Library eBooks: Untapped Resource?

Bookmark and Share

When gathering resources for teaching your next lesson, consider looking through the eBook selection provided by the KHS library.

Easily accessed through the library page, these eBooks can be “read online,” allowing multiple viewers to access one book at the same time.  These viewers can add their own notes to the texts and then print them out to turn in at the end of a daily lesson.

In addition to graphic versions of some Shakespearean plays, you will also find a collection of great speeches, a visual encyclopedia, and some new fiction selections as well.  These texts can be read by students on their laptops while you display a larger visual on your Activboard, or students may choose to read them from the comforts of their homes/mobile devices.  For your teacher login and password, contact the library.  Students can login to eBooks by navigating to the eBooks section of the KHS Library website, entering “p StudentIDNumber” for their login and “StudentIDNumber” for their password.

How might you use eBooks in your classroom?

New Year: New Voices in Evaluation?

Bookmark and Share

What if students’ voices played a role in teacher evaluation and development?  According to Tracy Crow in “The View from the Seats” (Learning Forward, JSD Dec. 2011), teachers in Memphis City Schools are about to find out.

Through their partnership with the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, Memphis teachers will receive student feedback on their level of care for their students, their classroom control, their ability to clarify difficult ideas, their desire to challenge their students, their capability to captivate, their wish for students to confer, and their skills of consolidating the day’s learning.  Data gathered from almost 3,000 classrooms suggests teachers who receive high ratings on this survey have classes that score at high percentiles.  As a result of this correlation, administrators might use survey results to plan teacher development and write evaluations.

Should student voices contribute to crafting teacher development and evaluations?