About one month ago I was sent the link to a public service contest being hosted by the University of Idaho. The challenge was for students to research something called the Morrill Act and to create a video about what they learned. I had no idea what it was, and the group of students that chose to be part of the project were ignorant to it too.

Through student-directed research and collaboration, pieces to the puzzle began fitting together. I made it a point to step aside and watch these 6th grade scholars at work. What they discovered and created blew my mind. Here is our video entry.

I have gleaned many good ideas from fantastic educators in my Twitter professional learning network. John Hardison, a friend of mine, inspired me to assign my students to produce an impromptu wax museum. While John uses this assessment activity with his high school English class, I chose to use it with my 6th grade Social Studies students. Happily, it worked with equal success in both classrooms.

Assessment like this is something I can look forward to grading!

Teaching can be a bad gig sometimes. We need to always be looking for ways to lighten the mood and really connect with our students. One way that I have started doing this is freestyle rapping with my students.

Rather than huddle indoors, I get things taken care of quickly so that I can step outside and socialize for 15 minutes before the bell rings. Recently, I took my iPad with me. Here's what happened.

As a teacher, you might have heard of the popular video game "Plants vs Zombies". Well, I hadn't. Not until this morning when one of my students asked me if I had.

"Pants vs Zombies?" I asked.

"No!" he responded. "But that would be an awesome game! I want to be a video game creator when I grow up. Do you know how I could do that?"

To be honest, I don't. And while I don't know anyone specifically who does, I know a group of connected educators who I am sure will help my student find out.

Please pass this podcast throughout your circle until my student and I can make contact with someone who knows how a 6th grader can pursue his passion of video game design. And be sure to leave your comments here.

I write about Twitter a lot. That's not a secret. Neither is the fact that I believe Twitter has revolutionized the way that people interact and share ideas. In fact, I believe that "Twitteracy" along with understanding how to navigate and comprehend the languages of social media is quickly becoming a need-to-know skill for successfully living in the 21st-century.

Twitterpated: A Beginner's Guide to Twitter is my attempt at helping others to understand digital, social communication. It is a downloadable PDF e-book that I have written with the intent of walking those who want to become connected to do so at a comfortable, leisurely pace.

I am always telling others that the power of Twitter is how it has enabled us to connect with groups of passionate people and share ideas and resources. Twitterpated: A Beginner's Guide to Twitter is my contribution to the dialogue. Read an excerpt from it right now.

You can buy it here through PayPal for instant download for $1.99. It also comes with 24-hr "customer service" by contacting @DaveGuymon with any of your Twitter questions. That's what being connected is all about, isn't it?

"I love seeing blank stares from my students after posing a question about what we are learning," said no teacher ever. Still, we have all been there. While many students sit like logs, waiting for someone to act on them, equally discouraging are the hogs, those four or five students who always have their hand up. I'm not immune to the situation, bet here are three strategies that I use in my classroom that help to engage all students in discussions that you might consider using too.

When students walk into my classroom, I'm always at the door to greet them. Occasionally, I have a deck of playing cards with me as well. "Take a card," I mandate, as they move through the doorway. Once each student has a card, I have a way of engaging all learners. 

"Do I have any 7s?" I'll ask after drawing a card out of the remainder of the deck. All of those students who have a 7, of any suit, then raise their hand for me to choose from. If no one happened to draw a 7, I might turn to the suit. "No 7s? Where are my clubs, then?"

I have students leave their card face up on their desk so that I know that none of them are trying to go under the radar. Visibility is also important for group sharing. "I need my spades to meet over here to discuss question 3, while hearts meet over there."

Movement is a great way to get students participating. And this technique will induce laughter at the same time.

If students are growing restless, or I simply want to shake things up, I'll tell them that we are going to have a "Hollywood Mingle" to discuss this next concept or question. All students know what this means: stand up, push in your chair, and assume the position!

Pirates! Spys! Slowmotion Cartoons! I choose a theme, and my students safely move throughout the room as if they are in the middle of a movie scene as one of these characters. After signaling them to "Cut action!" each student finds another whom is closes to him or her in the room to quickly pair up with to discuss what we have been learning. "Lights! Cameras! . . ." and we are ready to roll again.

Slightly similar to the "House of Cards" strategy, "Poker Face" requires me to bring an ample supply of red, blue, and white poker chips, and hand two or three out to each student to begin each class period.

"James, if you know the answer to this question, you can take one chip away from any of the students sitting around you." Slowly, but surely, a sample of my classroom becomes very territorial. 

It is an incentive-based game. If you get a question right, you get to take a chip away from someone else and add it to your cache. If you get it wrong, the chip is thrown into "the pot" which can be won on certain "bonus" questions (recommended to be asked to reluctant students).

This can be done as every student for himself or herself, paired teams, or small groups. Whichever way you choose to use it, all students get competitive with "Poker Face". It's almost as if blank stares never even existed.

Ever since getting an iPad, I have been in search of an app or website that helps me to plan my week of lessons and events as a teacher in the style and format that suits me. After quite a long a fruitless search, I tried using Google Calendar, but it just wasn't efficient enough for me. Enter, planbook.com.

