Teachers, you make a difference in the classroom. You are the ones who inspire. You share knowledge and a process to thinking that helps students succeed in countless ways. Everyone at IPTV is thankful for what teachers do. To celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, we’ve collected a series of resources that highlight what teachers are doing in the classroom. Here you'll find documentaries of teacher and principal success stories, online resources, lesson ideas, and inspiration.
Teaching Channel: See how Teaching Channel celebrates great teaching and provides a way to share effective teaching practices. Inspired teaching, like any great art, should be seen. Teaching Channel lifts the curtain on inspiring classrooms by showing how great educators teach.
The PBS Teachers Innovation Awards: This resources invites educators to share ideas and videos showcasing how they engage students with PBS resources and innovative ideas to reinforce 21st century learning skills.
The Principal Story: The Principal Story tells two stories, painting a dramatic portrait of the challenges facing America's public schools — and of the great difference a dedicated principal can make.
Schools have found an alternative way to equip children with flexible and adaptive skills by allowing them to learn through playing interactives and videogames. In the hands of a skilled teacher, interactives can engage students in ways that a textbook cannot. A great amount of research has gone into the effectiveness of using video games in the classroom. From giving students the ability to deeply analyze and interact with material to providing immediate feedback, video games create learning environments that define clear goals, encourage motivation, and scaffold learning to meet the individual needs of each student. The teacher then provides the interpretation and the ability to help the student plan and move forward in their learning. IPTV offers hundreds of interactives for teachers to use in the classroom. Here are a few that help develop a variety of different 21st century skills:
Non-linear Thinking Patterns
NOVA Elements iPad App: This free app, available now on the App Store, takes the periodic table off the wall and puts it into users' hands, bringing life to the world's elements in colorful and dynamic ways. NOVA Elements, featuring tech guru David Pogue, allows users to explore an interactive periodic table, build elements from their particles, construct 3D rotating molecules, and watch the two-hour NOVA program.
Storyboarding: Students will create a virtual storyboard to learn to plan the scene sequence of a media production. A storyboard is created to help the director set up the shots. In this activity, the student will click and drag the pictures in the grid to create a story. The student is asked to write the action in the text box below each picture and print out their storyboard when they are...
April 22 marks Earth Day, and in honor of this special event, IPTV has provided a combination of educational resources to help you broaden, diversify, and promote the environmental movement in the classroom. Although Earth Day is celebrated only one day each year, these resources are meant to be used every day. Help your students take a proactive role in their communities by exploring the concepts of sustainability, ecology, and environmentalism. Help make everyday an Earth Day.
Engage your students to more fully appreciate and understand water quality in Iowa; have them work through issues on the future of energy; and provide them with the opportunity to evaluate the social, economical, and environmental elements in land resource management. Explore More gives your students a rich array of resources, challenges, tools, and information surrounding the contemporary issues of water quality, alternative sources of energy, and working landscapes. Check it out today!
Iowa Outdoors focuses on outdoor recreation, environmental issues, conservation initiatives, and Iowa's natural resources. From giant caves that sprawl for miles underneath the surface of Iowa, to birds rebounding and thriving from near extinction in the state, to outdoor physical activities that can help promote a healthy, physical lifestyle for your students, Iowa Outdoors offers something for everyone.
Watch a series of eight short, funny videos to begin thinking about the stuff you use and see every day and what it all can do to the environment. Learn how to reuse items like magazines and catalogs that are lying around your house, how to reduce the amount of garbage you produce each week by recycling and composting, what happens to those juice boxes you have with lunch, and why you should not set any unwanted pets free in the wild. The videos also feature educational lessons, such as how Velcro came to be, and where breakfast juice comes from. One video, "Happiness," even teaches kids about smart shopping. After learning about good "green" practices, see what ways you can come up with to help the environment! Check them...
"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box." -Edward R. Murrow
This famous quote by Edward R. Murrow was in reference to television over fifty years ago. It was a new form of media. People were watching hours of programming each week, and many experts wondered what future implications this new technology was going to have on society. The parallels of television to social media today are numerous. Are Facebook and Twitter good things for society? What is the appropriate amount of time one should spend on YouTube? How can this constant distraction serve any educational purpose?
Student safety has been the rational behind a great number of laws restricting teachers’ and students’ interactions through social networks. The laws also call into question what sort of educational value social tools have.
There are a great number of arguments, however, for why social media should be used in education—the most compelling being that since its inception, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have been sites that students want to use.
@IPTVEducation asked its Facebook and Twitter followers why teachers should use social media. We received a number of responses, all for responsibly using social media in the classroom. "If not in their classrooms, teachers should be using social media for themselves professionally," said Darin Johnston, an Iowa middle school educator. "They gain a more directed professional development stream, one they can tailor to topics of interest/need in their classroom, and they also gain the ability to interact with other classrooms with an assortment of educational activities."
Social Media has changed how we communicate, particularly with mobile devices and social media. The Read More »
Online professional development, now with local graduate credit available through Morningside College, that helps teachers find the necessary tools to succeed in the classroom.
