We often hear educational experts harp on teachers that times have changed, tools of changed, and students have changed. The conclusion drawn is that teachers and classrooms also need to change. While I agree with the sentiment in some ways, I find it ironic that many of those people who are preaching this from the mountain tops also never really model that behavior.

The sit-and-get full-day workshop is the traditional professional learning model that, in many ways, is much like the traditional classroom. We know that adults don't necessarily learn best in this format, but it’s what we see most of the time.

Hopefully you’ve had a great start to the year—can you believe we’re already heading into the holidays?! Now that you are well into a groove, it’s a great time to discover instructional methods that may be more interactive so your students continue to be engaged at this time of the year.

As I discussed in the first part of this series, there are many great reasons to get started with virtual reality in your classroom. The immersive experience is like nothing else—to me, it really feels like futuristic technology in our students' hands. Engagement skyrockets when we have the VR goggles out. 

There are numerous teaching tools and instructional strategies to go along with this experience that are easy for teachers to access. While on a VR tour, teachers can prompt students to look at different landmarks or details of the environment. There are both self-guided student experiences as well as others that the teacher leads the students through, depending on the objectives of the lesson.

Halloween is an exciting time for students, but that doesn’t mean you can’t join in on the fun! Whether you like to go all out or opt for something quick an easy, there are plenty of great options for dressing up on the big day.

Need a little inspiration? Here are some ideas to help you find the perfect costume this Halloween:

Over the past five years, many school districts—including the one where I work—have transitioned from iPads to Chromebooks. There are some advantages to having done this, but there are also some drawbacks. Many of the decisions in making this change have hinged on money and the cost difference between a Chromebook and an iPad. When it comes to most decisions that involve cost, we get what we pay for. In moving away from the Apple iOS to Google, we found that we lost some options for teachers displaying from their screen.

When we discuss STEM classes and content, by their very nature, we are talking about multiple cross-curricular concepts. Engineering is math and math leads to technology, which requires science, which is what engineers study, and so on and so forth. So why should we consider how STEM concepts can branch out even further into our classrooms?

The semester is about halfway done for most of you, which means you’re probably well into preparing your students for their end-of-semester assessments and projects before they’re distracted by the winter holidays. We know this can be exhausting, and you deserve a break––even if it’s just for the duration of this blog post.