#Whatsup Wildcats - Classroom Edition

As a teacher, there is no greater feeling than ending a lesson and knowing that our students were engaged and challenged. Add student accountability and voice to the equation, and man oh man, life is good! I am thrilled to report that many of our teachers are utilizing the awesome features of Pear Deck and are super excited about its power in the classroom. For those of you who are not familiar with Pear Deck, it is an awesome tool that takes lessons to the next level by making them interactive. It promotes student accountability and choice, and through the variety of question options it provides, students are engaged and truly thinking through class content. Click here to learn more about this fantastic resource.  As a G Suite for Education district, our teachers are quite familiar with Google Slides and create most of their lessons using this resource. Pear Deck has a simple and powerful add-on for Google Slides that makes it so easy to enhance and transform our lessons to put ou

Week after week I continue to reflect on the importance of student voice in the classroom, and after a week of professional development activities, it still consumes my thoughts, plans, and conversations with colleagues. I was lucky enough to attend the ICE Conference this week and connected with numerous teachers and #EdTech gurus from around the country. I left feeling refreshed and eager to try some new activities in my classroom. Ultimately...these new activities centered around giving voice to ALL students in my classroom by asking them to be accountable and share their learning. My favorite, most memorable session of the conference centered on how to effectively check for understanding in the classroom. Holly Clark , co-author of The Google Infused Classroom , led the session and is a rock-star because the focus of her session was not EdTech tools; instead, she focused on the most important part of education: how our students learn and demonstrate their learning. She discussed