Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting more powerful year after year. Although it will have some positive and some negative effects on foreign language teaching and learning, I believe they will be predominantly positive.
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There are many traditions that surround the start of a new school year: new shoes, new clothes, first-day-of-school pictures. For teachers, there are fresh bulletin boards, class lists, and, for some, an inbox full of email promotions from travel companies. And often that means planning not for the current school year, but for the year after.
Gamification, in plain English, means turning learning into a game. Take the popular foreign language learning app Duolingo for example. Duolingo makes language learning fun, turning it into a sort of video game. When students do well, they win virtual prizes (gems). They compete against other users of the app and get ranked based on their performance. They can make it into the “obsidian league” if they rock the game, or even into the “diamond league” if they’re one of the best that day.
Many of us are looking for a school with classrooms where students and adults seek the truth, expand their minds by embracing challenging ideas, and build empathy by seeking to understand the ideas of others. As a result of my over twenty years of experience as a history, government, and economics teacher, I have come to believe that students should believe the material they learn matters and that their education has a purpose.
As a World History teacher at The Beekman School, I love introducing students to British History and the colorful rulers that people its pages. In part, my fascination stems from the way in which tradition and novelty are continually interwoven within the traditions of the British monarchy. We got to witness a glimpse of this as the United Kingdom celebrates Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee during a four-day bank holiday weekend that began this past Thursday. Elizabeth II has now reigned for 70 years, and as such is “the Queen” whom the world immediately equates with Britain.
The Beekman School faculty recently completed a 3-part professional development workshop given by The Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education. The focus was on twice-exceptional (2e) students.
The end of the school year is upon us again! I have been eagerly making plans for my summer adventures and slowly gathering a stack of books that is getting taller and taller. As I have said before, summer reading does not have to be a compensatory list of books that students dread reading and save for the last possible second. Summer can (and should be!) a time to really dig deep into a topic of interest.
So you’re going to teach psychology to high school students. The first step in planning your course is to select the text or texts to be used. There are two ways you can go.
April 15th*. Tax Day. Just the mention of this date evokes the same feeling in most adults; stress, fear, anger, and frustration. According to research conducted by The Pew Research Center in 2013, the majority of adults (56%) feel either hate or dislike doing their taxes.
We’ve all been there. We stayed up late studying the night or two before an important exam. We worked on all the assigned practice problems, studied with friends, and finished up our last few flashcards.