Ditch That Textbook Podcast :: Education, teaching, edtech :: #DitchPod

I'm at the TCEA conference in Austin, Texas! There's a lot to learn here. In this episode, I share several of my key takeaways from the first day.

Many times, when we see the cool things that teachers are doing with Google products, we might assume that the same things can't be done with Microsoft. But that's not necessarily the case! Scott Titmas Share some of his favorite tips and tricks for making Microsoft products work for you in the classroom.

teachers love to have choices in their professional development as much as students love to have choices in their learning! In this episode, Stacy Saia shares how her school district is giving teachers choice and how they learn professionally -- and how they are reaping great rewards from it.

So many of our students are fascinated with social media. any mention of one of their favorite apps can instantly grab their attention. We can pull elements of social media into our learning activities to engage those students! In a recent post on the Ditch That Textbook blog, We shared several templates and websites that can help you accomplish that!

In so many schools around the United States and the world, we see a wide variety of native languages. Providing support to students and their families in their own language can pay great dividends in student learning. The Microsoft translator app lets educators connect with students and their families in their native languages and a wide variety of circumstances. In this episode, I share four plac...

Understanding how the brain works and learns can help us teach and our students learn with more power. Understanding that each student's brain doesn't learn the same way is important, too. In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond, she shares how we can understand culture, how it is wired into our students' brains, and how we can reflect that in our teaching.

When we learn how the brain prefers to learn, We can learn smarter instead of harder. I got so much valuable information and insight from the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zarretta Hammond. in it, she talks about how we can teach in a way that recognizes all students in our classes and optimizes learning for their brains. in this episode, I share her insights on the three ph...

When students take activities home to do, sometimes they struggle. Sometimes the parents struggle! To add a layer of assistance to your activities, you might try what Nate Ridgway calls the Flipgrid 5. It's an easy way to add a short instructional video to paper-based assignments that you give your students. You can learn more about it on his website, TeachingFromTheRidge.com.

Lots of students do media projects when they need music or sound effects to make them sound their best. The YouTube Audio Library is a great source of downloadable songs and sounds.

Quizizz is one of several formative assessment tools that teachers are using all around the world. After loading it up recently, I noticed a few newer features that really impressed me. in this episode, I'll tell you what those features are and why you should be excited about them, too.

We have so many mechanisms in our life to keep us from boredom. We check our phones. We listen to music and watch TV. But our brain likes to be bored! It does it's best thinking that way many times. I recently heard author Manoush Zomorodi talking about this idea on the Vrain Waves podcast and had to share some of my takeaways from it!

During the FETC Conference, there were lots of tools and apps shared in a variety of sessions. During the Tech Share Live, The four prisoners shared some of their favorites. In this episode, I have picked four of them that are super interesting to me!

When is the best time to do analytical work? Or administrative tasks? Or insight work? In his book When -- and in his keynote address at the FETC Conference -- author Dan Pink shared what science knows about how to optimize our day. There are fascinating takeaways from it for the classroom and for our daily lives.

Timing is important in so much that we do in schools, whether it's the start of the school day or when we do different types of academic work. In his keynote at the FETC conference, author Dan Pink shared how schools and education can make better decisions on when to do certain things in schools. his insights were fascinating, and I share a few of them in today's episode.

When designing our learning spaces, many times we think about going to Pinterest before we think about turning to research. In today's episode, The Space co-author Bob Dillon shares some practical things you can start doing right away to optimize your classroom for solid student learning.

If you use Google tools very often, you are probably familiar with the feature to make a copy. You can find it under the file menu. In Google Slides, there's a new feature. Make a copy of a slide presentation and only take the slides with you that you need. In today's episode, we hear how to do it and how you might be able to use it.

We all know the importance of building those close relationships with our students. But did you know that being close in proximity helps us develop relationships too? Neuroscience tells us that being in personal space, between two and four feet from a person, can help us develop relationships. How often do we take the time to communicate with our students on that personal level?

Flipgrid lets students respond to a topic or a prompt with a short video clip. Many times, teachers simply ask a question And have students respond to it. What if students recorded those video responses with a new twist? How can we look at those video responses through a different lens that lets students play a different part? I have a couple of ideas you can try!

Lots of teachers have seen great success with gamification. they incorporate the elements of games into their classrooms. If you haven't tried this and are thinking about it, you might be overwhelmed with getting started. You might worry that you don't have all of the pieces in place. In her book, Make Learning Magical, Tisha Richmond offers these two tips to encourage you to give it a try anyway.

It's so easy to get distracted by small tasks ... The kind of things that don't move the needle in the right direction in our lives. For me, that means emails, social media, meetings, and other things. It's important to keep the first thing as the first thing. This quote that I share in today's episode really reminded me to keep my priorities straight.

Have you heard some of the buzz about augmented reality and virtual reality? they are starting to make more and more of a presence in the classroom. During the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit, Jaime Donally shared some of her favorite apps and ideas for using augmented reality and virtual reality. In this episode, I share some of her suggestions so you can check them out yourself!

If you need to create quick tutorials or instructions for students or parents, You definitely need to check out Iorad. This app creates tutorials on the web, not as a video, so the creation process is really fast and it isn't as data intensive. Use these to give students differentiated instructions for activities and even to share with parents too.

When we only ask students a select few questions on a quiz or a test, it can lead to a game of gotcha. It's almost like we say, gotcha! I figured out what you didn't know! Instead, how can we create assessments that encourage students to show us what they know? in the last episode, I shared a couple of strategies to use. Today, I share two more.

When we give traditional quizzes and tests, it's easy to play a game of gotcha with students. By asking only a select few questions, we are penalizing students for what we caught them not knowing. Instead, we could be empowering them to show us what they do know. In this episode, I'll share a couple of strategies for making that shift on your assessments.

Memes have become so commonplace in social media and online. They can be a great learning tool! They can help students find the essence of what they're learning, expressing it with brevity and a bit of humor. Learn how to help students make memes quickly and easily using Google Drawings. This idea was shared in my presentation in the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit (DitchSummit.com).