Happy Tuesday! I hope everyone got a chance on the weekend to go out and enjoy the sunshine. I sometimes have to remind myself that I like winter and try to embrace the chilly days. I recently found two things that I would like to share with you that may help you enjoy winter. The first was a lesson plan from the New York Times, titled “How Nature Comes Alive in Winter“. This reminded me of all the wonderful teaching resources at the New York Times Learning Network. Here you can find up-to-date discussion articles, picture prompts and more! I will share the link below. The other neat site that I would like to share (thanks to Matt and his Ditch That Textbook emails) is about Snowflakes. It is full of really interesting snow crystal facts, videos and information.
New York Times Learning Network:
I encourage you to check out this amazing resource with stuff for almost any grade. You can find contests, writing prompts, and opinion pieces that students can read with questions at the end to get them thinking and so much more!
New York Times Learning Network
Welcome back everyone. I hope you all had a restful and fun holiday 🙂 I came back to some exciting news from Microsoft: Math Progress is now released globally so we all have access! I was super excited when Reading Progress came out, a great program to help people improve their reading, and now Math Progress is available in Teams Assignments to help students ages 9-18 improve their Math skills. Math Progress will generate Math questions (or you are welcome to create your own), auto-grade them, track student progress and help you identify focus areas for more support and when you send the results back to the students, they can open them to see the steps that they should have done to complete the question (oh yeah, the computer does that for you). Can you tell my excitement by my run on sentences? This is a great tool that you can use to create homework, quizzes and tests. Did I mention that students can even submit the written work that they do to support their answers?
Here is a short (ish) video explaining how it works:
We are excited to share that Book Creator has had some amazing new upgrades. It is now equipped with Background Remover, a tool we use all the time in Canva. Read on to learn about their recent improvements. Next week is National Coding Week—a fantastic chance to enhance problem-solving skills while introducing students to coding, a valuable skill that could shape their future careers. Why not start with an Hour of Code? We have outlined some of favourites below (the Minecraft Hour of code is a fantastic way to introduce the School District Minecraft Challenge-hint hint 😉).
Book Creator Update:
- Zoom Magic 🧐 – Published books now come with zooming capabilities in read mode! Readers can easily zoom in and out to catch every detail.
- Image Editing with the Pen Tool 🖌️ – You can now edit images right on your pages, using the pen tool to add your own personal touch to visuals!
- Transparency Slider 🌫️ – Adjust the transparency of text, images, and more to create custom looks that suit your style!
- Background Remover ✂️ – This might be my favorite update! Now you can remove backgrounds from images in a snap. Just imagine placing a cat on a tropical beach or a selfie with a concert backdrop!