Happy New Year! As you return to your classroom this month after the holiday break, it’s the perfect opportunity to spruce up your lessons. Here is our collection of themed content to help you keep students engaged all month long:

As the holiday break begins to wind down, we often find ourselves thinking about all of the things we need to do to get organized when we head back to our classrooms. Before that first day back approaches, here are 25 steps to help organize yourself with technology:

The holiday break is our longest during the school year—an approximately two-week flurry of Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. A time to relax, recharge, and gather ourselves for the long slow march toward state-mandated testing in the spring.

I’ve always found January to be the start of my most favorite time in the classroom. The expectations are known, centers have been taught, and I have a solid understanding of my students. I feel that this two-week hiatus ensures that the rest of the winter months going into spring are productive. While I am busy imagining new resolutions for my personal life, I also allow a moment to breathe and reflect on the successes and the failures of the fall term. I have found several themes that I visit each year:

Congratulations—the holidays are finally here! Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy some much-needed time off. And who are some of the most deserving of a holiday break? Teachers! Now is the time to recharge your batteries so you can get back to your classroom after the holiday ready to help your students succeed. 

Snow is falling, music is playing, and the wonderful smell of cookies is in the air. School is out for the holiday, and students aren’t the only ones excited about the break! So, what can teachers do with their free time away from the classroom? Here are some fun ideas to give you inspiration:

A lot has been written about brain research and education. It can sometimes be overwhelming to remember all the areas of the brain and their functions as well as the best ways to educate students with these functions in mind. Here is a crash course in brain development and some ways teachers can use this information to provide best practice teaching.

In part one of the CTE overview, we provided a short history of career and technical education along with some examples of pros and cons for students and schools when it comes to implementing CTE courses. The real power of CTE, in my opinion, comes when career preparation and college preparation are not independent, but when they work in conjunction with one another.

For most of us, conferences can bring about a familiar pattern. We attend the amazing conference full of great speakers. We are inspired to try new things in our school. We understand the research and the significance of how we can impact our students. It is exciting and we are ready to move forward.

Then we return to school. Issues came up with the substitute, grades are due, there are a few parent emails to respond to—you get the idea. So, we take the handouts and materials from the conferences and put them on the shelf behind the desk. We tell ourselves we can get to it over the weekend and really get some things planned to implement next week, but this probably never happens either.

When December rolls around each year, it’s hard to believe another year is actually coming to a close. Here at Boxlight, 2018 brought exciting product launches, STEM initiatives, and plenty of collaborative learning events. It’s been a successful year, and we are poised and ready to accomplish even more in 2019!

Learning for the sake of learning is a great idea—students are able to learn what they want and focus on anything of interest. Sounds great, right? Our schools, and in particular our public educational system, exist in part to fill the needs of the careers that our country needs. This isn’t the sole reason that we educate our students, but it is definitely part of it. And rather than just teaching students what may interest them, we attempt to prepare them for specific careers that they can easily transition into after high school or other post-secondary education.