J.P. Prezzavento - The Bits and Bytes of Education:

For a few months, my wife Kim and I have been discussing adopting a dog.  After a lot of careful thought and reflection we decided to adopt Molly a 3 year old puggle.  Between the time we decided to adopt Molly and when we brought her home, I did a lot of reading about how to welcome a new dog into our home.  While reading information from the web and talking to employees at the Open Door Animal Sanctuary I realized that bringing Molly home for the first time wouldn't be all that different from starting the school year with a new group of students. Here are five ways that adopting Molly has helped me prepare for the upcoming school year...and vice versa: 1.  Each day will not go as planned.  After we got home from the animal shelter, we decided to take Molly for a walk.  We tried to put her new harness on her, but no matter how hard we tried, Molly wouldn't put on her harness.  After about 20 minutes of trying to put on her harness and...

What resources do you use while planning lessons?  Do you consult your Twitter feed?  Ask members of your digital or face-to-face PLN what works and what doesn't work?  What about your students?  How often do you ask them for input on instruction?  If your answer is "not often" or "not at all" I recommend that you start asking them now.  Student voice and choice is the missing piece of the academic puzzle.  Our students are starving to give us feedback on our lessons and how those lessons can better suit their needs.  All we have to do is give them a time and place to share those thoughts. I recently finished my freshmen research project.  For the first time, I decided to include a technology element to the project.  I had the students create a Glogster instead of a poster or PowerPoint presentation to share their findings.  Throughout the project I was constantly reflecting and thinking about how I will be able to improve the exp...

Trying a new lesson, new teaching method, or integrating a new piece of technology can be stressful. Thanks to my Twitter feed , I discovered GlogsterEDU earlier this year.    A Glog is an online multimedia poster.  This post is going to reflect on my first experience using Glogster.  There were a lot of positive aspects of this project for both my students and for me, but there were also a few road bumps that made caused a little frustration. Planning the Project If you are unfamiliar with my blog, I am relatively new to the world of educational technology.  Up until this school year, I was hesitant to incorporate much technology into my lesson plans.  After discovering the power of Twitter over the summer, I began incorporating technology whenever I could justify it.  One place I was sure I wanted to incorporate some sort of technology was my research unit.  Typically, I have students use the internet, library books, and online databases to...

Student engagement is a topic that is constantly being discussed by teachers, administrators, and parents alike.  While all of these stakeholders know what student engagement looks like, it is often times unclear how to get students actively engaged in a lesson. I am going to suggest a variety of activities to increase student engagement in your classroom using both modern technology and traditional classroom instruction.  1 - Jigsaw Activities   After reading a story, article, or book, I split students into small groups and assign each group a concept to focus on.  After the students have discussed their concept, I split the groups up again so that each group has one member from each original group.  Each student will be responsible for sharing with his or her classmates what was discussed in the first group. The beauty of the Jigsaw Activity is that each student in the classroom is held accountable for disseminating information to other members of the cla...