Teacher Burnout

Summer is the time for teachers to regroup, rethink, refresh, and relax. What causes people to burnout in their occupations and how can you stop it? The year-round school concept hopes to solve that by giving more regular breaks throughout the year. A support group of teachers can help. This article gives some great ideas for you.

Teacher Stress Burnout

How can you use this?

Live streaming is a great addition to any classroom. Here is a video from one of my favorite Geeks, Luria Petrucci (Cali Lewis).  It is called Periscope Live Streaming Mobile App. Watch and see for yourself.

Using all your resources--even movies

We have a society who watches movies--lots of them. So why not use that resource for lessons in the classroom? We all have movies that have touched us in a positive or negative way, emotionally or intellectually. Probably, everyone has a favorite movie from childhood or a movie you have watched many times. This article recommends just that.

Lessons from Movies

So the question is: do you have to provide popcorn in class to use a movie lesson?

What makes for good technology-enabled personalized learning?

This article is interesting but really shouldn't be anything new for us.

Personal Learning Guide

Here are the needed ingredients to make learning work:

1. The right usage of data - continual evaluation of how students are doing, what their needs are and what do they prefer? Many students, for example, do not like online textbooks.
2. Content and curriculum - This, of course, is the base for any class.
3. Research and development - Stay up on what is working in education and what is not. 
4. Human capacity - What can students handle as far as technology and when is it better not to use it?
5. Technology architecture - This, of course, must be in place for everything else to work.

This report was presented by North Carolina State University's' Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. This group does some awesome MOOCs!

Education--not offered fairly in this country

With recent police prejudice cases against blacks, we should be concerned about the raw deal many black students are getting for their education. There are people out there calling for reform. This TED video is one of them. It presents some alarming facts to consider.

Technology Connects the World

I was moved by this TED video titled: The Lady Lifers: A moving song from women in prison for life. Wow--the world of social media has allowed us to share with the lives of women we would never interact with in any other way. Technology brings us together and allows us to share with a variety of people from all walks of life. What do we do with all the connectedness?

Collaboration Overload

The Internet has provided so much information that we never lack for facts about a subject. As a teacher, there is no lack of sites to go to in order to listen to great ideas about how to make your classroom teaching better. There is no doubt about this. But how does a teacher manage to go to all these sites and still have time to prepare the lessons needed for tomorrow's class as well as grade the lessons from yesterday? It is truly a difficult place for teachers! Even if all schools went to year-round school giving longer breaks through the year rather than a block of 3 months in the summer, teachers also need a break from teaching and learning to just be a normal human being and be with their families. Was the one-room school house really that bad?

With all this in mind, here is a virtual conference held May 8 and 9 by Google. The Education on Air is another great tool to stay at home and learn. Thanks, Google, for all the help to become a great educator! Can you now find us the time to watch these presentations?