Prepare Students for Life Beyond School---Build Relevance Into Homework

Homework is assigned to just about every class on a daily basis.  However, the purpose behind it is sometimes not clear to students or their parents.  What are the students expected to learn from it or is it just a continuation of unfinished classwork?  Do students receive additional insight into the topic or just complete a worksheet? For homework to have purpose, it should have students applying newly acquired knowledge to the real world which generally involves ongoing problem solving in team settings for the most part.

So what is the key to motivating students to want to do any type of assignment after school?  Well, it must be interesting.  Students must be excited about trying the assigned task.  Teachers must set the tone by tempting them with an approach that resonates with them.  For example, if studying biology, why not have students create a garden on school grounds.  This would involve a team effort to plan and tend the garden from the planting of the seeds to the harvesting of the vegetables and fruits.  This type of activity adds meaning to ecology.  Further, the produce can be taken home to add to meals or given to homeless shelters to feed those who are struggling.  This "homework" would not be a one day event, but would span the semester and would involve math, science, internet research, reading, writing/blogging, etc.  In this type of team setting, one student could also be the groups official chronicler (one who would blog team's progress).

Take a look at this article on  homework  for more ideas on getting students jazzed about doing homework! :)

Denise

ELL TEACHER PROS
Check us out on TWITTER @ell_teacherpros and PINTEREST under dmcyberteacher.

FREE PLAGIARISM CHECKER--Must-Have Tool For Every Teacher!

With COMMON CORE STANDARDS and the push to motivate kids to excel in pursuit of a quality education, teachers need also to have a way to identify improper use of primary source materials.  Some students may copy because they feel their writing is not strong enough to write an essay or complete a project with lots of writing in it.  For them, it is a mistake which can be dealt with in class in a student-teacher conference.  

However, for others, this is far from the case.  These are the students who are well aware of what plagiarism is and yet try to submit plagiarized work anyway in the hopes of not being caught.  In the past, such students simply recopied work they found in books.  Teachers who thought there were some "irregularities" had students verbally summarize their work OR write a summary of the turned in work without the paper in question.  These approaches were effective, but also time consuming. Further, with the arrival of the internet and the millions of resources on it, students have an almost infinite resource of everything imaginable to select from.  With a COPY and PASTE, the assignment is done (or so they hope).

PLAGIARISM CHECKER  is a free plagiarism checker which has the potential to drastically reduce the number of students trying to commit acts of intellectual theft.  Since work is often times submitted via email or through dropbox, all a teacher needs to do with suspicious work is to copy and paste the material in the empty box on the site and click on CREATE REPORT.  Give the program a few seconds and it will cite the source the student stole the work from.  This is free.

Would it pay to notify classes up front that a teacher had such a tool?  THAT is a choice every teacher will need to make on his/her own.

Denise

ELL TEACHER PROS

A Safe Search Engine Designed by Kids for Kids:)

If you are an elementary school teacher, you probably worry about the sites kids may run into when doing assignments on the internet. Though the ideal is to create a bank of safe websites for students before they enter the lab, it is not always possible since many teachers have limited access to school computer labs. Often times, teachers need to reserve access to the lab far in advance to make sure that their students will be able to use it. Since the lab must be scheduled ahead of time, it may be difficult to predict all the issues kids may have in doing the research. Sometimes, this may lead to them stumbling in the wrong site and that wastes valuable time.

One resource for elementary school (and possibly middle school) is Kid Rex. It is a search engine designed BY KIDS FOR KIDS. Parents will definitely appreciate this as well since inappropriate materials have been removed. KID REX will become a favorite of both teachers and parents alike.

It is also possible to create your own search engine (Google) and I will put together a "how-to" for that in the next two months:)

Denise

ELL TEACHER PROS