Week 1 Online Masters In Education
This is a link I found on Pinterest. It's a compilation of some of the best websites for teachers that are extremely useful. It has websites for all teachers, from Preschool all the way up to High School. Many of the websites are blogs that have tons of information and insight as to how a teacher conducts their classroom and with links to sources they've found useful.
Week 2 Morphing into a 21st Century Teacher
It's a visual flow chart that shows 27 characteristics of a 21st century teacher. I thought it was interesting because it gives 27 different words and applies them to the education world and gives educators ways to apply these words into their teaching style. It has some great ideas and even some good reminds that we might forget about when creating our lessons for our students.
Week 3 How Important is Differentiation in Language Teaching?
I thought this puts an interesting emphasis on differentiation in the classroom. It talks about how differentiation may be more beneficial to older students, whereas younger students in elementary school may not need as much differentiation due to their implicit learning skills.
Week 4 How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement
This is an interesting article about how poverty specifically affects students in the classroom. We all know poverty affects children, but this article touches on seven specific things that are different for low-income students. Health and nutrition, vocabulary, effort, hope and growth mind-set, cognition, relationships, and distress are all major factors that can negatively affect a students success in the classroom. This article helps identify these factors and gives suggestions on how to overcome them.
Week 5 Paper Plate Clock 
This is a simple and easy way to make a clock to help kids learn how to tell time. Even if you don't teach elementary school lots of foreign langauge classrooms teach this skill. I was looking for pre-made clocks for me to use in my classroom, but this is an easier and probably cheaper way. It's great for teaching time in another language and for reinforcing telling time with an analog clock.
Week 8 Board Game to Learn Compound Preterite Tense
Really great game I found to help with the compound preterite tense. I can't wait to try this in my own classroom.
Week 11 Pesca!
This is a fun game I found, but you actually purchase it through Teachers Pay Teachers. I'm finding there's a lot of activities available on Teachers Pay Teachers and it may be very worthwhile to subscribe and pay for some of these plans. This is a fun game that works the same as Go Fish, there's matching pairs of cards with adjectives and the students play the card game just like the regular card game. You can also use the cards for a matching game or Pictionary or Charades, very versatile!
Week 12 How to Integrate Tech without Losing Your Mind
This is a great article I found through Pinterest on how not to become overwhelmed by trying to integrate technology into your classroom. It gives some great tips on how to tell when something is working and when it's not, and when it's worth it to persevere through the difficulties to make something work in your classroom. It's really a must read for teachers who aren't sure where to begin when it comes to starting to use technology in education.
Week 13 Teaching Emotions in Spanish
This fun activity utilizes pumpkins and drawing faces to help students learn the emotions in Spanish. This blogger also mentions a good book she uses in her classroom to teach the emotions. It also has a free printable worksheet you can download and use for your own.
Week 14 Infographic: Next-Gen Language Learning
This is an interesting infographic that has some great facts about language learning for the next generation and what's to come.
Week 15 Google Docs 101
This article has some great tips on how to use google apps best, what features to take advantage of, and how they work. It also has links to courses on how to use different google features such as presentations, spreadsheets and forms.
Week 6 12 Choices to Help you Step Back from Burnout
This article addresses the topic we all like to avoid. Burnout. Many teachers burn out and every year teachers leave the profession because of the stress and work load. Here's an article with tips on how we can all take a step back, look at our situation and and avoid burning out.
Week 7 Using Gaming Principles to Engage Students
I thought this was a really interesting article about using the principles of gaming to help engage students in the classroom. It didn't just talk about using games in the classroom, but rather talked about using the things in a game that engage students and putting them into our work and activities we do. For example it talked about how games often provide multiple paths towards the end goal so each player completes the game in their own unique way but ultimately gets to the same end. The articles talks about how teachers should do the same and make their activities and projects with more room for experimentation, allow students to get to the end result in different ways and this helps students be more engaged because they can each have their own unique experience of learning on the way to the end result.
Week 8 Creating a "Least Restrictive Environment" with Mobile Devices
This is a really interesting article about the possibilities that we can offer our students using mobile devices. Usually the words "least restrictive environment" are used when talking about students with special needs or that need an alternative learning environment, but this article redefines the term to be used when talking about using technology with students. The article argues that by not providing our students with more mobile and technology based learning we are restricting our students. By using more mobile devices we can create a "least restrictive environment" for all of our students and increase the likelihood of their success.
Week 9 Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain
Very interesting article and interview with the Zaretta Hammond, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, about cultural responsive teaching. She defines cultural responsive in a new way and talks about how her book can help teachers come up with new strategies to reach all students. She goes beyond the usual definition and also talks about the science behind how culture affects learning. Its a refreshing new look at cultural responsiveness and might be worth a read.
Week 11 The Importance of a Classroom Library
This article stresses the importance of reading in the classroom and how a teacher can have such a great influence on their students reading. The article not only talks about it, but gives ideas on how to incorporate it into lessons and the every day classroom. The article also identifies different types of reading students you'll find at a school and stresses how important it is to engage all readers, from ones who actively seek out books to those who are only comfortable reading in school.
Week 12 Reflection on 1:1 Chromebook Implementation
This is a great article written by a principal of a middle school who has recently implemented Chromebooks in their school. He has some great insight on what you can expect, what kind of expectations you should go in with, and some other ideas on how you can best support your staff when you begin a new technology integration system such as this. It's a very interesting article and I like that it's his reflections on how this is all going and he is able to look back on their expectations versus the reality of it.
