December, 2010 Blog -- Holiday Break: A time to reflect and reenergize!

[Greg Timmons]

Season’s Greetings to you all! As you wind down your classes for the upcoming holidays, I’m sure you are looking forward to well-deserved time with family and friends. The holiday break is also a good time to recharge the batteries and be thinking ways to help your student excel in the second half of the school year. As you know, there are a multitude of great resources on active learning strategies on the Internet. In this month’s blog, I am featuring three websites I recently came across that offer different things for teachers at different levels of interest and experience. The links are embedded in the text. Keeping in mind that the upcoming holiday break is your time, I hope you will find an opportunity to review these sites during your holiday break. If not, have a Happy Holiday season and perhaps you can explore them sometime later in the year.

 

Inspiring Teachers.com:This website features several departments with useful tips for all members of the education community—young teachers, veteran and mentor teachers, administrators as well as parents and students. The site also offers professional resources such as webinars, continuing education information and classroom resources.

In the “Classroom Resources” tab is a great article by Jeri Asaro writing about “Great Active Learning Strategies” where she provides nearly three dozen easy to apply strategies to incorporate active learning strategies into your class instruction. The beauty of these is that they don’t require you to do anything different then you do now. These strategies can be quickly implemented prior to giving a reading assignment, lecture or homework. They’re intended to help pique students interest and get their thinking going.

 

Active Learning Online: The Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence in Abilene, Texas, produced this website which is totally devoted to the study, understanding and implementation of active learning. The site provides information on the basics of active learning, resources, testimony of teachers’ experiences as well as resources for applying active learning strategies in the classroom and in online courses. Of particular interest are strategies for the classroom on comprehension, application, and problem solving. Many of these have video demonstrations included.

 

Center for Teaching and Learning: The Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota has a great site on the finer points of classroom instruction. The Center believes scholarly teaching leads to transformational learning and has made a commitment to promote exceptional teaching and learning. The website offers a plethora of information on active learning. Of particular interest are the links on active learning on the “Online Teaching Resources” tab featuring active learning and the “Online Self-Paced Tutorials” tab l featuring a myriad of selections on techniques such as effective ways to incorporate PowerPoint into an active learning classroom, designing smart lectures that actively engage students. On another section, “Scenes from the Classroom,” helps viewers confront the realities of active learning. The left hand menu board takes you through several video scenarios of issues teachers face implementing active learning strategies. The website’s contributors update the content, so new information comes on periodically.

 

I hope you will have an opportunity on your upcoming break to take a look at any of these web resources and get some solid ideas and techniques to implement in your classroom in the New Year. And if you find anything interesting you’d like to share with other members of the Teacher’s center please write in to this blog or post your thoughts on our Forum page. Happy Holidays!