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Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for kids on Epic

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Get unlimited access to 40,000 of the best books, audiobooks, videos, & more for kids 12 and under. Try it free.

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Boom Learning | Admin, Teacher, & Student Login

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School, teacher, and student sign-in for Boom Cards. Log in with a Boom username, Google, Microsoft, ClassLink, or Clever. Not a member? Join free now.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives.

To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics. If you want to get more specific, use the search bar at the top of this page. Still can't find what you're looking for? Contact our support staff. If they can't help you find it, they'll add your topic to our list of future blog posts.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives. To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics.

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4 million free and priced teaching resources created by teachers for instant download including lesson plans, interactive notebooks, unit plans, novel studies, worksheets, printables, quizzes, task cards, math centers, projects and more. Join over 6 million teachers on the web's most vibrant collaborative exchange.

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Activity Coloring eBooks, Doodling Ideas, Discovery Pictures and Bloopers! Free and easy to print.

Thousands of FREE, printable coloring pages. There is something for everyone!

Support Doodle Art Alley - Makes great gifts for teachers, friends and other coloring fans.

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Activity Coloring eBooks, Doodling Ideas, Discovery Pictures and Bloopers! Free and easy to print. Thousands of FREE, printable coloring pages. There is something for everyone! Support Doodle Art Alley - Makes great gifts for teachers, friends and other coloring fans.

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Using QR codes and AR, math teachers can connect to tutorials, make their word wall interactive, share student work, explore 3D shapes, and update old textbooks.

Scannable technology can totally alter the way that you think about teaching and learning in the math classroom. This powerful free and low-cost technology can support students inside and outside the classroom and change the way you think about interacting with content. QR codes and augmented reality are scannable technology tools that are perfect for K-12 math classrooms.

A Quick Response (QR) code connects users to a link such as a website, YouTube video, or audio clip. Augmented reality (AR) layers digital content over the real world. There are a handful of apps that have pre-made AR experiences and a few tools that you can use to create your own. Once you explore these tools and understand their capabilities, scannable technology offers exciting possibilities for deeper learning.

How can you energize lessons, differentiate instruction, and share student work in the math classroom? Try these five ways to use scannable technology with your K-12 math students.

1. Connect to Tutorials

One of the most familiar complaints about Common Core math references the "new" or "different" strategies used to solve problems. Parents are frustrated when trying to help their child with homework, and even older siblings may be unfamiliar with a variety of the problem-solving strategies now used in classrooms. A QR code can connect students and families to tutorials. Similar to a flipped classroom model, the links to online tutorials can be connected to a QR code. This makes it easy for teachers to link helpful videos to homework assignments. Teachers can use clips that they've found online or made themselves with a tool like Explain Everything or ShowMe.

2. Interactive Word Wall

Many classrooms have wall space dedicated to posting anchor charts or vocabulary. You can add a QR code next to keywords for the unit that takes students to more information. In a middle or high school classroom, this might include a link to a Khan Academy video hosted on YouTube that explains a concept. In an elementary school classroom, it might include a sing-along video. Another option is to have students create the informative content with a tool like Adobe Voice. Then they can use an AR tool like Aurasma to attach their videos to a poster so that it pops off of the page when scanned.

3. Share Student Work

Earlier this year on Edutopia, I shared my ACES Framework for scannable technology integration. The S in the ACES Framework is all about sharing student work. Encourage students to create products that demonstrate their understanding. This could include math tutorials, Hamilton-inspired hip-hop videos on math concepts, or a step-by-step guide on how to solve a problem. You can attach their video links or online content to a QR code using QRstuff. Another option is to use an augmented reality creation tool to build an AR experience that shows off students' digital math projects.

4. Explore 3-Dimensional Shapes

There are a handful of mobile apps that have high-quality premade AR experiences for teachers and students. One of my favorites is from the folks at Quiver. Geometry nets from Quiver are perfect for helping students interact with three-dimensional shapes. After downloading Quiver EDU onto the mobile devices that students will use, you can visit their website to print the geometry AR triggers. Students can color the pages (but they don't have to) and scan the trigger to see the three-dimensional figure pop off of the page. This is a great introduction or vocabulary-building activity. Students can even record their AR experiences to create a tutorial or reflect on their learning.

