The School Principal Blog

2009 was a solid year for educational releases, and the first year where many of the bestselling educational resources on Amazon.com were books for the Kindle. Here is a closer look at ten of the bestsellers on Amazon.com:

1. Empowering Online Learning: 100+Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing by Ke Zhang.

While this volume is catered towards exclusive online learning, the basic concepts it relays concerning content delivery online for different learning types can be utilized by educators who wish to supplement the classroom with digital content.

2. You Can Do It: How to Boost Your Child’s Achievement in School by Michael E. Bernard

You Can Do It is a parent’s resource first and foremost, but teachers can also benefit from a read. The book is particularly adept at offering advice on curtailing small problems before they become serious school performance issues.

3. Content Matters: A Disciplinary Literacy Approach to Improving Student Learning by Anthony M. Petrosky

This book outlines an instruction framework developed by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. It will prove a particularly good resource for teachers concerned with preparing junior high and high school students for a college education.

4. Wikiworld by Juha Suoranta and Tere Vaden

Wikiworld focuses on the course learning has taken in recent years with a particular emphasis on new types of critical learning and open collaboration (as in a wiki).

5. The Writing Teacher’s Lesson a Day: 180 Reproducible Prompts and Quick-Writes for the Secondary Classroom by Mary Ellen Ledbetter

Even the best teacher needs a little help sometimes, and this book provides the writing teacher with all of the prompts needed to keep high school students busy!

6. Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt

The larger problems facing both educating and learning, especially within the context of modern education, are addressed in this book. It offers pointed advice for the crafting and utilization of engaging and educational online communities.

7. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Books to help students structure research papers and other school assignments are a must. This Kindle Edition of a classic resource was an educational bestseller.

8. See It. Say It. Do It! The Parent’s & Teacher’s Action Guide to Creating Successful Students & Confident Kids by Dr. Lynn F. Hellerstein

This book’s main focus is on encouraging the use of visualization and imagery skills children already possess to help them, as students, grasp numerous types of learning challenges.

9. Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments by Derek Bruff

This book emphasizes creative ways to use the “clicker” technology that is popular in colleges and universities. Beyond this basic premise though, the book is an effective idea board for interactive teaching.

The Classroom Teacher’s Survival Guide: Practical Strategies, Management Techniques and Reproducibles for New and Experienced Teachers by Ronald L. Partin

This new edition of “Teacher’s Survival Guide contains new information on inquiry-based learning and much more. It also features special web-access to additional supplemental materials for the teacher.

The ten best sellers featured here come from several different Educational subheadings. Many of the more popular books this year were Kindle editions, but a Kindle does not have to be owned to enjoy the books. Several feature hard copy versions and a PC version of the Kindle reader is available for free download for Kindle only books.

While the thought of Facebook as a learning tool might elicit some skepticism, savvy students are discovering uses for the ubiquitous social media site beyond trading gossip and playing games. In fact, Facebook offers an array of applications geared to student needs. Web tools like Do Research 4 Me, Wikiseek Search, and JSTOR Search take the tedium and legwork out of researching term papers. Applications are available for homework assistance, forming virtual study groups, finding the best deals on textbooks, and of course Rate My Professors.

Teachers are getting aboard the Facebook bandwagon and establishing accounts of their own, finding it an effective bridge beyond the classroom, freeing them of late night calls from frantic pupils and parents seeking last-minute information on the week’s spelling words or a project due the next day. Facebook also fills a crucial gap as a forum for providing homework guidance and lesson-extending tutorials that may be lacking for latch-key kids. When Facebook is integrated into the learning environment, it helps create a safe online community that parents can feel confident about.

Facebook even provides opportunities for parent involvement through online interaction in a platform that is flexible enough to fit even the busiest schedule. As a conduit for communication it helps build teacher-student-parent relationships beyond the constraints of classroom walls and school schedules, and it does so in a way that is non-intrusive and non-threatening. A parent who dreads the idea of attending a parent-teacher conference after a long day of work and putting a meal on the family table is likely to relish being able to conduct a meeting at their fingertips. In this manner, Facebook creates new opportunities for dialogue between teachers, parents and students, spanning generational, geographic, and cultural distances. When students see that teachers are willing to “speak their language” and use the tools of their generation, amazing connections can occur.

Do you think Facebook has a role in education? Leave your comments below.

