Blog Archives - Piedmont PD

A Lesson in What We Notice And Why

3/27/2014

Inspired by Ms. Winegardner scoring our students tickets to Joshua Bell, I give you this short video lesson idea to teach a thinking skill. It is more a quick "hook" to introduce a higher order thinking practice to your students within whatever larger lesson you are teaching.

Use it when you want to have students be more aware of their surroundings, their thought processes, external cues to when something is " important", etc. I can make this fit almost any curriculum. It meshes nicely with reading strategies taught in

Here's the video introduction and link to the news story about it. Will one of the nation's greatest violinists be noticed in a D.C. Metro stop during rush hour? Joshua Bell experimented for Gene Weingarten's story in The Washington Post (Video by John W. Poole)

Try In-Class Flipping

3/27/2014

This article was posted recently and I agree wholeheartedly with this method of flipping. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-in-class-version-jennifer-gonzalez

As some evidence for rethinking homework, I give you this DATA (Look, Ma! Data!)
Only 3 of a roomful of 38 district level leaders did their homework for a very important 3 day training! Don't be so offended when students don't do yours and note that many of them may be faking it or may have cheated. For me in class flipping is a great way to get rid of that and be more "montessori" in the approach to homework which fits with the reality of the world today -- adults' worlds as well as kids'.

Should we Celebrate Tau Day?

3/14/2014

Let your student decide:

The Piedmont Tau-rates doesn't have the same ring to it as Piedmont Pi-rates, and I don't know if we do it on June 2 or February 6 but :

here's Vi Hart's explanation why Pi is wrong and Here's Numberphile's Pi/Tau Smackdown
in case you want to share with students and get their opinion

If they side with team Tau, Click the Tau image to go to the Tau Day website

Yummy Math Lesson

3/12/2014

Yummy Math is a site all about math food problems.
Check it out just in time for Pi(e) Day!
http://www.yummymath.com/

Turn Problems into Comics

3/12/2014

Great idea that can work with any discipline from Lee MacArthur on Google +
"I gave students a page of word problems out of my mathematics magazines. Students create a comic strip showing the problem and how to solve it. "

Teach Close Reading with Diigo

3/12/2014

Close reading is a good way to get students to develop critical thinking and ask logical questions as a starting point to good research. It teaches metacognition about what and why we annotate as we read.

In our Balanced Literacy PD, I demo'd a Diigo-annotated web article as a tool for close reading, in that situation as prep for a socratic seminar discussion. Diigo lets the user highlight the webpage and place sticky note comments electronically, so it is great for paperless close reading, for gathering your thoughts, or for sharing collaboratively.

As a PD Facilitator, I use the annotated URL link so others will notice just the sections I highlighted in a longer article that I only am interested in part of.

This video below give you a one minute intro to accessing Diigo's annotation services:

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12 Year Old Inventor

3/11/2014

Read this article with your students.
http://www.livescience.com/43455-lego-braille-printer.html
Curriculum connections:

practice close reading and annotation
introduce Love of Learning, Genius Hour, or Google 20% time project
introduce Maker Movement project
Tier 2 vocabulary

- I can also help you connect it to your specific content! send me an email or drop by.

Women's History Month Lesson

3/10/2014

Do you know who the woman in this illustration is? She's important to what you are using right now.

March is Women's History month.

here are several ways to integrate women often forgotten into your lessons (including women in tech like Ada here who invented coding before computers were even invented- click the image to know more about her)

Who chooses who is important enough to be studied? Do your students see themselves in the people of your discipline? Ask them.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/0308/How-teachers-bring-women-s-history-and-women-s-rights-to-life-video

Pre - Research Strategies Lesson

3/10/2014

One great way to engage students is let them do a web search of any topic in your curriculum.

To help develop their critical thinking, evaluating and website assessment skills, and to build their Tier 2 vocab, a pre-search is a good first step. It is also part of balanced literacy as you are modeling for them and thinking with them.

This article gives 15 tools and a choice of steps you can use to teach via pre-search. Students knowing the right words when searching is an important part of finding the right sites. You can also use Google 's advance search.