Vanderbilt Center for Teaching

I have to share that the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching website is amazing! I stumbled upon it as I was looking for ideas for my end of year student feedback survey. There are so many excellent ideas on this website. One aspect of fascination for me at the moment is mindfulness in the classroom, and they have a great section devoted to that topic. This site is intended for new teachers, but there is such a wealth of information teachers, regardless of how far they are in their careers, could find something to inspire them with ideas for their classrooms. Enjoy!

Favorite Online Resources

The 'Information Age' is a great time to be a teacher! I have been working on exposing myself to new avenues for teaching ideas, and here are some of my favorites right now:

Pinterest

Not just for recipes! (Although it IS great for recipes.) The selective teacher can get great ideas for his or her classroom. Some of my favorite Pinterest finds are close reading ideas, simple classroom management fixes, and graphic organizers. You can view my "School Stuff" Pinterest board here.

Facebook

Facebook, really? Actually, I follow some great resources on Facebook such as Edutopia, NPR, PBS, and more. Facebook has a new function: you can save links that you like from your newsfeed so that you can come back to them later. I have come across great articles to use in class via Facebook. 

Edutopia

I discovered Edutopia through Facebook. Some of my teacher friends on Facebook kept sharing links from Edutopia, and I started following the page as well. -Tons of great ideas for K-12 teachers. One blog post with great reminders for all educators is "5 Highly Effective Teaching Practices." I find that having access to new teaching ideas daily keeps me extra thoughtful professionally, which leads me to doing things in my classroom that I am really proud of. 

Newsela

My direct coworker introduced me to Newsela, and it is fabulous! If you are looking to differentiate reading in your classroom, this is a great way to do it. Although, SIRS also lists the lexile level with their articles, Newsela is curated like a news website, so students can easily browse or search their website. It is less intimidating than a database like SIRS, so it is useful for casual research or younger students. Also, SIRS does list the lexile, but Newsela articles are actually rewritten by staff writers to lower lexiles than the original articles.

So, those are my four favorite teacher info. avenues of the moment. I have recently joined Twitter and Google Plus. I have followed a bunch of education websites, associations, educators, administrators, and educational speakers on Twitter. I have done this very recently, so I can't comment in depth on the professional merits of Twitter. My first impression is that it is a tool for self promotion and that other platforms, where I have more control over what I am seeing, might be more useful to my needs. I have yet to scratch the surface with Google Plus; I am hopeful that it will meet the professional connection aspect that I thought Twitter would have.