Humans in general have short attention spans, but today's students have a particularly hard time staying focused. Dr. Judy Willis, MD, (2016) a neurologist and classroom teacher (how cool is that, by the way?!) emphasizes the need for a break: "Brain breaks should take place before fatigue, boredom, distraction, and inattention set in....As a general rule, concentrated study of 10 to 15 minutes for elementary school and 20 to 30 minutes for middle and high school students calls for a three- to five-minute break." So asking students to stay completely focused for long chunks of time without a break might be too much for them to handle. GoNoodle is an easy way to implement brain breaks in your classroom. It has been around for a long time, and is marketed more for elementary students, but there are so many videos on their site that work for middle school and even high school students. GoNoodle has different activities of varying lengths. They have activities that you can use at the start of the day (good for those who have first hour classes that don't seem quite awake), and they have ones you can use in the middle of class to give students a brain break. Now, of course, I would advocate for the teacher and all students to participate. Having said that, I know not everyone is comfortable making a complete fool of themselves (both teachers and students included). Luckily, there are activities that range from the cheesy to the not-so-cheesy and from the complicated to the easy-peasy. You really can tailor it to meet the needs of your students, which is great. An alternative to GoNoodle is just going to YouTube and searching for brain breaks, but the GoNoodle site is nice because you easily can find videos by categories (i.e. Cross Lateral Skills, Enhance Focus, or Brainercise) and it keeps track of your progress. GoNoodle does have a YouTube Channel that is really well organized, too. Overall, the key here is to make sure we are giving students time to focus and re-energize, even if it's just for a minute or two! Any other ideas for how to give students' brains a break? Comment below! Professional Standards
Standard 2: Impact on Student Learning Standard 4: Grow and Develop Professionally
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Just FYI, the first quick tip I'm going to share with you applies to a PC (Windows computer) or Mac, not your Chromebook. The first helpful tip will allow you to access your bookmarks, apps, and extensions when using Chrome on your desktop or laptop. To do this, you just need to log in to your Chrome browser. It is very simple to do! Just see below. Linking the data for your account will keep your browser signed in so that if you install an extension or app on your Chromebook, it will show up on your desktop. You still have to log in to your mail and everything on your PC, but this will sync history, extensions, apps, themes, and preferences from device to device. The second helpful tip is how to manage multiple Google accounts on your computer. We all know that students need to be good digital citizens, but it is also important (more so, in my opinion!) for teachers to be good digital citizens. This tip I'm highlighting is super important to utilize if you have a personal Google account that you log into at school. Keeping your personal account and work account separate is really important, but when you just click on your icon at the top right of Gmail or Drive and Add Account, it is messy and your accounts can easily get confused. The last thing you want is to share something with someone that you didn't mean to share. The easy fix for this is the Incognito window. This is a way for you to search without saving browsing history (Note - what you do incognito is not kept from the tech. department or our internet service provider). The benefit of this is that it allows you to log in to a separate Google account. See below for the easy how-to! There is another really cool way to add accounts in Google. Kasey Bell of Shake Up Learning did a blog post on this if you are interested. However, the way our computers currently are set up at school, this won't work. I use it on my home computer, though, and I love it since I have three different Google accounts!
Hopefully these two simple tips will help those of us still getting our feet wet with Google. To my Google pros, any easy organizational tips you'd like to share? I'd love to hear from you! |
AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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