This is the third post about teachers using Google Earth to enhance student engagement with learning. Students are put in charge of creating content to help build context and perspective about any topic they want to study. Before you as the teacher can start a project or lesson, it is important to learn some basic […]
Read more "Google Earth navigation hacks"This post will be broken up in to several different posts to get you started with the basics of Google Earth. There is a lot of information and it sometimes feels overwhelming but some there are only a few simple buttons and commands that you really need. I will illustrate each of them to show […]
Read more "Getting ready to teach with Google Earth"The case for Pass/Fail in Secondary Schools When my wife told me that most medical schools in the US are pass/fail, I was dumbstruck. “What do you mean?”, I asked incredulously. How could the smartest people in the country take their classes pass/fail? Wouldn’t they just start skipping class since there was no more competition? […]
Read more "What’s wrong with the A-F grading policy."Google Earth. You heard of it way back in 2006 when it first launched. Odds are that you probably even found your house on it and maybe even played the flight simulator that is built in. What you haven’t realized is that Google Earth is one of the single most powerful teaching tools for social […]
Read more "Why Google Earth is so awesome for teachers."I had a quick thought this afternoon. Have you ever noticed that some teachers are afraid to leave their class alone even when they, the teacher, are getting annoyed and upset? I just realized that new parents do the same thing with screaming infants. They try anything to soothe and quiet the baby. Pleading, rocking, […]
Read more "A class is sometimes like a crying infant"It is so hard to get out of our classrooms these days. With the amount of grading, planning, meeting, and TEACHING that teachers accomplish on a daily basis it is no wonder that once you enter your classroom at 6:30am, you might only leave it to go to the bathroom around noon. These expectations seem […]
Read more "Why you need to visit another classroom"A few years ago the school I was teaching at started using Google Docs for productivity. It was a district wide change and every teacher AND every student was signed up with a Google Docs account to use. I was thrilled but the reactions of my colleagues were mixed. Some teachers were saying it was […]
Read more "Digital Classrooms: Pros and Cons"