Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge spoke with Peter Liljedahl who argues that traditional teaching methods often result in students mimicking what the teacher does without truly understanding the material:

By thinking, [Peter Liljedah] means actively engaging with the course material. The most problematic strategy that many students try instead, he argues, is what he calls “mimicking,” which he has especially found in the math classes he studies. These mimickers dutifully copy the problems presented in classes, but never grok the conceptual underpinnings, so they’re left able only to do problems that are nearly identical to what the teacher showed them.

These are the students who end up hitting a wall when math courses move from easier algebra to more advanced concepts in, say, calculus, he argues.

Liljedahl’s solution is to create a “thinking classroom” where students work in groups on challenging tasks at vertical whiteboards. He claims this approach has been shown to increase student engagement and thinking time by 80%.

Connie Hamilton at Cult of Pedagogy shares some simple changes that teachers can apply to enhance group work.

Create groups for different activities ahead of time, so that the groups are more aligned with the instructional goals of the learning activity.:

Try using Clock Partners to organize multiple pairings. Here’s how it works: Students make “appointments” with different peers at specific times. Then, when the teacher announces they should join their 3:00 partner, the pairings are already predetermined. Only you know that the 12 o’clock partner is a reading buddy, while the 6 o’clock partner considers how introverted or extraverted students are.

How to respond to student questions during a group activity:

During collaborative learning, the goal is for students to learn from and with one another — not you. Students already know you’re the safety net. Ideally, we provide other options — such as appropriate tools, access to a text, sufficient or additional time, and opportunity to collaborate — that help them persevere through productive struggle before asking you for help. So for goodness sake, don’t front load an invitation to seek you out at the first sign of difficulty by announcing, “If you need help, just raise your hand and I’ll come over.” Just think for a moment what this communicates and encourages.

Encourage students to apply critical thinking and problem solving skills to find the answers themselves:

One way to accomplish this is to respond to their question with a question that prompts reflection or metacognition (see examples above). Answering questions with a question bounces the responsibility off of you and back on to them.

Of course, what you say is as important as how you say it. Cynical or sarcastic tones, when posing questions, can break down your relationship with students. Be sure your questions are delivered in a positive and productive way that strives to encourage students to activate their empowerment.

Allow students to collaborate without interruption:

The gradual release of responsibility (GRR) is often referred to by its “I do, We Do, You Do” parts. Every time you approach a group and ask them how it’s going, you effectively jolt them from the “You Do” part into the “We Do” phase of GRR. Unless you have a need to abruptly stop their learning progress and have them repeat what they’ve already done or learned, don’t. Stay invisible by listening from a short distance to hear and observe how students are doing rather than interrupting them.

Group work is a powerful strategy to promote student learning, engagement, and social skills. However, it can also be challenging to implement effectively. These tips will help you make group work more productive and beneficial for you and your students.

Miguel Guhlin at TCEA Tech Notes Blog provides provides a step-by-step guide on how to use the GetMarked MCQ Converter and Text to Quiz Converter to convert quizzes between different platforms, such as Quizlet, Kahoot!, ClassQuiz, and Quizizz. Guhlin’s directions demonstrate how to:

1. Export and Convert from Quizlet
2. Import Quizlet to Kahoot!
3. Import Kahoot to ClassQuiz
4. Import Quizlet/Kahoot! to Quizizz
5. Import to Quizalize
6. Bonus Tool: The GetMarked Digitaliser

This can be a valuable tool for teachers who want to use different quiz platforms without having to recreate their quizzes from scratch.

Your Plan, Your Planet is a free, interactive, online tool that can be used to help students learn about sustainability and the kinds of changes they can make to help ensure a healthy planet today and tomorrow. The tool focuses on how we consume food, water, energy, and stuff.

Here are some ways that teachers can use Your Plan, Your Planet in the classroom:

• Use it as a starting point for a discussion about sustainability. The tool can help students to understand the impact of their everyday choices on the environment. Teachers can then lead a discussion about how students can make changes to their lifestyle to reduce their impact.
• Use it to assign individual or group projects. Students can use the tool to calculate their environmental impact and then develop a plan to reduce it. Teachers can then assign students to work together on projects to implement their plans.
• Use it to create a classroom challenge. Teachers can challenge students to see who can reduce their environmental impact the most. This can be a fun and competitive way to get students engaged in sustainability.
• Use it to connect with local businesses and organizations. Teachers can use the tool to find local businesses and organizations that are working on sustainability projects. Students can then contact these organizations to learn more about their work and how they can get involved.

By using Your Plan, Your Planet, teachers can help students to learn about sustainability and the importance of taking action to protect our planet. The tool can also help students to develop the skills and knowledge they need to make a positive social change.

Charlotte Shane explores the phenomenon of audio memes on TikTok. She argues that these memes are more than just a trend, but rather a new form of communication that allows users to “riff” off of each other’s ideas in a way that is both creative and collaborative. Shane also considers what makes a sound compelling beyond its musical qualities or linguistic meaning, and suggests that the “brainfeel” of an audio meme is what ultimately makes it so popular.

Before social media, Gleason’s “Nobody’s gonna know” might have been called a catchphrase: a banal word combination animated by unique context and delivery. “Did I Do That?” “I’ll Be Back” and “How You Doin’?” would mean nothing if not for the precise tones and cadences with which their originators (Jaleel White as Steve Urkel, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator and Wendy Williams as herself) so reliably rendered them. In a phone call, the linguist Molly Babel mentioned Alicia Silverstone’s “As if,” from the movie “Clueless”: Taken altogether, Silverstone’s iconic phrasing, intonation and cadence are the sound. Like earworms, these quips are so mentally sticky that it takes just a few listens for your mind to latch onto them and never let go. Try reading them without hearing their corresponding acoustic signatures in your head: “Here’s Johnny!” “You talkin’ to me?” “Damn, Daniel!”

