The 5:1 ratio has completely changed my thinking about interactions in the classroom. It all started with a question about grading. After all, part of our jobs as teachers is to provide corrective feedback to help students grow. The 5:1 ratio helps to ensure that students can receive this feedback effectively. More importantly, however, it can help us be intentional about creating a classroom environment that centers our humanity.
Educators often cite a lack of time as one of their most significant stressors. How can we help teachers find the balance necessary to feel satisfied in their jobs and meet their social and emotional needs? This third post in the Time for Teachers blog series will discuss the importance of a self-assessment in addressing individual problems and solutions teachers face. This is not to say the onus of addressing challenges should fall squarely on the shoulders of individual teachers. Teachers need a community of practice and support to help them identify problems they might face individually that could benefit from solutions that come from consulting with colleagues.
Educators often cite a lack of time as one of their most significant stressors. How can we help teachers find the balance necessary to feel satisfied in their jobs and meet their social and emotional needs? This second post in the Time for Teachers blog series will discuss two possible solutions that can help all educators save time while addressing needs to serve students and communities: agile meetings and short pulse surveys.
During this time of remote learning, what are some best practices in the ways you communicate with your students and their parents? In this webinar, we’ll explore examples and tips for communication, specific tools and resources to aid this process, and lessons learned from applying these practices.
Are you feeling overwhelmed about transitioning your classroom into a remote learning environment? In this webinar, we share simple strategies for getting started, communicating with students and parents, finding and delivering content, building relationships, and designing assessments. You can do this!
What factors should schools and districts consider when selecting a learning management system (LMS)? What are the key processes that you should follow? What challenges and opportunities exist within the process? Where should you start?
Google Forms is not a new tool. It’s been around for quite some time; however, a number of recent updates have made this tool one you will want to use in your classroom. In this article, we will walk you through some innovative ways to use Google Form for student surveys, quizzes, and assessments.
Looking for ways to make your classroom resources more interactive? In this article, we share two free image annotation tools that teachers can use to bring assignments to life in their classroom.
As a teacher, it’s great to showcase student work, but it can be time-consuming to compile and share these accolades with parents. In this article, we walk through how teachers can use the Google add-on Autocrat to showcase student work in an efficient way.
The most powerful thing we can do as educators is to invite our students to explore. Service-learning and project-based learning are two ways to allow students to explore and get involved in their communities. These two experiences continue to be woven into Katie Bielecki’s teaching and have spurred on the implementation of Genius Hour in her classroom.
Roadmaps is an open educational resource that allows teachers to create interactive, graphical, collaborative, and adaptive deeply digital lessons that are easy to use. This tool promotes collaboration between students and teachers which is why Denise Gallemore regularly uses it in her 5th-grade social studies and ELA classroom.
Kindergartners have the ability to do a lot more than we often expect from them. Taylor White’s use of computer science and computational thinking lessons opened her eyes to what kindergartners have the capacity to do at a young age. While she witnessed them break down problems with machines and codes, she began to see it bleed into how the students broke down problems with their peers.
In my district, we continue to work on preparing our students for a changing world. Maintaining positive relationships is always important, but we need to
I’ve been teaching for 14 years, most of which have been at the middle school level in an urban school district. I’m a risk taker,
Some of my students were struggling with specific aspects of taking a course online, as well as certain assignments. They would send me emails that
As an online teacher, Google Slides been the answer to all my hopes and dreams. Using it is like making a collage, but my fingers don’t get sticky! Pretty much everything I post in my online courses is created in Slides. One of my favorite ways to use Slides is for a Class Gallery, a place where students can showcase their artwork.
Young students often have a hard time thinking about actions, consequences, and, generally, anything that takes place in the future, so setting goals is not an easy task for them. In this article, Erin walks you through how to use the iPad App, SeeSaw, to help students set and achieve goals.
It’s my dream is to have a classroom that feels like a Starbucks with students spread all over the room, engaging in a variety of activities, working in a group on a lab, or working solo on an assignment.But how do you make this type of independent learning a reality? For me, the answer was the camera on my phone. I know, nothing fancy, no bells or whistles, just my camera. Thanks to the work shared by Ben Rimes, the power of the camera allows me to be in multiple places at once.
One of the biggest challenges as online Spanish teachers? Regularly scheduling time to connect with each student in our course to listen to and assess their language development. We needed to find a tool that would eliminate the need for several back-and-forth communications to simply set up an appointment for each short assessment. We not only wanted a tool to help share available time slots for appointments, but also one that would sync with our calendar. That’s when we discovered Calendly.
One of my challenges as an online teacher is this: I teach in an asynchronous program, so my students are not necessarily online at the same time as I am. One tech tool that has helped me to bridge this divide is PowToon, the video-making software that allows teachers to create engaging, animated clips to help explain challenging content to students.
We’re sorry to inform you that we have reached capacity for several of our Semester 1 and Trimester 1 courses. You’ll notice when attempting to enroll students in our Student Learning Portal that some courses are unavailable. While we are no longer accepting new enrollments for these courses at this time, many courses continue to remain open for enrollment.
With many students across the state 100% remote, demand for our online courses is greater than ever before. Because every course we offer is taught by a Michigan-certified teacher, this high volume of enrollments has created capacity issues for our teachers who provide each and every student with individual feedback.
While the Michigan Virtual team anticipated and planned for significant increases in student enrollments this Fall, the increased demand we’ve experienced has been unprecedented. As a result, we are taking steps to hire even more part-and full-time teachers to support larger numbers of student enrollments for Semester 2 as well as for Trimester 2 and 3.
For schools that still need online learning options this year, please fill out the form at the bottom of our virtual pathways page to meet with someone to discuss other solutions. While some of our teacher-led courses are full, we may still have the capacity to help you in upcoming terms or can discuss timing to implement a whole-school or collaborative program in which local teachers from your school/district use our online course content to teach students. We also have free course content and resources available for you to use.
We know this is an incredibly stressful time for all, and we’re sorry if the courses you’re looking for are unavailable. We never want to turn away a student who wants to learn from us. Our top concern, however, is student success, and we have a policy to not take on additional enrollments if we cannot guarantee that all students will have a quality online learning experience.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we navigate the unusually high volume of enrollments we are receiving.
