. SunGecko. 17 May 2007. Web. 3 Oct. 2011.

What's a good teacher worth?

We've always known that teachers, especially kindergarten and early childhood ed teachers, were not paid what they were really worth, to their kids and society at large -- but we still probably underestimated the worth of a good teacher.

A 'standout' kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 per year if you add up the lifetime benefits for her students.