Teaching? I’m on the phone!

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Seven ways a smart phone can make a teacher’s life easier!

  1. Use your phone to record who did the homework.   Don’t collect all that paper if you only have time to verify who completed the assignment. You can easily use the scan to spreadsheet solution- Got the Homework Blues?
  2. Randomly call on students  or choose groups with one of the name generating apps: Randomly, Pick Me!, Decide Now! or Who’s Next? so that you can get them into groups for great interactive activities such as The Great Debate (Socratic Seminars in the Classroom!)
  3. Present directly from your phone.  My classroom computer is really old and really slow.  Now that I have Office 365 on up to 5 devices, I can project a PowerPoint presentation directly from my phone.   My set up time is now under a minute!
  4. Get rid of the paper immediately by snapping a digital copy.   I know I will lose that late assignment or make-up test.  It is safer to get a digital copy and send it to email or to a cloud file!  Try to go paperless as I’ve shared in the past here-   The Paperless Teachers Desk (It can be done!) Here’s how – Continue reading “Teaching? I’m on the phone!” →

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The Paperless Teachers Desk (It can be done!) Here’s how –

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As you hardworking teachers know, there is a tremendous amount of paperwork in teaching. Everything from quizzes, to tests, to class handouts, to collected homework.   The goal – keep it all moving!  Over the years I have been able to reduce the amount of paper I generate in my classroom which I explored already in my post on  The Paperless Classroom? Here’s how.

BUT the REAL challenge for me is to keep track of all the other paper that flows over my desk.  The one-off sheet of paper I always spend a few minutes looking for!     I am talking about the memos from administrative authorities, weekly attendance, absent notes, late homework, hand-scrawled notes about individual students, last-minute changes to today’s  lesson or the instructional gem  I collected from a talented colleague.  It used to make me crazy..

Continue reading “The Paperless Teachers Desk (It can be done!) Here’s how –” →

nofiredrills9 Comments

The Paperless Classroom? Here’s how.

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What?! A paperless classroom? You’ve never heard of such a thing?! Well… guess what. It can be done. I teach 5 classes of 34 students in an urban public school. Do you know how many trees I was killing a year? Fine… thats not the “real” problem. Do you know how much time I was WASTING in the copy room a year? Now that! That was the real problem. So I made a decision. I’m going paperless. Here’s how I did it, and YOU can too!

First, create a website that is user friendly. I liked using wordpress.com for my website but my school offered Moodle and Google Classroom as options as well.

Continue reading “The Paperless Classroom? Here’s how.” →

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