Parents and teachers have been concerned with the increase of stress in their students’ lives. Leigh Ann Whittle of Edudemic visited Visitacion Valley Middle School to see their meditation program in action, and featured them in her post, An Effective Approach to Reduce Students’ Stress.
Whittle offers several meditation activities to try, as well as advice on how to implement a meditation program in your setting. Here are Edutopia’s four steps to implementing one:
Identify Key Problems Determine what behavior problems need to be addressed by meditation – this could be truancy, academics, traumatic experiences, etc.
Prepare for Implementation Inform yourself with relevant research to convince colleagues and parents of the benefits of a meditation program, and teach the faculty and students basic meditation techniques.
Determine How Meditation Time Will Be Spent Meditation time is quite time, but not inactive time – encourage students to find what relaxation techniques work best for them, whether it’s reading, drawing, or something else.
Adjust School Space and Schedule Accordingly Designate a specific space for meditation time, and adjust the school schedule to accommodate your new meditation program.
Meditation isn’t beneficial only to students – give these a try yourself (if you’re not using meditation techniques already), and share with your colleagues!
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? What comes first, curriculum or technology? This is the question proposed by Elise Ecoff on Edudemic. Technology integration is more than buying devices, “every school must first have a great, robust and adaptable academic curriculum,” Ecoff says. “Only then can you begin to find ways in which technology can help to elevate it. It’s important to never force fit technology.”
Think Curriculum Enhancements, Not Technology Implementations
Here are five ways to ensure you’re putting the curriculum before the technology:
1) Learn How Students Are Using Technology at Home
2) Don’t Use Technology for the Sake of Using Technology
3) Focus on Just One Tech Implementation
4) Utilize the SAMR Model
5) Actively Seek Out Professional Development Opportunities
So much of what students are creating in school these days is online rather than on paper. Instead of putting projects on refrigerators, how can we allow parents to still view these materials?
Digital portfolios, online repositories for student work, might be the answer.
“Because digital portfolios live online, parents can easily access them as well and see what their kids have accomplished throughout the year. Students can share them with each other, share them with family members, and even use them as a tool for college admissions.”
Edudemic recently had 5 tools that might help students create their digital portfolio:
Are you looking for plagiarism detection tools to pass onto your teachers? Look no further than Edudemic’s list of the 5 best! The tools are each detailed and reviewed with their good and bad qualities. Take a look at the list below to get an idea of the articles content:
TurnItIn
PlagiarismChecker.com
SafeAssign
Plagscan
The Plagiarism Checker
Do you have one that you like? Submit it in the comments and we’ll add it the list!
Image by Lulu Hoeller. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons' licensing.
Are you looking for lesson plans to help teach online research? Edudemic and Google to the rescue! Edudemic recently highlighted 15 lesson plans, courtesy of Google, designed to make students better online researchers. The lesson plans are organized by difficulty and meant to help students become better online searchers.
Want a quick overview? Check out this Lesson Plan Map first to see what they offer.
Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/opl8wqz, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Parents and teachers have been concerned with the increase of stress in their students’ lives. Leigh Ann Whittle of Edudemic visited Visitacion Valley Middle School to see their meditation program in action, and featured them in her post, An Effective Approach to Reduce Students’ Stress.
