8 ways feedback makes proficiencies work

Meet Grace Gilmour, and her proficiency-based classroom.

“Oh yay. I was like: yay, my heart.”

This was Grace Gilmour’s response to a student’s honest appraisal of her class: “I love it in here because I always feel like I know the next steps on the road to improving.”

Grace teaches social studies to 7th and 8th graders at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury, Vermont. Like teachers across the state, she has been working hard to implement proficiency based learning in her classroom.

If you ask her how it’s going, Grace will likely smile and whisper, “it’s working.”

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March 18, 2017April 29, 2022

4 more ways to help middle schoolers get organized

Helping students get organized

Middle schoolers’ lives are multi-faceted, dynamic and dramatic. And while we talk about how to grow self-directed, engaged and motivated students, that growth can’t take place while students are overwhelmed and anxious about managing their daily lives.

Last time, we looked at how to organize the tech itself. Now let’s look at how to use powerful tech tools (shiny!) to help make middle school manageable.

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March 7, 2016December 7, 2018

Google Tools for personal learning plans (PLPs)

A teacher-authored case study

Today we hear from a grade 5-6 team venturing into the world of personal learning plans (PLPs) using Google Tools.

Jared Bailey, math teacher, and Joy Peterson, English Language Arts teacher, provide concrete details on how they rolled out PLPs this year, including links to such resources as graphic organizers that they used for goal setting and an assignment (including rubric) on identity.

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February 29, 2016December 7, 2018

How does professional development affect technology integration?

The impact of PD in a 1:1 teaching environment

A trio of middle grades educators from Mill River Union High School, in Clarendon, Vermont, presented the results of their semester-long action research project, examining what role professional development plays in increasing the amount of time technology is integrated into the classroom in a 1:1 environment.

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February 17, 2016July 25, 2019

What are some good tools for studying hurricanes?

Science app-smashing in a 1:1 environment

Brendan Nerney, a middle grades educator at Mill River Union High School in Clarendon, Vermont, explains some of the edtech tools his students use to study hurricanes with their iPads. The students used a variety of edtech tools to produce a mock newscast documenting a hurricane and its aftermath.

Let’s look at some good tools for studying hurricanes.

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November 11, 2015November 11, 2015

How to save, edit and share video clips with your students

Part 2: sharing videos in Google Classroom, Drive, and YouTube

In Part 1, we looked at tools for finding and editing videos to share with your students. But once you’ve found and marked up videos with polls or questions or just a shot of your own sweet self in there, how do you share these videos with students?

Let’s look at three platforms for sharing: Google Classroom, Google Drive and YouTube.

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September 10, 2015May 21, 2025

L is for Learning Management System (LMS)

What can you do with an LMS?

LMS stands for Learning Management System. An LMS is an application for planning, delivering, managing, and assessing a learning process.

Likely, your school or district will choose which commercial LMS package to deploy (Canvas, Haiku, Schoology and Google Classroom are a few), but how you use it is entirely up to you.

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August 24, 2015October 12, 2015

D is for Digital Workflow

Digital workflow: What is it good for?

In its simplest form, digital workflow exchanges the paper and pencil transfer of information for a centralized digital system where information is pushed out, synthesized, analyzed, or created and returned to the teacher.

With the increasing popularity of 1:1 programs, or readily available access to technology, the form in which learning transfers between people, adults and students, looks slightly different than when I was in school. Additionally, the availability of free programs, such as Google Classroom, help to promote the cycle of information in an effective way.

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