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Mind-Blowing Google Extensions for Education

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Mind-Blowing Google Extensions for Education

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OPEN THIS LINK ON YOUR PHONE TO USE PHONE AS CLICKER: s.limhenry.xyz

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5 Ways to Build Career Connections in High School

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Teachers can use preventive discipline to help avert episodes of misbehavior before they start.

Our schools are being challenged to return to some type of normalcy, with policy leaders focusing on learning loss as we move through a third academic year in a global pandemic. But the developing nervous system of our children and youth requires felt safety before it can learn.

Adults are also feeling the emotional and social fatigue from the mounting behavioral challenges in schools along with the push to close learning gaps while sitting beside students and helping them adjust to the social loss that they are still experiencing.

This social loss is observed through verbal and physical aggression that significantly increased in schools across the world over the past couple of years. Our students are struggling to tolerate differences in one another with increased agitation and anger.

Failing grades, incomplete assignments, and the chronic challenge to stay attentive and focused on tasks, assignments, and lectures through a seven-hour school day are also problematic, contributing to the overwhelming feelings of disconnect and anxiety impacting students' developing nervous systems and, therefore, their behaviors.

Nervous System Challenges

These behavioral challenges are nervous system challenges, and this is true for both adults and children. When our nervous system feels overwhelmed, human beings revert to survival states of functioning. In this condition, we can become reactive in our discipline responses rather than preventive, relational, and aligned with the sensations and feelings that are driving the behaviors that we feel and see in our classrooms and schools.

When our children and youth learn why they feel the way they do, they are often relieved and empowered to understand and know, I am not a bad kid, and there's nothing wrong with me! Traditionally in our schools, we attend to the behavior, followed by consequences, as we suspend, isolate, or refer to administration, but we are back at this again the next hour, day, or week.

Our discipline data often informs us that the same students are accumulating discipline referrals each week, and many of these students are carrying significant emotional pain into our classrooms and schools.

A Necessary Shift

Behavior management is about the adults. This is a significant shift in how we traditionally view discipline protocols in our schools and homes.

When we understand how contagious our nervous systems are, we are learning that we can unintentionally dysregulate students through our dysregulated nervous system. When I am frustrated, irritated, or feeling hopeless and overwhelmed, my window of tolerance lessens, and I can activate a defensive, aggressive, or shutdown reaction in my students from the look on my face, my tone of voice, my posture, or how I gesture.

If we do not experience a sense of felt safety within our relationships and environments, our nervous systems initiate a survival response that's intended to protect us. But at that moment, it also shuts down access to the cortical functions of the brain. These are the functions that enable us to think clearly, emotionally regulate, pay attention, and hold a steady working memory, while simultaneously activating curiosity and creativity.

We need to get out in front of the behavior. When we are intentional about our procedures, routines, and transitions, and how the students enter and exit a class and the school, we can meet students and ourselves in our nervous system states.

How? We integrate bell work, focused attention practices, nervous system check-ins, guiding questions, and group discussions as Tier 1 practices and strategies that build engagement, strengthen relationships, and activate the prefrontal cortex of our brain so that we can pay attention, integrate working memory, problem-solve, and emotionally regulate our sensations and feelings. Below are a few practices that we can integrate all day long, as we model how discipline occurs before a crisis.

4 Preventive Discipline Practices

1. Dedicate this one. In this focused attention practice, we create an image or write down a few words that we want to share with someone we appreciate. As we think of this person, we breathe deeply for one minute sharing our love, hope, and any words of comfort that we want to send them. We then share our dedication with a partner. We can draw, write out, or visualize our appreciation.

2. Regulate with a partner. Choose a partner. Without talking, find a rhythm in your own breathing, and see if your partner can match the breathing rhythm. What about a drumming or movement rhythm? Change it up as each person takes the lead. Did you find a pattern, a rhythm, or even a beat to your dual breathing or movement? Maybe one student could begin a rhythm, and the other could add to it and repeat a few times until they have created a patterned, collaborative rhythm.

3. Mirror me. In this co-regulatory practice, one partner creates a variety of body movements that the other person must mirror. They then switch leads, so the other person is choosing the movements.