This post has been republished from the Intand Blog.

The state of Virgina has implemented a pilot program to use a math video game called DimensionM, which uses 3-D graphics and math orientated missions, to teach algebra. In 2008, the University of Central Florida conducted a study of students who played the game and concluded that it improved students’ understanding and significantly raise test scores.

According to eSchool News:

Students in the experimental groups who played Tabula Digita video games over an 18-week period scored significantly higher (in some cases, twice as high) on district benchmark tests than students in the control group who did not play video games, researchers said.

Also, four out of five teachers (and all 15 students) who were interviewed reported that students’ math understanding and skills improved as a result of playing the educational video games.

Often video games are given a bad name, but they also have the potential to increase learning if used in an educational way. I have heard anecdotes of schools in Japan issuing the Nintendo DS to students and there are many educational games available on the iPod touch that can exercise the mind or improve vocabulary. One of the reasons that video games can help learning is that it is fun and engaging for students. Also, games often have specific goals that must be accomplished to win, which can motivate students to keep trying until they successfully solve problems. This can build student’s resiliency when they can’t solve a problem on the first try, which author Malcom Gladwell argues is an important component of educational performance. Gladwell argues in the book Outliers, that one of the main reasons Asian students score better in math tests is because they have been ingrained with the habit to keep trying, a trait that is generally less present in American students. It seems that video games may not rot the brain after all.

photo by hiperia3d

Often times it can be very helpful for parents to be able to sync the school calendar with their personal calender, such as Google Calendar, iCal, Cozi, or Outlook. Tandem for Schools is an online school calendar that can export information into these personal calendars.

Caitlin DiMare-Oliver writes over at Type-A Mom:

“Cozi has a great, friendly interface that’s incredibly easy to use. Appointments can be color-coded to represent each family member - or all family members. You can even add your kid’s school calendars so that events are updated and added automatically if your school publishes their calendar to Tandem for Schools.Talk about convenient!”

“Talk about convenient” is right! We know that, many times, the most important events on a families’ calendar revolve around the school. We are excited to provide an easy way for families to get the key school events they need on their online calendar, be that Cozi, Google or whatever digital calendar they choose to use.

An Digital Education blog at education week post describes a district in San Diego that is using virtual courses to supplement traditional classes and provide courses that aren’t available.

A couple of days ago I met with a San Diego school official to get a demonstration of the district’s new virtual school, iHigh. So far, 200 students are taking courses, and 30 are doing so full-time, through iHigh. The district gives each student a Netbook with a built-in Internet card that allows them to access the online campus and courses at their own pace. They are in touch with teachers electronically after an in-person orientation. The teachers make assignments, review the students’ work, and monitor their progress through the portal.

Virtual courses can be a good tool to challenge students to learn how to learn on their own, which can prepare students for college or the new digital workplace where more people work virtually. I like that it allows students to go at their own pace, which can be rewarding and motivating by helping students see the progress they are making. It can also be helpful to students who have difficulty in a traditional classroom settings. The downside may be that if students take all their classes virtually they may not have the opportunity to build people skills that are also important to have in the work world and in life.

Photo credit

How do we get children to embrace change and increase the desire for life long learning? How do we get children to play with building and creating knowledge? This is an excellent video of John Seely Brown, the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation and a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at USC.

One of his points that really resonates with me is that the best way to learn is to teach. Having students teach other students can be a very powerful approach teaching that can be utilized more in the classroom. He also talks about fostering imagination and its importance in learning. I think that effective teachers, not only demonstrate imagination in their lessons, but also encourage students to constantly exercise the imagination part of their brains.

This is an inspiring video urging support for improving education under the Obama administration. It is part of the Will We Really? campaign launched by The Forum for Education & Democracy which promotes “a public education system worthy of a democracy, one characterized by strong public schools, equity of educational resources, and an informed, involved citizenry.”

Sir Ken Robinson discusses how our modern educational system can kill creativity. Most children are educated in the same way they have been for the past 100 years. Usually students sit in a class and listen to a lecture by the teacher and then are expected to prove that they learned what they were supposed to by answering a set of multiple choice questions.

Instead of learning to optimize their individual gifts, school typically makes kids into generalists who are good at everything, but not great at anything. Robinson also points out that students are taught to not take risk because they are afraid to make mistakes.