A Teacher Candidate Space

Newsela is an adaptive technology that can be useful in any K-12 social-studies classroom. Essentially, Newsela is a website that compiles news articles from a variety of sources, such as the Washington Post and USA Today, and re-writes those articles at a several of different reading levels. Newsela describes their product, writing, “We publish high-interest news and nonfiction articles daily at five levels of complexity for grades 2-12 using a proprietary, rapid text-leveling process. By combining relevant and interesting nonfiction content with standards-aligned assessments, Newsela gives educators the primary solution to dramatically improve students’ literacy skills for the    21st century.” While Newsela is a powerful piece of technology that can be applied in many ways, its most commonly used in a social-studies setting to allow students who read at different levels to all access the same content without being limited by one’s own reading skill le...

I had never heard of Kahoot until I saw it mentioned on the syllabus for a technology in education class. Upon looking up the website, it became immediately clear that this app would be a great way to conduct formative assessments. Basically, Kahoot is an app that allows anyone to create a quiz on a computer and then present that quiz to students who are able to answer each question on their smart phone or tablet. The platform itself is very engaging and would be easy to use for most high school students. One obvious shortcoming of this app is that if there are many students who do not have a smartphone it could be problematic. To solve this problem, ideally the classroom would have one or two tablets on hand to allow students to participate even if they do not have a personal device. If there is a large number of students in the class without access to a device, Kahoot also offers a team mode that could solve the problem, though it might lead to a less accurate assessment of eac...

Hi everyone, I have just created a podcast about pirates. First thing I want to note is that it is much longer than the 3 minute limit for the assignment. I have broken the podcast up and at 2.5 minutes I inserted a little break that lets you know that I reached the limit of the assignment, but I really wanted to include all the content that I recorded, so I also have allowed you to continue listening if you desire. Basically, this podcast was a summary of a paper I wrote about pirates a number of years ago. I have always been really interested in 17th century pirates from a social and economic perspective. I find them to be fascinating and in a lot of ways I feel a ton of empathy for individuals who ended up becoming pirates. I have always said that this paper was the most thought provoking paper I have ever written and I was excited to revisit it. I hope you enjoy the content and I want you to remember that the assignment was only the first three minutes, but please feel free to ...