4. Focus on faces, eyes, gestures, and postures. It's important to notice another person's eyes, listen to their voice, and watch their gestures and posture. Facial expressions and body language tell us how someone is feeling, and they are signals for us as we interact with them. To be aware of another person's body language is to understand how we need to respond. People "listen" more to body language than the words that people say. It's also very important for us to understand our own body language! Teachers can use these guided questions to help students better understand the messages conveyed through body language.

By shifting discipline protocols, we're able to get out in front of dysregulated behaviors while providing felt safety inside our relationships with students and our classrooms. We make this change by altering our procedures, routines, and transitions.

This is a process, and just as our brains and bodies require patterned repetition to create and strengthen neural pathways, our students need the time and practice to learn new ways of responding while being aware of the beautiful adaptability and creativity of their nervous systems.

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In order to stop misbehavior before it starts, teachers need a good understanding of the nervous system's role in behavior.

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EduProtocols are engaging lesson frames that can be used again and again across levels and subjects. In this collection, you will be able to explore and experience EduProtocols that will increase the amount of writing that students will complete in any classroom, not just ELA classes.

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EduProtocols to Amp Up Writing in the Classroom

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Edu...what? EduProtocols are engaging lesson frames that can be used again and again across levels and subjects. In this collection, you will be able to explore and experience EduProtocols that will increase the amount of writing that students will complete in any classroom, not just ELA classes.

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How To Play Hot Seat | Fun Classroom Game

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ChatGPT and other AI tools complicate how teachers think about student writing and how they teach academic integrity.

Goodboy Picture Company / iStock

As a child of the 1990s, I recall arguing with teachers about why I should be allowed to use a calculator to do math and why, with the advent of personal computing, having to learn cursive should go the way of the abacus.

"Get with the times," I told my teachers, asking why I should have to perform tasks the old-fashioned way when new technology already made life easier and more efficient.

Fast-forward: Karma hit me when my high school history students told me about ChatGPT, a currently free online platform that, true to its advertising, "is trained to follow instructions in a prompt and provide detailed responses."

No matter what I ask of ChatGPT, it generates well-written responses in mere seconds, with interesting, if not always accurate, content. Upon researching more about these "writing assistants," I came across Jasper, which, while charging for access, proved to be even more intelligent and intuitive, but also imperfect.

Experimenting with AI Writing Platforms

Using a free five-day trial, I asked Jasper to respond to my students' upcoming take-home essay assignment about religion in Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. After just a few quick keystrokes and some fine-tuning of my output parameters, Jasper produced a 1,500-word essay, including supposedly legitimate quotations from the narrative, with in-text citations. Keep in mind that with additional time and fidgeting, Jasper would have delved with even greater depth into any area.
Furthermore, reliance on Christian principles such as compassion and forgiveness becomes a vehicle by which Jacobs navigates her life as a slave. She expresses this idea when describing her master Dr Flint's cruelty towards her: "The better feelings which nature had given him were dead.... Here then was my home-my cruel home-made desolate by the demon Slavery! Yet heaven blessed it with one true friend-my good old grandmother! She prayed for me continually... her prayers kept alive my Christian virtues" (Jacobs 30-31). These Christian values-such as understanding even amidst hatred-help elevate Jacobs's spirit despite her oppressive conditions, allowing her to continue fighting for freedom without becoming consumed by bitterness or rage.
Examine the body paragraph below, which includes a clear topic sentence, accurate analysis, solid diction, and tight sentence structure:

However scholarly and convincing this paragraph may sound, be wary! Trust me: I speak from experience, as a high school history and journalism teacher of 16 years who also writes about media literacy and fake news.

I almost signed off on this story getting posted without verifying Jasper's use of text evidence, which, as it turns out, does not exist in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In fact, not only did I come up with bupkis after searching for matching words and phrases in an electronic version of the book, but a Google search also revealed no exact matches.

I should have known better, but if my ordeal encourages teachers and students not to be fooled by AI and scholarly-sounding prose, I happily fall on my sword.

Jasper did translate portions of my essay into near-flawless Spanish, as two Spanish teaching colleagues attest. The platform boasts that it can do just as good a job in another 24 languages. Furthermore, Jasper advertises that it "will almost always generate unique content, particularly for longer content." This raises a whole host of ethical issues and questions for teachers, students, administrators, and everybody else involved in producing and consuming content.