5. Update Old Textbooks

In the math classroom, you can use scannable tech to update old textbooks. Most math textbooks don't exactly become irrelevant, but they can feel outdated. Turn different pages into AR triggers, or print out a QR code on label paper and stick it to the corner of a page. These links might take students to a video hosted online, to more information about a mathematician or topic, or to a virtual math manipulative like the ones created by the Math Learning Center.

In the math classroom, scannable tech can be used to energize lessons, connect students and families to relevant content, and so much more! Have you used scannable technology in your classroom? Share your experiences in the comments below.

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5 Ways to Use Scannable Tech in the Math Classroom

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Using QR codes and AR, math teachers can connect to tutorials, make their word wall interactive, share student work, explore 3D shapes, and update old textbooks. Scannable technology can totally alter the way that you think about teaching and learning in the math classroom.

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In an age of creators, makers, and innovators, we hear of the concept design thinking too often. What is design thinking? More importantly, can design thinking help you as an educator in your classroom?

Design thinking is a concept that centers around applying creativity and innovation to our actions, decision making, and problem solving as human beings. More significantly, it focuses on the impact that this creative and innovative thinking has on individuals. As a concept, design thinking can be used pedagogically to enhance our teaching practices. As a tool, it can be used to foster and teach empathy in the classroom.

The core principles of design thinking are to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Teaching design thinking can be a powerful way of teaching students empathy in that it teaches them how to solve another person's problems by providing creative and innovative solutions that relate to his or her needs.

To practice this with your students, identify a problem that you will need to solve in your own environment. As a class, you can choose to work on one problem and have students come up with individual solutions, or the students can choose their own problems and work their way toward identifying solutions through the steps below.

1. Empathize

Empathy is the first step in design thinking because it is a skill that allows us to understand and share the same feelings that others feel. Through empathy, we are able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and connect with how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance, or situation. Some questions to consider:

What is the person feeling?

What actions or words indicate this feeling?

Can you identify their feelings through words?

What words would you use to describe their feelings?

These are just some of the guided questions that students can reflect on to identify the problem and how others are feeling about it.

2. Define

The next step is to define the above feelings and identify the main problem to be solved. It's important that, throughout this process, students use language that is identifiable, positive, meaningful, and actionable. Instead of focusing on the negative side of the problem and the lack of options, steer students to using language that is positive, empathetic, and will direct them toward solution-based thinking. Defining the problem is part of the process of shaping a point of view -- our own and others' -- about the problem. Therefore, the framing should inspire the group, the student, or the entire class to find solutions.

3. Ideate

This process is where ideas are generated. Students can learn empathy here when you teach them new and different ways to find solutions to a problem -- there is no single right way for a great idea. Here are a few strategies that you can encourage:

This process helps students to see things from different perspectives. It allows them to step outside of what they might think is the obvious solution and instead generate ideas outside of their own realm.

4. Prototype

In the prototyping phase, students get to make and create the solution to the problem. Empathy helps them see that they're in the first step in a longer process. A prototype can be changed, altered, re-evaluated, and recreated many times based on the needs of the users (either the students themselves or someone else). This process also helps students to recognize that failing is part of learning, and that it's OK to fail. Failure, however, needs to be analyzed so that we learn and grow from our mistakes. Ask these questions:

Why did we fail?

What worked?

What didn't work?

How can we improve to help the user next time?

Is this solution feasible? Is it manageable?

Are these changes designed with the user in mind?

5. Test

During testing, empathy plays a key role in shaping of the user's experience. Focus on showing and not telling. This helps the users to create their own experiences, and also helps us to identify how to improve their experiences next time. The opportunity for empathizing is important at this stage, because one is able to see the user's experience and hear his or her thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Testing also helps to shape our point of view in relation to the user's point of view.

Design thinking to teach empathy can be applied to many problems that arise in the classroom and help encourage students on solution-based thinking -- a process that concentrates on positivity, feedback, iteration, and empathy. If you're interested in implementing design thinking in your classroom, visit Design Thinking for Educators for some free resources.