Week 13 April Fool's Day in the Classroom
This fun article has some good ideas on how a teacher can have some fun in the classroom on April Fool's Day. The article contains 8 resources along with some tips and strategies.
Week 14 Coding in the Classroom: A Long-Overdue Inclusion
Interesting article about how important coding is to have in the classroom. The article addresses how it technology will affect the U.S. in 5-10 years. The article also addresses how coding in the classroom can be a great advantage to adults and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. There a lot of great information in here and the author makes a good argument as to why it's so important to start teaching coding.
Week 15 Hangouts on Air: Connecting Teachers with Content Experts
This article has some interesting information on how schools can use google hangouts to benefit teachers and provide some good professional development (PD) or connect them with experts in their field. One unique use this article mentions is using google hang outs for snow day PD to help teachers keep up with PD when schools have a lot of snow days.
Week 6 5 Lessons for Staying Sound
Interesting article about "staying sound" and recharging. The author reminds teachers that they need to make time for themselves and reenergize every once in a while. The author gives five tips and ways she keeps herself sound, and includes some good advice. It's important for teachers to make time for themselves and it's something most forget. But unless teachers take time to recharge and relax, they will not be able to perform at their best, so this article is in the best interest of both their students and the teachers themselves.
Week 7 7 Tips for Successful Collaboration
I found this article really interesting because it talks not only about collaborating with your co-workers in the school, but it talks about it in a new way. The article comes from teachers who have been working together for decades where they share a cohort of students in their English and Social Studies classrooms. They teach the same block of students together, for two or three periods in a row in the subjects of English and Social Studies. The teachers talk about how this model has been successful and gives tips to create your own successful cohort like theirs. I was especially interested in this article because I experienced this type of learning myself at my own high school. Two teachers worked together to teach English and Social studies, they shared a classroom and taught Social Studies and English together. Since I have experienced this idea and know it works, I thought it'd be interesting to read about the behind the scenes and see what it takes to make this a successful endeavor.
Week 8 Using Google Docs
This teacher talks about the great benefits of using Google Docs in a classroom and how it helps the collaborative writing process. She also talks about how it fits into the new Common Core Standards.
Week 9 Classroom Culture
Interesting article on classroom culture. In an intro to this topic the author wrote about how she thinks classroom culture is different from classroom chemistry. She talks about how classroom culture is something that teachers need to cultivate and work hard at creating one for their students. In the article there are videos and strategies to help teachers begin to cultivate good classroom culture in their own classroom.
Week 11 Integrating Art & Science
This teacher seamlessly integrates art and science in one lesson and allows students to make claims, support them with evidence and providing reasoning for their claims. She does a great job including the Common Core into her lesson and has the students use all their previously learned knowledge to talk about art.
Week 12 Collaboration
This article not only talks about collaboration between teachers, but it talks about how these two teachers are able to challenge their students and make them think at a higher level. It talks about a unit two teachers did on the Harlem Renessaince, but the trick is, these two teachers aren't in the same school. They work together and meet to plan, but don't have the added benefit of being able to directly see each others work. This blog talks about the great work these two teachers are doing and the video that's included has some great ideas for other teachers.
Week 13 Sharing Lessons to Shift Practice
Great article about teachers sharing lesson plans they've created, or teachers using lessons others have created. This article gives four examples of teachers using others lessons and adapting them to their classrooms. The article has some great ideas on how to make others lessons work for your classroom, and also supplies you with some websites to got to where you can find others lessons, rubrics, standard-aligned lessons, etc.
Week 14 Three Strategies to Support Gifted Students
This is a great article that talks about how teachers can support gifted students. There's a lot of emphasis on supporting students with special needs, or students in urban populations who lack motivation or resources, but it's just as important to think about students who are gifted and need a little bit more in school. This article comes from a teacher who has been teaching for 18 years and has been working specifically with gifted students. She gives tips on how to pull these students out of their comfort zone, and help them explore and think about new things.
Week 15 Four Tools to Improve Communication Between Home and School
Interesting article on how to help teachers and parents communicate better and more frequently. While some of the apps concern me because they begin to infringe on teachers personal time, I can see how many of these programs and applications can help these two groups of people stay in contact about their children and students.
miscellaneous
Week 7 Scratch Weekly Round-Up (Scratch.mit.edu)
Interesting link that contains a weekly update on what's new in the Scratch world and what people are talking about. There's links from every week, and lots of new information every time, from videos to articles.
Week 8 Writing about Shopping in Spanish (found through Pinterest but is on throwawayyourtextbook.com)
Really cute blog and interesting idea on how to work with both the preterite tense and vocabulary. Allows the students to both be artistic, creative and productive.
Week 9 5 Big Ways Education Will Change by 2020 (Fast Company)
Really interesting predicting the changes to come in the education field and discusses how technology will help shape it.
Week 11 It's time for Google to Clean up Chrome's Web Store
Interesting article about Google Chrome and their web store. I don't spend much time on their web store, but I use Chrome every day so I thought Id take a look at the article. I learned a few things from reading this article so I thought I'd share. For example, I didn't know Google was trying to make Chrome it's own platform. Lots of information and an interesting take on what companies are doing to try to make themselves more successful and useful for all users.