Implications for Educators

Witnessing the power of this technology firsthand, I'm left with many burning questions as an educator, many of which are difficult to begin to fathom: With AI generating unique content, how can teachers encourage and enforce academic honesty? If it is extremely easy to cut corners, avoid plagiarism-detection software, and still submit quality work, how and to what extent can educators persuade students to put in hard work the old-fashioned way?

Along those lines, I dare to ask how AI will change what educators expect students to know and be able to do. For example, how will AI change how we assess student learning and growth? Will educators give fewer take-home assignments while having students produce more of their output in class, under direct supervision? Will we have to rethink the need to teach penmanship or invest in proctoring software? What does more time devoted to in-class work mean for how much content teachers can cover each year, or for a particular subject?

Should teachers entirely shun AI, dismissing it as an easy and attractive way for students to get out of doing real work, which is needed to really learn and grow, or should teachers acknowledge its existence, experimenting with and researching how it can aid learning and growth? Might it enhance accessibility for students with disabilities? What would a healthy use of this software look like, and who should act as the arbiter?

I am extremely excited about what AI could mean for modeling effective writing and research. And yet, I, like so many other teachers, am stuck wondering who should ultimately be held responsible for content produced by AI. If AI misquotes, plagiarizes, or does something else nefarious, to what extent is the student user also responsible? Along with the student, how and to what extent should a particular AI platform be held accountable? What factors should administrators consider in trying to get to the bottom of any error or oversight?

To make another 1990s reference, I don't think that platforms like ChatGBT and Jasper indicate the rise of Skynet, a super-intelligent AI from the Terminator films, which gains self-awareness and reduces humanity to a postapocalyptic hellscape. As I have seen in my own classroom, technology can open unexpected opportunities for learning.

Technology as a Facilitator of Learning

I often project responses to a given prompt in the classroom, but AI could take this practice to a whole new level. While I do not want my students to feel tempted to copy and paste a response, there is significant value in asking students to observe and study stellar writing in action. I am already thinking about how AI could save me time to cover more content with students-for example, by generating mentor texts to showcase for whole-group discussion.

In 2023, we still debate the vices and virtues of students using calculators in most math and science settings. Yet the near-ubiquitous acceptance of this technology conveys a fundamental truth: No matter our wishes, content-generating AI is here to stay.

As we have always done, teachers must navigate with students how to make effective and ethical use of this new technology. It's way too early to know how to do this or what this entails, though one thing is for certain-if we do nothing but lament how AI spells doom for education, we lose a sacred chance to help guide students into a brave new world.

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Grappling With AI Writing Technologies in the Classroom

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ChatGPT and other AI tools complicate how teachers think about student writing and how they teach academic integrity.

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Everyone gets stumped when they begin a new writing project-even the professionals. Here are some strategies the world's best writers use to push past the doldrums and generate higher-quality writing.

If you're trying to help your students become better writers, what better place to go for advice than professionals?

A recent New York Times article went behind the scenes to get tips from journalists about the best practices they use to make their writing sparkle. One big piece of advice was quite simple: Read your work out loud.

"Whether it's parsing tricky passages or checking for overall flow, they [the New York Times journalists] all agree: Hearing their words makes their writing stronger," the story notes.

Julia Jacobs, a general assignment reporter for the paper, said reading her work aloud is an easy way to slow down and pay attention to small, but crucial details-like the length of her sentences. "It's a way to focus my brain very quickly," she said, adding that she knows particular sentences need more work when she starts to run out of breath while reading them.

Dan Barry, a veteran Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who is often lauded for long narrative features, said reading aloud is a surefire way to "nail the rhythm" of a piece of writing. "Hearing his words," the article notes, "allows him to immediately spot an overworked alliteration, dropped articles, and gaps in logic."

The practice is also backed by science. A recent study asked college students to proofread texts silently and then aloud to assess which approach helped them spot more typos, grammatical mistakes, and errors in word choice. Compared to silent readers, those who read out loud found 5 percent more errors. For more challenging errors-like the common they're/their/there mistake-accuracy jumped to 12 percent.

Asking students to read aloud, while focusing on things like tone, sentence structure, and cadence, is a simple, effective, and researched-backed way to improve their writing-particularly during the revision stage.

