A teacher's time is precious and seems to move ever more swiftly. Our goal as teachers is to create the greatest educational impact in what seems to be increasingly less time. How might we do so?

This track is designed to provide teachers with online tools that help save time. Properly used, these tools deliver high impact lessons, provide clear expectations, and save time by automating a portion of the teacher's grading load.

Educational research on best practices suggest that students learn best (in depth with greater conceptual understandings) when presented with learning challenges that are authentic, relevant, complex and open-ended. To be effective, these problems need to be properly scaffolded by annotating primary source material with well-designed questions that provoke thought.

In Task 1, you will take the role of a student and deconstruct three online reading assignments. I have scaffolded the reading by providing two different levels of questions. The first level questions directs the student (you) to find specific passage that illustrates a major talking point for class discussion. The second level (critical thinking) questions check for deeper conceptual understandings.

So let's begin by imagining (sic) that you are a teacher with a limited amount of time.  That you have some eager, some reluctant and some belligerent students, who are faced with a challenging curriculum to complete in a shortened school year. Sound familiar? You bet, baby! Welcome to public education!

One strategy to solve the problem of limited classroom time is to teach our students to be independent. Independence allows students to accomdate their own learning styles and teaches them life-long learning skills om their own time.  I believe that this strategy is the only effective way to make up for lost time during the hectic school year. 

OK, so how can all this be accomplished? How can we encourage our students to think and learn outside the classroom?

Task #1 in this track will present you with an experience of learning that was designed to meet this question. You will be asked to read a primary source document that describes some of the best teaching practices for the use of technology in the classroom. To support your learning, the online paper has been annotated with questions that focus your learning on the key points of this task.

During the task, you will be asked to identify a authentic and compelling student task for your own classroom. Task #2 extends this learning. You will construct a rubric, a widely used assessment tool, to evaluate student learning. Constructing a rubric provides you with clear and specific criteria for evaulating your student's progress. You can now use the rubric as a scaffold for producing specific learning subgoals

Once you have a clear set of goals and subgoals you are ready to provide students with online support for their assigned task. This can be done for both content and process. Task #3 is designed to build scaffolding for content. Task #4 provides scaffolding for processes.