The Pros and Cons of Rubrics

I read on Professor Maryellen Weimer’s excellent higher education teaching blog, The Teaching Professor, a post about a discussion college teachers were having about the pros and cons of using rubrics to grade student products.

It’s an interesting discussion and probably something you and your teaching colleagues have discussed before: do rubrics guide both teacher and student or do they limit student creativity and independent thinking?

Classroom Management: Always Have a Plan B

Yes, the unpredictable happens, but we can at least predict which types of events might occur. Fire drills, lock downs, drug dogs, power failures, tornado drills, bomb threats, hallway incidents, and an out-of-control student all unpredictable disruptions to your class. Even predictable disruptions like Homecoming events, assemblies, and club photo days can cause classroom chaos. How are you expected to teach when the power is out or half the class is in the yearbook room mugging for the camera?

Study Finds that Students Are the Digital Advance Team

If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.

Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs.

Federal Budget Lesson Plan: Online Interactive Game Lets Students Make Federal Budget Decisions

Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have created Budget Hero, an engaging online game that challenges users to balance the federal budget (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2008/05/budget_hero/). The game relies on numbers and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and offers users options for balancing the budget like cutting aid to foreign governments or increasing the retirement age to 67.

Pearl Harbor Lesson Plan

Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event.