That insight got us thinking about other easy strategies-used by real pros-that students can also employ to improve their writing.

WALK AWAY FROM IT
It might seem counterintuitive to prescribe taking a break from writing as a way to improve it, but research suggests short breaks from challenging tasks aren't idle time; they provide the brain with the space needed to resolve tricky issues.

In a 2021 study, researchers observed the neural activity of students as they learned how to type with their nondominant hand. During breaks, the brains of the participants unconsciously replayed the practice session over and over "at an astonishingly high rate of speed" according to the study, flipping the information between processing and memory centers dozens of times in the span of a few seconds. The brain makes progress even when we are not focused on a problem, and "stepping away from the activity, it turns out, is not stepping away from the activity at all," the researchers concluded.

If research isn't enough to sway you, take it from literary luminaries like Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and William Wordsworth, who are among the scores of writers known to use walks to get creative juices flowing after hitting rough patches in their work.

While it may be difficult to build walks into the middle of a school day, it is certainly something you can prescribe to students as they work on writing outside of school.

TALK IT OUT
Alexandra Parrish Cheshire, an educational consultant and former educator, writes that students who can talk at length about a given topic often freeze up when it is time to get things down on the page-"almost as if they've been handicapped by the task we have set for them."

One easy way to help students to overcome this natural resistance is to allow them to use recorders or voice memo apps to record themselves speaking out their essay, rather than trying to write it out first. They can then play back the recording and write down the most salient points. Free transcription tools, like Trint, can also be used to quickly convert their speech into text.

For students who are really struggling, Cheshire writes that teachers can schedule one-on-one time and give them the opportunity to talk out their ideas, while the teacher jots them down. At the end, students have something to work off of and are able to push past their initial fears. That approach, she says, might free a student up "to express their thoughts without the hesitation that makes some students' minds go blank as they pick up that pen or pencil."

The pros agree. National Book Award winning novelist Richard Powers writes that he's been dictating his work for over a decade, which allows him to "hear every sentence as it's made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind's ear." Powers notes that the practice dates as far back as the 17th century, when English poet John Milton, who was blind, dictated his epic poem Paradise Lost to his daughters.

HAVE THE COURAGE TO BE (VERY) BAD Another reason students freeze up on the page during the drafting process, writes Christina Torres Cawdery, an eighth grade English teacher in Hawaii, is that they spend a lot of time self-editing and self-critiquing themselves early on-stifling any forward momentum. First drafts can be thought of as a form of doodling, instead, and Cawdery says it's important to create opportunities for informal, ungraded writing that is less focused on content, grammar, or fluency, and more on just getting raw thinking down to be reworked later.

Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that even his first drafts are "cringe-inducing."

Crafting eloquent and persuasive writing, he says, entails revising your worst version of a piece of writing over and over again until it sings. "I believe that many people have the talent to write. But very few have the courage to rewrite. Even fewer have the courage to rewrite, fail, and live to do the whole thing again."

Getting down a bad first draft, quickly, is an approach backed by countless writers and authors who profess the merits of "vomit drafts." So many that it would be worthwhile for ELA teachers to hang up quotes from the professionals as a means of inspiring their students to do it themselves.

In her classroom, Cawdery gets students to generate quick drafts by giving them 10 minutes after reading a prompt or a text to write down as much as they can, unfiltered. "This exercise allows students to get as many ideas on the page as they can, helping them release judgment about 'good' or 'bad' ideas." When time is up, students can take a highlighter to find and mark "hidden gems in their work," which helps them realize that their informal writing can provide them with good ideas to use in higher-stakes assignments.

Cawdery says you can also challenge students to write the "worst" first draft possible of their paper. Explain that they're free to discard grammar rules and come up with the silliest possible connections they can think of. According to Cawdery, more often than not, students will come away with bits and pieces that are useful, and perhaps even more interesting, than if they'd started off the writing process thinking about getting things down as perfectly as possible.

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Things Professional Writers Do That Students Should Too

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Everyone gets stumped when they begin a new writing project-even the professionals. Here are some strategies the world's best writers use to push past the doldrums and generate higher-quality writing. If you're trying to help your students become better writers, what better place to go for advice than professionals?