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Spice Up Your Classroom with These Nifty Ideas
posted by: Melissa | September 21, 2012, 07:00 PM   


Looking for some ways to spice up your teaching?  We’ve scoured the web and found several neat ideas to try integrating into your curriculum.

 

 

Some teachers have started using LiveScribe’s Smartpen in their classroom.  This handy little device records everything written by it as well as things said out-loud and can turn them into one of a wide variety of documents.  Smartpens are being used as a quick way to record lessons for absent students, and there is at least one math teacher having her students use them to record their work.

 

Moving from a high tech tool to a low-tech one, sticky notes are utterly versatile and have a wide variety of uses in the classroom.  They can be used as tools to group students, used by students to analyze and edit literature pieces.  They can be mixed up and then used in makeshift timelines, matching games, or finding groups of things.  Need some inspiration on how to use these in your classroom?  Check out Edutopia’s recent piece on using sticky notes in the classroom.



Tweenteacher has a quick little video on a grouping technique that she uses in her classroom.  It’s a bit more imaginative than using titles like “Group Recorder” and “Group Speaker,” and it allows for more flexibility in the division of tasks.


There was a year when I was roped into teaching one period of middle school math.  I remember trying to teach parallel and perpendicular line graphs as being the bane of my existence that year.  It’s too bad that I wasn’t creative enough to think of something like this little game to get the concept across!  My favorite thing about this game is that while TeachingTechie uses computers and a smartboard, this idea can be modified and changed to fit  any number of classroom situations.

 

Finally, my favorite idea, and it’s not just because I’m ready for a snack! I came across this lesson on Sweet Teachings, but apparently it’s been used by many teachers. This nifty little lesson can be adapted for any grade level from elementary to high school.  You pass out cinnamon roll shapes to your students (or they make their own depending on grade level), and they put in the middle a “boring” word.  Then, on the spiral around the synonym roll, they write synonyms they could use to replace it.  Personally, I would laminate these, keep them in a roll pan or file to let students sift through them while trying to write.

Are you doing anything new or innovative in your classroom?  Share it with us on our blog, facebook, or twitter page, or send us an email.  We’d love to feature what our teachers are doing on an upcoming blog.

Comments (2)Add Comment
Teacher
written by Kim Britton, November 08, 2012

Sticky notes are great! I use them as fun vocab review. Put the word on one, definition on another, and an example on the last one. Pass them out and make the students find their match. It is a great review that gets students moving and thinking!
Spice up!
written by research writer, September 25, 2012

This can really help students so spice up their studies. Fun while learning.

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