Christmas Break Countdown

Only a few days left before Christmas break!

Changing Education Paradigms

Someone posted this video on facebook, and I thought I would pass it along. It's a pretty interesting clip about how the world of education is changing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

After I watched that clip I clicked on another video that youtube suggested for me, and I happened to watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=9aGuLuipTwg

I was so interested that I spent the next couple hours on this website:
http://fi.ncsu.edu/project/fizz/

I'm pretty excited to try this in my classroom. Although I don't think I will completely dive into it all at once, I do plan on testing it out in just one class for now. What teacher wouldn't want to differentiated instruction to every student?

Free Work Day

During my economics class I came across the idea that if you give your "employee" a free day to work on whatever project they so chose, they will produce results you wouldn't imagine. So, I decided to give my computer classes a "free work day" so they could show me their computer skills on something that they were passionate about. Some students wrote a story, some made a powerpoint, some made creative signs, while others made greeting cards. Overall I was quite impressed with what some people accomplished, and I didn't have any complaining! At the end of the class period I simply had the students tell me what they wanted to be graded on - all of them got full credit.