For the past few years, I have focused my energies on supporting teachers who are creating assessments, both formative and summative, which target student’s higher order thinking skills. Oftentimes, as I was creating an exemplar to showcase to teachers, I turned to Discovery Education for content to use in the sample assessment. Discovery Education includes
March 2020: Celebrating Pi Day
3.1415926535897932384626433832795 What is it about pi that makes it so intriguing? Is it the fact it never ends? Is it the fact we all remember the formula we learned in math class and still use when we are sewing, or creating a playground, or simply drawing a circle? Pi is the ratio of the circumference
February 2020: I love the #DEN
The use of social media is commonplace for educators nowadays. I interact daily with teachers on Twitter, which is my social network of choice. I monitor each person that follows me and make sure they are educators that are going to be interested in the things I post about. I think the most important component
January 2020: Questioning skills to support design thinking
There are hundreds of visual models of the design thinking process on the Web. They all include similar components as illustrated below. The first step in the design thinking process, empathizing, requires students to identify a problem or process from the point of view of the intended audience. Developing this empathetic mindset requires asking
December 2019: My 20/20 Vision
This past year, 2019, has been an exciting year! The use of new technologies in the classroom have exploded. The number of new tools, apps, and sites to support the embedding of augmented and virtual reality in the classroom have become a hot topic of discussion. And the new devices and tools for coding have
November 2019: Teaching perspective to build empathy
Empathy is defined, as per the Teaching Tolerance site, as “the understanding of, or the ability to identify with, another person’s feelings or experiences”. This ability to put oneself in another’s shoes does help students build empathy and tolerance toward others. There are some great ideas online and in the Discovery Education Streaming resources to
October 2019: Virtual field trips
Face it, we all love field trips! Getting out of the school and visiting an historic site or attending a performance is fun for everyone! Well, maybe not for everyone. Having chaperoned fifteen, four-day trips to Washington, DC with eighth-graders, I can attest, while exciting and fun, it was also exhausting! With today’s budget constraints
September 2019: Classroom centers to support learning
I did my student teaching in a second grade classroom at the Knollwood Elementary School in Piscataway, NJ in the spring of 1979. I was big into learning centers and spent a lot of time with Imogene Forte’s bulletin board books. I traced and cut out images for many activities for centers in all the
August 2019: Best of the Katch
As I approach the end of my seventh year (and 84 posts) on Kathy’s Katch, I decided to look back and highlight some of my favorite posts. As you grab those last days of summer vacation, remember how far we have come with meaningful technology use in the classroom. A big thank you to Discovery
July 2019: Web-ulous tools, part 3
Every couple of years, I share my favorite online tools, like I did in November 2017 and March 2014. In this post, I am going to concentrate on tools to support Creative Commons image usage. I am not specifically going to cover the process of searching for CC images , but how to make sure