Blogs on Student Engagement

April Fools Day has a long and illustrious history of pranks both large and small -- so much so that sometimes real news stories published on April 1st get written off as fake. For teachers and students, it can be a chance to blow off some steam. There's no denying that sometimes it can go too far -- which probably makes more than a few educators glad when it falls on a weekend!

The students work, huddled in pairs, jotting down ideas in notebooks. The classroom buzzes with collaboration, punctuated by giggles and laughter. Students are excited to be writing as we start our annual celebration of Script Frenzy!

As a third grade teacher who has been fortunate enough to work in a 1:1 classroom for the past three years, I believe that the upper elementary grades are the ideal time to integrate 1:1 technology into the classroom. Because students at that age level often spend extended parts of the school day with one homeroom teacher, integrating technology smoothly across multiple subjects is easier than it would be if students had different teachers for each individual class period.

Some of you may remember the scene in The Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams' Mr. Keating mocks the approach to poetry of Dr. J. Evans Pritchard. In a nutshell, Pritchard has a method for mathematically calculating the measure of a poem's greatness. "If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness." Keating has students rip the pages out of their books, sardonically exclaiming, " . . . we're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry . . . I like Byron, I give him a 42 . . . "

Some of you may remember the scene in The Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams' Mr. Keating mocks the approach to poetry of Dr. J. Evans Pritchard. In a nutshell, Pritchard has a method for mathematically calculating the measure of a poem's greatness. "If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness." Keating has students rip the pages out of their books, sardonically exclaiming, " . . . we're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry . . . I like Byron, I give him a 42 . . . " Read More