I found several interesting things on the teach.net blog. The first one is a teacher resource website called North Star Teacher Resource. They have bookmarks, number & alphabet lines, printer paper, awards & incentives, bulletin board display items, and lots more. There website address is www.nstresources.com. I am going to save them to my favorites because I plan to order some items from them. I especially loved the bookmarks!
Some printables from teach.net include: a Classroom Display Alphabet, it available in 26 different fonts. You can print them out and decorate them or since they are outline only letters; you can let your students color and decorate them on the first day of school. You can then hang them up on the wall for students to use. Oversized Playing Cards- you can print these out and use them for math activities. Printable Certificates & Awards- there are a lot of these to choose from. Just download, print out, and fill out the information. These are awesome! There is also a Awards for Everything post, that gives ideas to use for basic certificates such as Certificate of Appreciation. This blog has a lot of neat ideas for new teachers to use!
On the Road to Teaching blog, they posted about a new Learning Management Software that is FREE for teachers called Canvas. It has rich features around common teaching tasks – grading, communicating, calendaring, creating assignments, etc. Canvas has the potential to reshape how you organize, communicate, deliver curriculum. The person who posted about this said they used to use Blackboard but now uses Canvas. To find out more information about this site go here: http://www.instructure.com/ It looks interesting and something that I might try out when I get a teaching job.
On Two Writing Teachers blog, they talked about some books that I would be interested in reading and using in my classroom. The first one is called Nasty Bugs. It is an anthology of bug poems edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins. I am not a bug person but I think students would have fun reading the bug poems and then making up poems about bugs on their own. We could then have our own classroom anthology to put in our reading center for students to read over and over again.
The next book is called Ladybugs by Gail Gibbons. Here is what Ruth (one of the bloggers on Two Writing Teachers) had to say about it “The thing I’m most excited to share with them [students] are the rich diagrams. There is more than just labels on the diagrams. Some of them include sentences with key points, pronunciation guides, and specific titles”. I think this book would be a great addition to my classroom.
The last book is called Peas on Earth by Todd H. Doodle. It uses a simple play on words to portray the basic concepts of peace, harmony, getting along with all kinds of people, and being green in a manner that young kids will grasp. And it will resonate more as they grow older. Adult caregivers will chuckle over the peas/peace references while young children will relate to the important messages about our earth and those of us who live on it. The artwork is colorful, charming, and perfect for the board book crowd. And, as an added value, there is a simple pop-up at the end of the book. It sounds like a cute book and I want to read it!
Over on the Answer Sheet blog, I read a post called Report: Test-based incentives don’t produce real student achievement. The report says that incentive programs for schools, teachers and students aimed at raising standardized test scores are largely unproductive in generating increased student achievement.
The report said that standardized tests commonly used in schools to measure student performance — including high school exit exams and tests in various grades mandated by former president Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — “fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways,” according to a summary of the lengthy document.
The researchers concluded that the effects of incentive programs tend to be “small and . . . effectively zero for a number” of such programs.
Other studies in the past year have also cast doubt on the effectiveness and reliability of the value-added method of teacher/principal evaluation, which takes student test scores and puts them into a formula that is supposed to factor out other influences and determine the “value” a teacher has brought to a student’s learning.
The method often ignores outside-school factors that can influence how a child does on a test, including lack of sleep, hunger and illness, but even formulas that are said to take these into account are not especially reliable, some experts have said.
I don’t know what else I can add to this. There are a lot of us who know that standardized testing is not the best method to measure students’ achievement. Until the policymakers figure this out, we are all left to suffer the stress of high-stakes testing!
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