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:

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.

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that he was looking for a life change. He wanted a new start in a new place with a new career. He just threw it out there for people to tell him what they thought about his future plans.

Of course, there were some funny and non-serious comments, but there was also a wide variety of serious suggestions. From stand-up comic to running a small business, the ideas were very wide and diverse. My question to him was, “Why not teach?”

Many of us probably remember wonderful days in our elementary classroom listening to stories read by our teacher. These stories, whether they were picture books in kindergarten or chapter books in fifth grade, were a major part of my upbringing in elementary school and one of my favorite times of the school day. I distinctly remember in fourth grade listening to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and being sorely disappointed when we watched the movie and the details had changed. I had such a vivid picture in my head of the characters and setting. Our entire class had the collective language of the story that we could talk about and discuss.

The breadth of parent opinions on technology is very wide. Philosophies differ from parents who give their 4-year-old a phone and Instagram account to those who wait until high school for a student to have an email address and everything in between. Speaking as a current parent of children between the ages of 1 and 15, navigating this world of technology is hard.

There are no real guidelines or rules for how we should handle it all. With the experiences and exposure of kids being so varied, it can feel like a constant uphill battle—all of which schools should consider. As institutions, we hope to work with parents as partners to help their students become successful. I believe all parents know that the ability to use technology is an important future-ready skill. But the age that we begin and the depth that we go to—that is up for debate.

As a busy teacher, it can be hard to find the time to sit down and read teaching blogs, articles, or books for motivation and professional development. Luckily, we live in the golden age of the podcast, making it possible to listen to this same motivational and educational content while you’re doing something else, like commuting to school, organizing your classroom, or making dinner at home.

Because podcasts are easy to record and publish, there’s an extremely rich market of content to choose from. Weeding through all this content can take time, but we’ve done the research for you and found 10 inspiring and interesting podcasts with great reviews and ratings. All of the podcasts on this list are rated 4.5 stars or higher on Apple podcasts, so you know they’ll have great content!

As the air gets cooler and the leaves start to change, now is the time to weave some festive fall and Halloween fun into your lessons! Here is our collection of engaging themed content to help you get students in the spirit this month:

When a parent comes into school to discuss technology, they are typically not there to share positive feedback about all the recent wonderful integration lessons that have been going on in the classroom. It is usually just the opposite—concerns about how their student is accessing, using, overusing, or manipulating the technology in the classroom.

Although some of these concerns might be misplaced or lack knowledge about exactly what is going on, other concerns are very valid and need to be considered. So as a teacher or principal, it will be helpful to consider how to prepare for these concerns.

Teachers who are blessed with an assortment of technology in their classroom probably use it often—we are more likely to use something if it is readily available to us. But like any new tool, as we start to gain expertise and comfort with it, we use it more and more. And as we settle into a pattern of use with the technology, we probably feel as though it would be hard to live without.

But even if this is the case and usage is very high, teachers may find themselves in a groove, maybe even a rut, when it comes to how they use technology in their classroom. We limit ourselves to using the tool in ways that we already know and think less about the ways that we could be using it.