Category: Education Insights

CAASPP Math Scores

Improving CAASPP Scores: The Missing Key

As reported in the Los Angeles Times (2016), many schools have been struggling with the math assessment coming out of the CAASPP design. Only 33% of students in the United States meet or exceed the educational standards. One of the questions we frequently get while supporting schools is, “How can teachers engage and prepare students without ‘teaching to the test’?” […]

Don’t Ditch That Tech: Personalizing Content & Promoting Metacognition

All teachers want to meet their students’ needs, but some tasks can seem pretty daunting for beginners and experts alike. In this webinar, “Don’t Ditch That Tech,” we tackled two scary ones: creating personalized lessons and promoting students’ metacognition. Presented by Dr. Angie Ridgway (Professor & Director of Secondary Education, University of Indianapolis) & Nate Ridgway (High School History Teacher […]

Supporting Evidence in Questions for Reading Assessments

My teaching career started in 2014 as a special education teacher for middle schoolers (~ages 12-15). Since then, I’ve moved on to teaching history at the high school level with some much older students. I was recently thinking back about these two seemingly disparate jobs–just kind of my educational journey in general–and I stumbled across something that I feel like […]

Teaching with Limited Devices

  Teaching with technology can be frustrating. On one day, you show up to a computer lab with your class and all of the desktops have to run mandatory updates. Trying to avoid that problem in the future, you get their hands on an iPad cart after waiting another several days, but find out the devices don’t have the necessary […]

Promoting Metacognition in Classtime

  No matter the subject area, all teachers want their students to be thinkers. We want them to be reflective, pursue topics in-depth, attack problems from multiple angles, and draw complex conclusions. But how do they get better at that kind of thinking? By developing their metacognition — the ability to think about their thinking. Technology aside, making an effort to […]

Digital Escape Rooms in your Classroom

  If you’re not familiar with the “Escape Room” (and increasingly digital escape rooms) phenomenon found across the U.S., you’re definitely missing out! Escape rooms have made their way into recreational entertainment, board games, and even Hollywood. The premise is relatively simple: players must complete a series of tasks in order to gain passwords, retrieve clues, or gather other information […]

Flip your classroom with digital assessments

As teachers in an ever-more demanding profession, the one resource that we all wish we had more of is time. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the chance–with some help from Classtime–to “flip” my classroom with digital assessments and give me some of that precious resource of time back. If you’re not familiar with “flipped” classrooms, it’s much […]

Why children should learn to code

Learning how to code is akin to learning a new language. In a study on bilingualism published on NCBI, it was discovered that learning another language has cognitive benefits. These benefits begin at childhood, where kids are able to better adjust to their environment, retain information, and extend even beyond dotage. Now, coding may not be a language per se […]

Easy ways to collect and review assessment data

  Here, you’ll find the same steps to creating “Rapidfire Classtime Assessments” that were mentioned in the video, as well as the resources mentioned in it. At the very end, you’ll find some extra help on how to create your own Classtime-Infused Hyperdocs & Hyperslides. Step 1: Keep the Goal in Mind Although the words “Rapidfire Classtime Assessments”, “HyperDocs”, and […]

Create controversy with Classtime

  Learn how to create controversy with Classtime, and find all of the resources that were mentioned at the end of the video. Keys to Setting Up A Good Prompt for Controversy1. Make sure that your prompt doesn’t have a definitive answer. It could eventually end in a right/wrong answer after you expose your students to the content of your […]