Letter Grade Traits

What does an A, B, C, D, F really mean to a student?  How do you let your students know what the grade they received really means?  Does an A mean that you had a student excel in class, or just do the necessary work to get the grade?  Last night I got to thinking about grades, not sure why, but there is a lot of talk about the value of grades in education.  A recent post by Nick Provenzano asked What is an A Worth?  I often wonder that myself now.

I discovered that it might be important to provide your letter grades personality.  Let students know the REAL reason they received that letter grade.  Let me explain

A - A is for Attitude.  Chances are students with a positive attitude were some of your best students.  Let students know that the reason they received that grade is that their attitude about school work allowed them to succeed.  There attitude about coming to school and learning will allows them to succeed in the future.

B  - B is for Believe.  Students believe in themselves.  They believe in the teacher.  They believe in school work.  They don't have the attitude to reach A Level.  They let other things interfere with their potential success.  They believe in doing their best and if a B is their best, they believed that they succeeded.

C - C is for Concentrate.  Most students who are average students do their best just to concentrate on school work and leave class happy with a C.  The problem is that the students with a C personality trait tend to spend to much time concentrating on things other then school work to actually be above average.  They don't believe in hard work, and they lack a positive attitude about school.

D - D is for Disrespectful.  It is hard for a student to succeed when they have little respect for peers, teachers, administration, and the school.  This disrespect leads to the inability to concentrate on their work, believe in themselves and school, or develop an positive attitude.  Their disrespect can sometimes hamper your students who just try to focus on concentrating on their school work.

F - F is for Flashy.  These are your students who brag about getting an F, or think that failing is no big deal.  They are "too cool for school."  They lack or have yet to find the other traits important enough to no longer be flashy.  These kids must be shown the way.  They must be made to turn away from the need to be flashy.  You got to earn their respect and then make them concentrate on their school work.  They will then start to believe in doing better in school and develop a better attitude.

Not sure if this really makes any sense, but it was in my mind, and felt like sharing.  What are your thoughts?  Do you agree?  Disagree?  Do you have a trait that you would put with letter grade?

What if when we graded a students paper we put a trait instead of a letter?   

Weekly Core Subjects Resources

Hope all my fellow Americans had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and those from other parts of the World took time to give thanks for something or someone.  Just a few more weeks till Christmas break.  Hopefully you spend some time looking at the great resources on the web during that time.  It was a Christmas break a year ago that I decided to dedicate time to this blog and using Twitter more often.

English
I do recommend looking at a previous post on VerbaLearn.

You might also be interested in this article about Technology Being a Key Tool in Writing Instruction.

I did find an interesting link for those of you that teach Shakespeare; it is a YouTube Channel for Animated Shakespeare from the BBC.

Repeat After Us is an online library and language lab.  The library is a collection of copyright-free English text and scripted recordings.  You can browse by Author, Title, and Genre.  For a good explanation of Repeat After Us, visit the Edge 21 Blog

Mathematics
High School Math is a great resource from Jefferson County Tennessee school district.  It has links to several resources broken down by subject matter.  There is also a general section.  As you can tell by the link, it is specifically for high school teachers.

Calcoolate is the "Coolest Online Calculator" - Give it a try

ACT Question of the Day - A great site where an ACT type math problem is provided and then using Flash it plays out how to solve the problem.  Great to start a class period.

Math in Movies is a great site from Harvard University.  There are always down days in education around testing and I know teachers like to show movies, but math teachers generally have trouble finding movies that relate to content.  This site helps to solve that problem.

Science
Science Direct is a site dedicated to providing articles and information related to all science subject matter.  If you create an account you can save your favorite articles and journal entries to access later. 

Science NetLinks is a site for K-12 educators that provides lessons, resources, tools and other activities that are standards-based internet experiences for students.  Worth a look around for you science teachers.

We Choose the Moon is a Flash-based interactive recreation to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11.  It does take some time to get through the experience, but it is worth a look.  There are photo galleries that you can look at while waiting for the interactive to get through the process.

HubbleSite is dedicated to everything that has to do with the Hubble Space Telescope.  There are several galleries of images that are amazing to look at and just get students think about Space.

Cells Alive is a site for science teachers that brings the study of cells to life.  There are several interactives and galleries to investigate cells.  

Science Simulations from PhET from the University of Colorado.  These have been going around for math, but there are also several great interactives and simulations for the science subject matter.  You can find the simulations categorized by subject matter.  Definitely worth examining if you are a science teacher. 

Social Studies
The National Archives Experience is a great resource for history teachers to find several primary documents as well as lessons and activities for the classroom.  There are several digital image galleries that could be accessed by teachers. 

Foreign Relations of the United States is an archive of events that the United States was involved in with foreign countries.  The collection goes as far back as the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and ends with the 1960's.  These documents have been recently declassified. 

