TECH TOOLBOX: today I stumbled across this enormous new teacher starter kit. It would take me weeks to parse through that (and I will), but thought I'd start by just dumping the whole link here for you to scroll and see if anything catches your eye. I like that it even has such basic things as "Why Can't I Print From My Computer?" which may save you some time and frustration.
STUDENT VOICE: Nice post here on giving students a voice as a means to develop agency. One thing I've been doing for years: negotiate test dates with students. In addition to making my life simpler, since they often know what days are best / worst, it also lets them see that I care about the experience from their side of the desk, rather than just defaulting to what's most efficient for me personally. Paraphrasing Jim Fay of Love and Logic:
You can constantly fight for control on their terms or occasionally give some away on your terms.
PADLET AND AI: If you're a Padlet user (and there's no better way to quickly generate a slide deck of student work!) you may find some use for "Magic Padlet," their new AI tool.
STANDARDIZED TESTS: Big news yesterday as Dartmouth announced it would return to requiring standardized testing data for new applicants. Perhaps the era of pretending these things don't matter or measure anything useful is over?
PODCAST / BOOK OF INTEREST: I haven't read the Kieran Egan book referenced in this ACX book review, but I loved both his prior works Teaching as Storytelling and Learning in Depth. Storytelling in particular changed my career by a) making me more accommodating of the joyful chaos of a robust classroom full of non-robots and b) making me think very hard about how to "storify" even the (supposedly) dry content in things like chemistry and algebra. So I'll definitely be buying both books and listening to the podcast referenced here.
AND OF COURSE TAYLOR SWIFT: Look, I have two daughters, a wife, and four female pets (two dogs, two cats). But even in the absence of all that estrogen, I would still be an unashamed charter member of the Adult Male Taylor Swift Appreciation Society. So this idea from Larry Ferlazzo to turn her new album title into a whole classroom event / learning experience made me wish deeply that I were still in an English classroom.
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