After hearing of my digital travails on Twitter, @kellycroy, who also tweets as @wirededucator directed me to Planbook.com. I took a look, and I liked what I initially saw, so I signed up for the 30-day free trial. However, by the end of day one, I had seen enough to fork out the $12 per year subscription and can now rest from my lesson planning travails.

Planbook allows you to create subjects or courses, depending on the level of schooling you work with, and write your lesson plans online. If your class repeats daily, or even if it has a weird Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday schedule, Planbook allows you to select how often any given subject/course appears.

Along with creating a subject/course schedule, Planbook.com allows you to attach homework and notes to any given lesson, with the option to hide them if desired.

Whether you are required to align your lesson with state standards or Common Core State Standards, planbook.com allows you to do that quickly with the click of a button. Yes, every standard imaginable is programmed into the website. Find the one you are looking for, and select it to include it in your plans. It's as simple as that.

Not so simple, is the plight of teachers to remember events and assemblies. Whether scheduled or not, they always seem to poke their pesky head into your weekly plans. In the past, I practically had to scrap my pencil-and-paper plans to accomodate one of these. With planbook.com, you can include events if you know they are happening, or . . . (wait for it) . . . bump your lessons to the next day if there just isn't going to be time left after any given disruptions on the day you planned. This will adjust all successive plans for the given subject/course.

Now, I can plan like I want to plan. And I can do it wherever I have an internet connection. I haven't forgotten about my paper-based planbooks though. In fact, I still use them quite often . . . to hold open doors and weigh down papers.

With so many educators connecting for professional development, there aren't many practical reasons to not be. Being dead is the only one I can think of.

Twitter, Google+, Edmodo and Facebook are invaluable to teachers and administrators looking to share ideas and resources with one another. While not a problem to be avoided, it is often quite troublesome to keep track of all of the new webpages, online videos, and media that you would like to use in your lesson planning. Until, now.

Claco is a new social network that enables connected educators to collaborate on and share lesson plans and resources with one another in a more user-friendly platform. With features similar to those found on Facebook, Livebinders, and Pinterest, Claco has proven to be a great place to aggregate your lesson plans and ideas by binders to share with followers, parents, and students as well.
 
Why reinvent the wheel when you can borrow someone else's? Claco is a great place to be, unless, of course, you are dead.

Students don't want to know what we are going to teach them. They are capable of figuring that out themselves. They want to know why we are their teachers.

I was reminded of this as my new students shuffled into their 6th grade seats on the first day of school this year. I believe that the momentum that crescendos on the last day of school begins with a single note played in the first minutes of day 1. That is why, before I even introduced myself, I started the school year by saying this:

"Thank you for being here today, ladies and gentlemen. If you remember nothing else over the course of this school year, know this, our classroom is a better place because each of you made the decision to be here today. My name is Mr. Guymon . . ."

I hadn't done that in previous years, and I wasn't sure if anyone even heard me. Then I gave out my first take-home assignment.

After setting my students up with their own monitored websites I invited them to post their first blog as "homework" that night. As I perused through my class' RSS feed before going to bed one evening later in the week, I came across one student's post that let me know that he was listening during those first few minutes of our new school year. It was one sentence long, which was one sentence more than he had said in class during the previous three days. It read, "My teacher Mr.Guymon is the best teacher anybody in the world could have because he will do any thing for the people in this class."

I didn't say that directly to any of my students. Even if I did, I'm not sure they would have really believed me. But I put first things first and told them that they make a difference to me as a teacher and as a human being. And then I treated them as if they do.

Whether you have started your school year, or are just about to. Spend less time telling your students what you are going to teach them, and more time showing them why you're their teacher. I'm sure that at some point they will let you know that they were listening.

In the week before students fill the seats in our classrooms, the staff that I work with has been spending a lot of time learning about how to become a professional learning community, or PLC. We focused on Rebecca DuFour's 3 big ideas about PLCs, which are 1) a focus on learning 2) embracing a collaborative culture, and 3) becoming results-oriented practitioners.

Perhaps, not coincidentally, these big ideas reminded me of why I created a professional learning network, or PLN. And I took the opportunity to share this with my staff. The concept of a PLC is relatively new to us, so the idea of a PLN was foreign. "What's the difference?" some asked.

"Scope," was my response. Where a PLC is a localized collection of stakeholders in education, a PLN is a global network of motivated educators who collaborate and share ideas digitally. With Twitter being a catalyst of developing PLNs, I explained the basic concept of tweeting and following educators.

Surprisingly, many of my colleagues were open to learning more about the idea. Some even asked how they would go about "getting connected" once they got back to their classroom. My principal invited me to help him create a Twitter account for our school @RimrockElem.

Immediately after we connected our school with Twitter, I used my account to tweet: I just helped my admin to set up a Twitter accnt for our school. Share how @RimrockElem can use Twitter to reach the community.

Within five minutes, three members of my PLN had retweeted my invitation to help educate my PLC about Twitter. From those three retweets, @RimrockElem was tweeted to over 10,000 connected educators. Isn't that what DuFour means by embracing a collaborative culture?