The Supreme Court: Games is available from PBS and provides 9 different games/interactives related to The Supreme Court and cases they were involved in.  If you are a government teacher I highly recommend viewing this site and seeing how you can use these games in the classroom.  There are also several other links not related to the games that can be of use for studying the Supreme Court.

Smarthistory is a multimedia web-book about art and history.  If you teach Arts and Humanities or are studying the Renaissance and Reformation, this would be a valuable site to keep available to examine art.  The art is organized by time period, which makes it easy to find art that you are looking for.

The History Teacher's Attic is a site created by a teacher who takes all the lessons and activities that he has done through the years and shares it with his readers.  In a recent post I shared his post about TED Talks.  It has been a while since a new post, but there are still several great resources for social studies teachers to examine.

Social Studies - A MUST SEE!!!!!
State of the Union is a site that examines in-depth EVERY SINGLE State of the Union Address.  You can read George Washington's first State of the Union Address and discover what was important during his time as President.  State of the Union breaks down the word usage and occurrence in every speech.  I am really impressed with this site.  It is a great way to examine history.  When you visit the site, read the instructions so that you understand all that it has to offer.  There is also a great essay about the history of the State of the Union and occurrences of words from all of them as well as charts and graphs.  Even if you don't teach history, this is interesting.

BONUS!!
ABC's of Web Literacy is an interactive site to help students understand the five criteria for evaluation of information on the web.  Students today really don't understand how to decipher what a quality website is.  If students are conducting research, have them view the ABC's of Web Literacy first.

Google Earth Tours Tips - a Great Wiki with great information, resources, and videos for using Google Earth.

Blogs 4 Edu is a wiki created by members of my PLN for educators to share their blogs, especially those that are just getting started.  You can also find links to several "Blog Projects" to help bloggers get ideas for potential posts.  If you are new to blogging, I highly recommend spending some time on this site. 

Find something useful?  If not, check out my previous Weekly Core Subjects Resources Posts

You might also be interested in my publications to learn about various Web 2.0 Tools to use in the classroom.

If you are visiting this blog for the first time and would like to subscribe to the RSS Feed you can do that here.  To learn about RSS Feed and Google Reader, watch this great RSS in Plain English video

Google Maps Treks

I was introduced this site at the TeachMeet Kentucky Conference and meant to share it a while back and forgot.  Google Treks is the work of Dr. Alice Christie.  The site creates Treks using Google Maps.  The Treks are broken down by subject matter and grade level.  There is also a section for student created Treks.  On the front page you will find a link to a video tutorial, Creating Google Trek Curricular Units, and a tutorial for using Google Maps.  If you create a Google Trek, Dr. Alice suggest that you use the appropriate rubric before submitting them to be shared on the website.  The site is still growing, but there are several good examples.  What a great real world application of Google Maps.

VerbaLearn

VerbaLearn is a site for students to learn vocabulary.  The site offers several different ways that students can learn vocabulary.  There is a free version and a one time fee Plus version.  When you immediately visit a site you will see resources for ACT, SAT, and GRE vocabulary.  There is also grade level vocabulary and ESL vocabulary.

VerbaLearn allows user to learn vocabulary at their own pace and on their own time.  With the free version you can quiz yourself and participate in standard review, so rather limited.  With the Plus version you do get tons of other options.  You can record MP3's, watch video flashcards, print flashcards, create crossword puzzles, and complete advanced review to learn key terminology. 

VerbaLearn offers teachers and schools the ability to offer the software school wide for $.50 a student as well as classroom licenses.  A great feature is that school and community libraries can sign up for the service and get the pro account free for students.  VerbaLearn is another site attacking the vocabulary aspect of education and offers some features that other sites don't. 

Twitter Chats

One of the aspects of Twitter that took a while for me to understand was the whole use of a hashtag (#) and how it was beneficial to the me.  I kept seeing hashtags attached to peoples tweets and it took me some time to understand how they worked.  I learned that you can see all the tweets that contain a hashtag as well as save a search of a hashtag and come back to it on a regular basis to see the most recent tweets.

With these hashtags come a whole new spectrum.  The ability to "chat" using them.  Just about everyday of the week and at certain times you can join in to chats related to several different topics.  My favorite of course is the #edchat which is every Tuesday at 12 pm and 7pm EST with voting for the topic happening Sunday and Monday.

What other chats are there on Twitter?  I often wondered the same thing.  I know of #elemchat, #cpchat, and #sschat.  What you might not know is that there are actually over 200 chats on Twitter.  There is a great Google Doc spreadsheet that has a Twitter Chat Schedule.  On the schedule you can find the name, description, the founders/moderators, links to more information and to the chat itself, as well as a schedule, and a website if the chat has one. 

If you are new to Twitter, my suggestion is start following some chats related to your interest.  From there you will find people who share similar interest and follow them.  It is truly the best way to get connected with other professionals on Twitter.

Happy Tweeting