“Memes are often symbols,” says Don Caldwell, editor in chief of the dizzyingly comprehensive website Know Your Meme, and exceptionally viral memes tend to be “very novel or very catchy or just very, very striking emotionally.” Even when they’re estranged from their origins — i.e. taken out of context — they’re funny or moving or both. He mentions “sad trombone” as a pre-internet audio meme, and it occurs to me that the song “Yakety Sax” counts, too. Both musical cues evoke an unmistakable mood in and of themselves, but after decades of application to that effect, their deployment adds another layer of information to whatever scene they orchestrate. It’s a wink to the audience that positions the moment within a cultural continuum. The famous Wilhelm scream, a histrionic stock effect taken from a 1951 film, has since appeared in more than 100 movies, where it has become an inside joke for sound engineers and film fans. An audio meme’s most crucial quality, though, is the ability to instantly excite us, to make us think, upon the first listen: I need to hear that again.

When used effectively, memes can be a valuable tool to engage students and assess student understanding.

Yuvraj Chandra at MakeUseOf shared a cheat sheet of Google search operators that can be used to narrow down search results. It includes commands to help users filter results by site, timelines, and context. The cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from the webpage.

I use the following search operators on a daily basis:

Students who know how to use search engine operators can save time and find the information they need more quickly. For example, a student who is looking for information about the American Revolution can use the site: operator to limit their search to results from the History Channel website. Or, a student who is looking for a specific file type, such as a PDF, can use the filetype: operator to find only results that match that file type. Learning how to use search engine operators is a valuable skill for students of all ages. It can help them find the information they need more quickly and easily, which can save them time and frustration.

Fergus O’Sullivan writes about a growing community of people who are creating new games for retro consoles like the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. These hobbyist game developers are passionate about creating games for consoles from the golden age of gaming. O’Sullivan highlights the challenges and rewards of making retro games, and it provides a glimpse into a fascinating and growing community:

Noll also points out that many games are made by people that have an idea for a game but may not have the graphical skills to make their dream a reality. Retro games, in this case, are a great solution as you don’t need the same skill set as you would if you tried to use a game development platform like Unity or Unreal Engine. There are some specialized platforms like NES Maker that will let you make games on older consoles—or you could, if you have the chops, program them yourself.

Noll showed us several games at his exhibit that were made by people with little to no programming experience who just wanted to try and put something together. Examples include a platformer game called Doodle World put together by a father and his toddler, or some simple shoot-em-ups. As basic as they are, they still drew interest from passersby.

Educators can teach computer coding and game design by having students create games for retro consoles. This is a great way to engage students who are interested in gaming, and it can help them learn valuable skills in both coding and game design. When students create games for retro consoles, they are often faced with challenges that require them to think critically and solve problems. This can help them develop these important skills, which are essential for success in school and in the workplace.

Ian Byrd has developed an interactive tool to help educators create clear and measurable lesson objectives called The Differentiator:

The Differentiator is based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, Kaplan and Gould’s Depth and Complexity, and David Chung’s product menu.

Angela Watson talked with Monica Burns on the Truth for Teachers podcast about how teachers can use ChatGPT to increase their productivity:

Like, I need to write a reminder email for a field trip and tell parents not to forget this, and I can put that in ChatGPT because I’ve tried that already, you know? And that has worked really well to generate an email. Or, I wrote a sentence and I don’t love how it sounds and I’m going to plug it into an email, but I don’t love this. I might ask ChatGPT to rewrite this sentence in a more friendly way. Or, you know, the same way we use the thesaurus when we’re stuck on a word. We can do that with a whole sentence to paraphrase or rewrite it.

I’ve even used it for resource searches — I made a list for a blog post of tools for video essays that I love. Am I forgetting any? And I put that in ChatGPT and it gave me a couple more ideas and I’m like, yeah, I don’t know about that one. Or ooh, I totally forgot about that one. And then I added it in and I write my own paragraph description.

If you are a teacher who makes videos for your flipped classroom and you just want a quicker way to make video descriptions before you plug it onto YouTube, that’s one great thing. If you want to take something that you’ve written and simplify the vocabulary, maybe differentiate a prompt for a different group of students, so those creative teacher uses that are time-saving.

For more ideas on how to accelerate your workflows check out Angela Watson’s additional tips on how teachers are using ChatGPT.

Padlet is a powerful digital tool that can be used for a wide range of activities, including collaborative brainstorming, group discussions, interactive presentations, and multimedia projects. It also allows students to engage with each other and with the material in new and dynamic ways, by enabling them to share their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives in real-time. Recently Padlet released a new feature that allows users to create presentations from the Padlet boards they create.

Max Evans on the Padlet Blog explains how the new slideshow feature works:

You add your content to a padlet, and you click the [slideshow] button. Like magic, you have a beautiful presentation. Every post becomes a slide. The fonts are sized automatically. The colors are determined by your chosen wallpaper. You can navigate with your cursor or your keyboard. The presentation will be updated live when you edit the padlet it references.

To learn more about how to use the Padlet slideshow feature check out Padlet’s slideshow support page.