Suppl_eMINTS

Five Things: Classroom Management/Website Enhancement

My original goal was to post in time for training sessions. However, with my crazy summer workload, this did not happen. So, I’ll promise to post something here right before or right after we meet.

Classroom Management
We cover this topic at the beginning of the year because it’s the most important thing to establish at the beginning of a school year. I know it’s cliched, but it’s true. Whatever sort of expectations, norms, or procedures you set in August and September will either carry you through the year or make you want to quit. So consider your management strategies carefully.

Five Things:

1. The difference between norms and rules – Norms are long-term behaviors that you want from your students. These are the practices that will make learning possible throughout the year and possibly beyond. Norms are what students should do. Rules, on the other hand, are typically restrictions handed down from a higher authority; in this case, it’s you. Norms help students know what they should do while rules restrict students with few options.
2. Students help set norms. – You can set the norms in your classroom by giving one or two that are very important to you. Then, let the students determine the rest of the norms. They might just surprise you and they’ll feel more ownership.
3. Spend a lot of time on procedures. – Spending a considerable amount of class time in the beginning on procedure will make it possible to spend more time on learning as the year moves along. Plan simple lessons or even games where students perform class procedures for no other reason than to make them more efficient, leaving more time for learning later on.
4. Read Alfie Kohn. – Be sure to read the Alfie Kohn articles if you did not get a chance yesterday. They are extremely valuable in providing a theoretical framework to classroom discipline. The three articles can be found here, here, and here.
5. Don’t forget community-building. – Team and community building often get confused. Team building is the work you do to get teamwork out of small groups. Building community involves getting the whole class to work together with learning as the goal. There are several great resources for these kinds of activities in the online resources or there are a few on my Delicious account.

Website Enhancement
You all spent a lot of time working on your websites last year, but now that a new school year is upon us, there’s more work to be done.

Five Things:

1. Content, content, content – More important than anything is your website’s content. The most basic looking websites can still be the most useful if they have good content.
2. Update and maintain – It’s super important that your website is updated. Students and teachers won’t pay it much attention if the “last updated” message is from last school year.
3. Consistent Design – Just because we spent time enhancing websites does not mean you should adds lots of bells and whistles or mix in multiple fonts. Keep the colors and design elements consistent throughout your website in order to show cohesion of ideas.
4. Contrast – If you have a dark background, use a light color for your text. If the background is white, use black text.
5. Utilize Web 2.0 Tools – It’s really hard to make a website interactive or easy to update. Consider using a blog for your newsletter or announcements. Google Calendar can easily replace bulky, made-from-scratch calendars on Dreamweaver.

Again, don’t forget the resources in the Moodle and keep working at updating that website. See if you can find ways to best utilize your website to enhance classroom management.

See you all at the next session when we cover Excel and how to use authentic data in the classroom.

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijames/ / CC BY 2.0