(By Laura Lancu)
In the midst of the school break while enjoying time off, we cannot help but think about the coming school year. We all know that this season is a power charger for every teacher, a battery refill which hopefully will last the entire year.
But what if you could use this time to plan and prolong the life of your battery? Considering that the real payoff of teaching is students’ achievements, school break can be a wonderful time to improve your materials and projects for the next school year.
Such planning of thought and resources can significantly impact your teaching methods, can diminish the time you consume preparing classes and can lower your stress level during the school year.
Why should you do this? Well, here are our top reasons:
Improve Assessments
Evaluations can be tricky and time consuming. That’s why considering some tools to enhance this process can come in handy. This way you can either plan your appraisal methods and find proper apps or plan the activities to have more time to focus on evaluation. Knowing your projects in advance can determine the set of skills your students need and find the best way to evaluate them through each project. This means you can asses 21st century skills not only content, you can get to know your students better and ensure quality learning.
Organise Effectively
Have you ever wished to escape from all the stress that gathers during the school year? Having plans and materials can give a great feeling and help you in stressful situations. Thus, planning for projects not only that will give you a clear overview on which tools you will use but will also grant you some spare time to find partnerships.
Engage Your Students
Involving your students in activities requires time and attention. Having a range of options to diversify activities, introducing them to new smart apps and even to interactive technology can increase the level of engagement in your class. Preparing your educational toolkit for the coming year can allow you to enlarge the learning playground of your students’ reactions and preferences. Expressing themselves through other means of communication can overcome the fear of public speaking which some students may have.
Personalise Learning
I know that sometimes this concept seems impossible, but if you have a powerful technology toolkit at hand it would become more tangible. To empower personalised learning, you can allot group activities and focus on managing activities inside these groups. Having students work in teams on different levels or subjects can be a new approach. If you research for some tools in this matter you can be creative and think of all kind of group activities and when the school starts. It can be a solution so that urgent matters do not trump important ones anymore.
Learn Flexibility
Each educator has to have some super powers in order to maximise all teaching skills. Equipping with a set of apps which can ease your class activities or projects can give you the ability to adjust and this is a superpower you cannot neglect. Being flexible is crucial, considering that students will take your planning in directions you less expect. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a wise saying which I believe fits perfectly for every educator “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
Culled from edudemic.com
