Some of you have been in the classroom for almost six weeks, while others have just begun. Making changes to your classroom at this point in the school year may sound odd, but sometimes it is good to make a change after a few weeks to spice things up. 

If you’re thinking about shaking up your classroom dynamic, here are some easy changes you can incorporate:

The term “eduhero” has become popular over the past few years, but what exactly does it mean? I would define it as someone who is a “voice” in education. It could be a teacher who tweets pictures of their classroom, a prominent education author, a Pinterest teacher star, or a Teachers-Pay-Teachers whiz. The common thread between all eduheros is that they use social media to promote what they do in the classroom. The Twitter hashtag #eduhero is another way to tag teachers who are doing great things.

Saying that parenting is hard is a complete understatement. It is tiring, draining, challenging—and did I mention tiring? It’s also the most rewarding thing that I have ever done, and is worth all the late nights, smelly messes, and stressful car rides. 

I am very blessed when it comes to parenting. My wife and I work well together when it comes to our kids. As we were growing up, we both had great examples of what good parenting looks like. We have enough resources to take care of the needs of our kids, and sometimes we can even provide them with an extra experience in life that we didn’t have when we were kids ourselves.

But even with all of those advantages, parenting is still really stressful and hard for us at times. Removing any of those other supports—two parents in the home, good upbringing ourselves, or a lack of resources—would result in making it even harder.

We all know that uneasy feeling of sitting in front of a blank white screen trying to decide where to begin when it comes to designing and creating an interactive lesson. You can feel it just thinking about it, right? We also know how tough it can be to look at lesson after lesson on the web or an IWB website trying to decide if a lesson is good and whether or not it will be engaging for your students.

Interactive whiteboards give us an opportunity to excite our students about learning through multi-sensory, hands-on interaction with content, so we want to be sure that the lessons that we create and use for instruction are high-quality and engaging. Here are some design components that will help you create and/or choose lessons that achieve positive learning outcomes with your students.

Every classroom has its handful of personalities that make it memorable and distinct—this makes teaching both fun and frustrating at the same time. All of these students add flavor to the classroom, but at times, they may need help or encouragement to mature in one area or another.

As we emphasize a growth mindset in the classroom, we can help to support them in this. A student who lacks leadership skills may need to be encouraged to voice their opinion, or a student who is overly competitive may need help to learn how to be a good sport when losing.

Here is an approach to our students that we work with every day that helps us to relate to a few of these “stereotypical” types of kids. Keep in mind that this isn’t intended to make fun of any student, but to acknowledge that we all have areas of growth. We don’t want to just “be annoyed” by excessive sneezing, grouchiness, or shyness—these can be warning signs of other issues that we should keep an eye on. Most of the time though, these small quirks from our students become endearing over time.

In the years that have followed the No Child Left Behind era, schools, teachers, and administrators have learned that a hyperfocus on reading and math doesn’t produce the best outcomes for students. We all knew that our students were so much more than a test, and now that we don’t have our entire system centered around these scores, we can refocus on what truly matters.

Many schools are discovering that students with strong social-emotional skills, especially in early childhood, have better outcomes and healthier lives over peers who do not. This probably doesn’t surprise most of us. Being able to cooperate, compromise, empathize, and negotiate are skills that help all of us be successful—much more so than a score on a test.

Boxlight is excited to announce the fall webinar series, “Transforming Learning in the Classroom,” featuring six webinars to help you find ways to transform learning with the right technologies and best practices for your classroom. All of the presenters are working in schools every day and making an impact, offering you real insights from real leaders.

The series will begin on September 19, 2018 at 4:30 p.m. ET with “Atlanta Public Schools Secrets to Success: The Odd Couple.” The educators hosting each webinar in the series use and manage technology every day in their classrooms and districts to engage their students and encourage collaboration. The webinars were developed to help educators learn how to utilize classroom technology to promote students’ learning, and gain valuable insights and best practices from those who know what works best.

Since its creation in 2005, YouTube has grown to over 1 billion active users each month, with over 400 hours of video content uploaded each minute. This can make it almost impossible to filter through the massive library of videos to find the best educational content––whether you’re looking for your kids, your students, professional development, or pure curiosity.

To help you with your search, we sifted through YouTube’s countless channels and picked out our favorite creators of educational content. Here are the best educational YouTube channels for every kind of learner: 

In a recent conversation I had with teachers, we were asked to name one thing we had learned recently—these could be very basic tasks or skills, or even “life lessons” that were reflected upon. Once we all had something in mind, the next question was the critical one: How did we go about learning this? The answers ranged from experience to failure, YouTube to books, and colleagues in person to colleagues on Twitter. Of the eight of us in the room, we had eight different avenues for new learning.

This is the norm both in education and in life. We don’t wait around until the next training opportunity, just like we don’t wait around until 8:00 for Cheers to come on the television like we used to. Our world is more “on demand” than ever before, and learning is no exception. 

Welcome back to school! Now that class is back in session and you’re getting into the swing of things, it’s time to make sure your lessons are engaging your students. Here is our collection of fun themed content to spruce up those lessons for the first month back: