Email Etiquette Reminders for Students

The start of the new school year is a great time to review email etiquette with students. Doing some basic things like adding a proper opening and using spell check can improve the emails that students send and improve how you feel when you're responding to a students' emails.

Emailing Your Teacher, With Captain Communicator is one of my favorite videos about email etiquette. The short video features two students demonstrating how to write an email to a teacher. It's cute and well worth 90 seconds of your time.


The following video was made by a teacher for the purpose of sharing email etiquette tips with students. It's a bit more serious that the Captain Communicator video.

Why Do Dogs Tilt Their Heads? Why Do They Pant?

My old dog Morrison used to tilt is head to his right whenever I would ask him if he wanted to play stick. He wasn't the only dog to do this. Perhaps you or one of your students have a dog that does the same. If you've ever wondered why dogs tilt their heads in response to a question or other prompt, SciShow has some answers for you in the video embedded below.


Why dogs pant is another question your dog-owning students may wonder about. SciShow Kids has that answered in the following video released last week.


Try one of these seven tools to make a flipped lesson from these dog videos. 

Mega Report Writer - Streamline Narrative Report Writing

Mega Report Writer is a free tool designed by a teacher for the purpose of helping other teachers more efficiently write narrative reports. To get started with Mega Report Writer you import a class roster from either an Excel sheet or from Google Classroom. Once your roster is imported you can start writing comments and phrases that you frequently use in your narrative reports. You can then inset those saved comments and phrases into each report that you write. Mega Report Writer can automatically select gender-specific pronouns for each report that you write.

Applications for Education
Mega Report Writer could help you save time when you write narrative reports about your students. It's not a perfect tool because you do have to copy and paste your report into a Word or Google Doc in order to print it. That said, I can still see myself using it to save time when writing reports.

The Week in Review - Isla Turns 1!

Good morning from Maine where we're getting ready for friends and family to come celebrate Isla's first birthday. We had a little cake on her actual birthday earlier this week. Today's the big day for more cake and celebration. Many people have told me that the first birthday is more for the parents to recognize that they survived the first year than it is for the baby who won't remember the party. I'm not saying I "survived" the year, rather I learned a lot more than I ever thought I would in the past year.

Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you have time for fun with friends and family too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship - A PDF Handout
2. How to Collect Files Through Google Forms
3. Six Types of Classroom Video Projects - And 18 Video Creation Tools
4. How to Create a Book Trailer Video
5. 5 Topics to Cover Early This Year On Your Classroom Blog
6. Share Your Sutori Timelines in Google Classroom
7. 10 Good Options for Creating Digital Portfolios

I'm filling in my 2018 speaking calendar. I would love to add your conference to my calendar. Click here to learn more about my speaking and workshop offerings. 

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Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards.

SeeSaw is my favorite digital portfolio tool.
Metaverse enables anyone to create amazing things.
Kids Discover provides fantastic tools for helping kids discover new information. 

University of Maryland Baltimore County offers a great program on instructional design.

Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.

PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.

Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.

My Simpleshow provides a great way to create explanatory videos.

Ask for Fascinating

This is a guest post from Rushton Hurley. Rushton is the founder of my favorite educational video site, Next Vista for Learning.

If your term is kicking into gear, then it's likely that batches of assignments will soon be a part of your time. One way to quickly decide you need to thrust something sharp into your skull is to see in students' work largely the same thing, again and again. Easy recipe for misery, that.

Many students will give you something interesting and even novel, though, if you go to the trouble of asking for it.

The screenshot image below is from Found Sounds, a video about a man that makes musical instruments from all sorts of things people have thrown away. (The folks at Great Big Story put out lots of really cool videos, I should note).

Getting anything interesting from a student shouldn't be a function of hoping that one or two students provides a gem. It can also be about asking them to step up and give you something different.

"Everyone, you know your assignment. I also hope you know I'll be reading a bunch of these papers, so I'd love for as many of you as are willing to make what you write fun and interesting."

Not all will, of course, but if even a few do, you'll end up with a better experience when you grade them.

Find a collection of cool and moving videos at the Next Vista for Learning Sources of Inspiration page, and more advice like the focus of this post in Making Your Teaching Something Special: 50 Simple Ways to Become a Better Teacher.