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Teaching Empathy Through Design Thinking

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In an age of creators, makers, and innovators, we hear of the concept design thinking too often. What is design thinking? More importantly, can design thinking help you as an educator in your classroom? Design thinking is a concept that centers around applying creativity and innovation to our actions, decision making, and problem solving as human beings.

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Instructional Strategies

Use a variety of instructional strategies and learning activities. Offering variety provides the students with opportunities to learn in ways that are responsive to their own communication styles, cognitive styles, and aptitudes. In addition, the variety helps them develop and strengthen other approaches to learning.

Consider students' cultures and language skills when developing learning objectives and instructional activities. Facilitate comparable learning opportunities for students with differing characteristics. For example, consider opportunities for students who differ in appearance, race, sex, disability, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, or ability.

Incorporate objectives for affective and personal development. Provide increased opportunities for high and low achievers to boost their self-esteem, develop positive self-attributes, and enhance their strengths and talents. Such opportunities can enhance students' motivation to learn and achieve.

Communicate expectations. Let the students know the "classroom rules" about talking, verbal participation in lessons, and moving about the room. Tell them how long a task will take to complete or how long it will take to learn a skill or strategy, and when appropriate, give them information on their ability to master a certain skill or complete a task. For example, it may be necessary to encourage students who expect to achieve mastery but are struggling to do so. They may need to know that they have the ability to achieve mastery, but must work through the difficulty.

Provide rationales. Explain the benefits of learning a concept, skill, or task. Ask students to tell you the rationale for learning and explain how the concept or skill applies to their lives at school, home, and work.

Use advance and post organizers. At the beginning of lessons, give the students an overview and tell them the purpose or goal of the activity. If applicable, tell them the order that the lesson will follow and relate it to previous lessons. At the end of the lesson, summarize its main points.

Provide frequent reviews of the content learned. For example, check with the students to see if they remember the difference between simple and compound sentences. Provide a brief review of the previous lesson before continuing on to a new and related lesson.

Facilitate independence in thinking and action. There are many ways to facilitate students' independence. For example, when students begin their work without specific instruction from the teacher, they are displaying independence. When students ask questions, the teacher can encourage independence by responding in a way that lets the student know how to find the answer for him- or herself. When teachers ask students to evaluate their own work or progress, they are facilitating independence, and asking students to perform for the class (e.g., by reciting or role-playing) also promotes independence.

Promote student on-task behavior. Keeping students on task maintains a high level of intensity of instruction. By starting lessons promptly and minimizing transition time between lessons, teachers can help students stay on task. Shifting smoothly (no halts) and efficiently (no wasted effort) from one lesson to another and being business-like about housekeeping tasks such as handing out papers and setting up audiovisual equipment helps to maintain their attention. Keeping students actively involved in the lessons – for example, by asking questions that require students to recall information – also helps them to stay focused and increases the intensity of instruction.

Monitor students' academic progress during lessons and independent work. Check with students during seatwork to see if they need assistance before they have to ask for help. Ask if they have any questions about what they are doing and if they understand what they are doing. Also make the students aware of the various situations in which a skill or strategy can be used as well as adaptations that will broaden its applicability to additional situations.

Provide frequent feedback. Feedback at multiple levels is preferred. For example, acknowledging a correct response is a form of brief feedback, while prompting a student who has given an incorrect answer by providing clues or repeating or rephrasing the question is another level. The teacher may also give positive feedback by stating the appropriate aspects of a student's performance. Finally, the teacher may give positive corrective feedback by making students aware of specific aspects of their performance that need work, reviewing concepts and asking questions, making suggestions for improvement, and having the students correct their work.

Require mastery. Require students to master one task before going on to the next. When tasks are assigned, tell the students the criteria that define mastery and the different ways mastery can be obtained. When mastery is achieved on one aspect or portion of the task, give students corrective feedback to let them know what aspects they have mastered and what aspects still need more work. When the task is complete, let the students know that mastery was reached.

ERIC EC Digest #E584, Author: Jane Burnette

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Strategies for Teaching Culturally Diverse Students

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Use a variety of instructional strategies and learning activities. Offering variety provides the students with opportunities to learn in ways that are responsive to their own communication styles, cognitive styles, and aptitudes. In addition, the variety helps them develop and strengthen other approaches to learning.