To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, over 500 teachers worldwide have pledged to go paperless in their classrooms for the day.
Here's a link to the original call.
Here's the place to pledge.
Here's a spreadsheet of teachers who have pledged.
And here's a handful of posts written by folks taking the paperless challenge:
EdTech Workshop
Web 2.0 for ESL
Just One Teacher
Musings 365
SMS Tigertalk
Getting Comfortable Teaching with Technology
Earthcast 2010
Thanks for all your words and actions.
Bake: Almond-Cardamom Cake
-
Recipe blogs where there’s 16 pages of diary entry for a 20 line recipe are
so annoying, aren’t they? I’ll endeavor to do this right. First off, I’ll
say t...
Let us make our school pull the plug on all copier machine.........
ReplyDeleteDance Teachers almost always instruct their classes without using paper! Have your students ever used movement to explore any topics in the academic subject/s you teach? Have your students used movement to conduct experiments in any of your classes-(goof offing off doesn't count)? Do your students regularly have the opportunity to work in small groups, or with a partner, or alone, to demonstrate through movement what they have learned about a topic? If so, how did they learn to do this? Was it your idea or theirs? Were you involved in facilitating the learning process through movement to begin with? Does your whole class ever explore any topics using movement in your classroom with your guidance, or is this an option that is only suggested from time to time for "home study" (enrichment), or as a project option-or have you never suggested such a thing be tried for any reason, inside or outside of class?
ReplyDeleteOne of my former students was hired specifically to teach high school physics through movement in a highly competitive private school in Ohio, and though my own experience in using movement in academic subjects areas is k-5, I know there are lots of people "out there"-somewhere-doing more of this all the time-and not everyone is a dancer or former dancer or choreographer, or even a particularly "fit" and coordinated person! You don't have to be because your job is to Facilitate the process-and to do that, you shouldn't have to be moving around very much yourself. You have to ask questions and watch carefully, and ask more questions, and stay open to the idea that the "solution" or final product may not be what you imagined-if it works-it works! (It's fun to ask your class why something "works" and why it doesn't-the resulting discussion can be very illuminating on a number of levels)!
If a movement study doesn't quite work, or is a complete disaster, why? Sometimes you just need to ask more questions to help the students clarify for themselves what the problem or assignment really is, or where they might have gotten off track!
If you want to brainstorm about this way of teaching, contact me! I love to think of new ways to incorporate what my students are learning in their academic subjects into my primary level dance classes, but it's fun to me to brainstorm with students and teachers at other grade levels too.
Your goal is to get to a place where you feel you are not having to do very much except just that, because the students obviously "get it".