Cougar Communication: No Hands and Haiku Deck

Cougar Communication

Excellence in Education: No Hands

Did you know, that education research suggests that banning children from raising their hands in class improves classroom performance?

It can.

In a study conducted by Dylan Wiliam students were banned from raising their hands and the results were impressive:

• Shy and struggling students did better
• Strong students performed better
• Expectations were raised for all students 
• Classroom question and answer sessions were not dominated by a select few

What are some strategies you can use to avoid hand-raising?

• Cold call (randomly) on students
• Have students write their answers on individual dry erase boards, their desks or on paper
• Turn it in to a visible quiz with students either writing their answers down, displaying number of fingers to answer, ABCD cards

Do the above strategies take more planning and class time? Most certainly, but it’s time well spent.

In the classrooms where teachers take the time to develop their questions and questioning strategies before the class, student learning increases and academic expectations and rigor are higher.

Tech Idea for the Classroom: Haiku Deck

Great news!

Haiku Deck, a great ipad app, is now available as a web application as well. With Haiku Deck creating stunning slideshows and sharing the on the web  (Facebook, Twitter, email) becomes simple. The presentations also can be exported as PowerPoint files and can easily be embedded

What separates Haiku Deck from other presentation creation apps/sites? Haiku Deck’s intuitive and integrated image search and text-sizing are amazingly simple.

Haiku Deck offers a variety of themes and templates to use in your presentations. The best aspects of Haiku Deck are the integrated image search and the automatically resizing text. On each of your slides you can add images of your own or search through Haiku Deck's library of images. As you type text on each slide, the text automatically shrinks to fit in the space allotted. The shrinking text feature is great for encouraging students to minimize the use of text in their slide designs.

Check it out at www.haikudeck.com

Administrative Notes

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/cZIXm7

Reminder, please invite me into your classroom to see a new, creative lesson. The lessons I’ve been invited to see so far have been inspiring. I look forward to seeing your passion-filled, student-centered lessons. You do a phenomenal job and I look forward to seeing it and then bragging about it for you!

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