Power Up Your Classroom

Learn to design learning experiences that leverage gameplay to increase motivation and engagement, while building classroom community. By the time Lindsey Blass and Cate Tolnai’s paths crossed, both had taken a path from teacher to coach to central/county office roles focused on innovative learning design, all while noticing three trends that extended beyond their classrooms: students who weren’t able to own and connect to their learning experience became disengaged; students and teachers alike had a general fear of failure; and teachers were perplexed at how to design learning experiences that fostered student choice and celebrated failure as an opportunity for iteration. Together, they began to ask … what if? What if we designed learning experiences that leveraged the power of gameplay to create more motivated learners? What if we modeled this type of learning with educators so they could experience the impact firsthand and spread the excitement and innovation in their classrooms? What if learning was fun for both students and teachers? This book: • Includes visual elements that model the theme of engaging in a game with tips, hints and suggestions sprinkled throughout the chapters. • Features a downloadable full-color game board that can be used in tandem with the book. • Provides access to an accompanying website that offers dynamic elements and book study questions. • Features the voices of experts and innovators in the fields of gamification and game-based learning. With a uniquely fun and inviting format, Power Up Your Classroom helps educators implement gamification and game-based learning in their classes to drive student engagement and learning.

Wherever you are on the path to 1:1 teaching and learning, you need a guide that can help you make the best use of the powerful technology available in today's classrooms. In Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning, Diana Neebe and Jen Roberts draw on research and their extensive experience working with teachers across subject areas and grade levels to share the keys to success when teaching with a computer or tablet for every student. This is the book secondary teachers need to understand the changes in pedagogy, planning, classroom organization, time management, and collaboration that will help them be successful in a 1:1 environment. Whether providing immediate and detailed feedback to student writers, giving voice to quiet learners, or creating more time for actual work in a jam-packed school day, Neebe and Roberts show teachers how communication, differentiation, and other effective practices can be powered up with personalized technology. Throughout the book, Neebe and Roberts coach teachers through their initial concerns about technology integration, offer advice about avoiding common problems, and encourage innovation. Using detailed classroom examples, questions, and suggestions, they provide a framework for shaping the transformation of a traditional classroom into a student-centered, technology-rich learning environment. Readers will come away with a clear sense of how a fully implemented 1:1 classroom operates. Power Up makes the transition to 1:1 a manageable and exciting journey. It's a key part of supporting teachers and ensuring the success of your 1:1 program.

Based on the methods of the New York City Library Power Program, this is a practical handbook for revitalizing or rebuilding the school library. Putting the many facets of the media specialist's professional life into the context of a flexibly scheduled, collaboratively planned teaching program, the book offers simple strategies for effecting positive change. It covers such topics as the librarian's role as teacher, programming, assessment, collection development, facilities, technology, the library budget, support staff, and public relations. Written for the school library media specialist who has or plans to have a library that conforms to today's vision of an effective school library media program, this book places the library media center at the heart of the school's educational program and shows how to position the library as the catalyst for school reform.

Ready to go far beyond the usual classroom book collection to make your library a dynamic support for all your literacy teaching? In this practical, one-of-a-kind book, two veteran educators show you how to use your library as: A resource for mini-lessons on book selection, author's craft, comprehension strategies and other literacy lessons. A source for interactive read-alouds. An extension of your shared-reading and guided-reading instruction. A motivating place for students' independent reading in many genres. A gallery of student book responses, recommendations, and student-authored works. And much more!

The entire town of Up Yonder joins in to help their favorite teacher clean up her messy classroom.

In Powering Up Children: The Learning Power Approach to primary teaching, Guy Claxton and Becky Carlzon harness the design principles of the Learning Power Approach (LPA) to provide a rich resource of effective teaching strategies for use in the primary school classroom. Foreword by Ron Berger. The LPA is a way of teaching which aims to develop all children as confident and capable learners ready, willing, and able to choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others, in school and out. This approach therefore empowers teachers to complement their delivery of content, knowledge, and skills with the nurturing of positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish in later life. Building upon the foundations carefully laid in The Learning Power Approach (ISBN 9781785832451), the first book in the Learning Power series, Guy Claxton and Becky Carlzon's Powering Up Children embeds the ideas of this influential method in the context of the primary school. It offers a thorough explanation of how the LPA's design principles apply to this level of education and, by presenting a wide range of practical strategies and classroom examples, illustrates how they can be put into action with different age groups and in different curricular areas especially relating to literacy and numeracy, but also in specific subjects such as science, history, art, and PE. Bursting with tips and techniques to get students' learning muscles stretching from a young age, the book is designed for busy primary school teachers who want to get started on the LPA journey as well as for those who have already made good progress and are looking for fresh ideas. The central chapters are structured around thematic clusters of the LPA's design principles, and follow a common format: 1. First, the authors explain why the design principles focused on are important; including what's in it for the teacher and what's in it for the children. 2. Next, they offer a menu of practical low-risk tweaks to classroom practice that enable teachers to engage with the design principles and experience some quick wins. 3. Then they provide some ideas about how to embed the principles more deeply in the ongoing life of the classroom including some rich lesson examples from across the primary age range, and from different school subjects. 4. Finally, they address some of the common bumps and issues that may crop up along the way, and offer advice to help teachers overcome such potential obstacles. Suitable for both newly qualified and experienced teachers of learners aged 3 to 11.

This book comes at the right time with answers for teachers, principals, and schools who want to be on the cutting edge of the effective use of technology, the internet, and teacher pedagogy.