Summer vacation is a great time for educators to get some much-needed rest and relaxation after a busy school year and intense testing season. However, getting too relaxed can make for a rough transition into the next school year. To take full advantage of your well-deserved free time, it’s important to fill your summer with productive, fun, and fulfilling activities that will leave you refreshed and ready to dive into another great year come fall.

A student is sitting down to eat a “meal” of information that has been prepared for them. One teacher offers them a homemade meal as a chef would, with different ingredients pulled together to create the meal. Another teacher produces a quick ready-made meal that has been provided for them (think Hamburger Helper). The student is offered both meals—which will they eat? 

When school districts invest in technology, the tools they buy must be user-friendly, integrated, and ready to use to support instruction—not something that creates an additional burden for teachers. That’s the foundation that Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS)—Georgia’s fifth-largest school district—used in 2018 when it was time to refresh digital classroom tools.

Years earlier, CCPS had spent millions of dollars putting digital technology into classrooms, ending up with a very disjointed solution that included projectors from one manufacturer, whiteboards from another, student response systems made by a third provider, and slates and cameras by yet another. “None of it worked well together,” says Chief of Technology Rod Smith, M.Ed. “From an instructional standpoint, teachers need something that's seamless so they can save instructional time and focus on teaching students.”

You have no doubt let your parents know about the dreaded summer slide: That time when students can lose progress during the summer months. And I'm sure you have also let them know the importance of practicing those skills over the summer so students can start off the new school year ready and raring to go. 

But what about us teachers? What should we make sure doesn’t take the proverbial slide over the break? And are there some things we should let slide away into the summer abyss?

As the school year comes to an end, you (and your students!) might be feeling ready to wind down and get summer started. But the year isn’t over just yet! Keep your students engaged and learning until the last day with our collection of themed lesson content for June: 

In the English language arts Common Core standards, there are standards about speaking and listening as well as presentations. As teachers around me have unpacked the standards over the past few years, the concept of listening cited specifically as a standalone standard has been questioned. Teachers have claimed, “I expect students to listen every single day, so I'm covering that standard every single day of the year.”

On May 3, we celebrated the fourth Boxlight STEM Day (#BLSTEM) in conjunction with TAG-Ed’s Georgia STEM Day (#GASTEMDay). Students around Georgia, as well as several locations in Latin America, participated in lessons conducted with the Boxlight Labdisc. STEM Day is a hands-on, inquiry-based learning event designed to help students discover critical STEM skills and understand how STEM disciplines apply to the world around them. Lessons ranged in topics from heart rate and light absorbance to Newton’s second law.

As we count down the final days of school, I always like to stop and reflect. Yes, I am tired and probably looking a little haggard, but I really love my job. And I’m not just saying that because June and July are right around the corner!

Teaching truly is a wonderful profession, and here’s why (in case you need reminding!): 

Your child comes home from school and on their paper is a single number: 9. Should you punish or reward them? Call the teacher? Call a tutor? 

The answer is pretty obvious: we don’t know. A single number doesn’t really make any sense without having some context. Was it 9 out of 10 or 9 out of 100? Was it a score for points or a score from a rubric? We need more information to know what the number actually means.

The next questions for the teacher and the student are “How does this impact grading?” and “What do the numbers even mean when it comes to the grade?” Again, a number with no context doesn’t mean much. But in order to create meaning from this number, we need to start with what the number actually means once it is turned into a grade.