✍️ Empower your student writers

🌍 Hundreds of virtual field trips at your fingertips

Field trips can be exciting! But they’re also a LOT of work for teachers.

What if you could get the benefits of a field trip without leaving your classroom?

In our mini online course, Getting Started with Virtual Field Trips, we share lots of places to find and run virtual field trips with your students.

It includes:

• More than 45 minutes of video instruction

• An in-depth look at 10 places to find free virtual field trips

• Templates, tools, and tutorials for creating your own virtual field trips

Plus, you'll get the Virtual Field Trips Database, a searchable database of more than 500 virtual field trips you can use right away!

Best of all? This course is only $19 USD — and you get a certificate of completion for professional development credit.

Get details and sign up for the course here!

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

📚 Grow student authors during “Be An Author Month”

Some students in your classroom probably dream of being an author. Publishing a book. Maybe even having a best-seller and making it big.

Even if they don't want to write a book, you have authors in your classroom.

Now is a great time to think about growing authors in your classroom. March is Book Creator's "Be an Author Month," and Read Across America happens in early March every year.

📢 What is Be An Author Month?

March is synonymous with literacy. We’ve got National Reading Month, Listening Awareness Month, and even National March into Literacy Month! We can inspire our students to embrace their creativity, articulate their thoughts, and harness the strength of their voice.

Want to know how?

It’s all about being authentic. Kids love becoming authors. Creating a book is a tangible thing that anyone can relate to.

And when students know their work is going to be viewed beyond the classroom, they put in extra effort.

Turn your learners (and maybe even yourselves) into published authors through reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities across all subjects.

This year, Be An Author Month is about finding, refining, and recording your VOICE to share your amazing stories.

There are multiple ways of sharing your voice. You can write, draw, code, film a video, record your voice … you decide.

✏️ How to take part in Be An Author Month

Head over to the Book Creator website to get started - you’ll find:

• 📚Templates to help with reading and writing

• ☘️ An Activity Journal for something to do for every day in March

• 📺 Inspirational webinars to motivate and inform you

• 🌎 A special collaborative project for the whole world to participate in!

📕 Learn more ways to take part in Be An Author Month in our updated post: Growing authors: 15 ways to use Book Creator to publish student writing.

🎯 Quick Teaching Strategy

🚀 Level up your Think-Pair-Share routine

The think, pair, share strategy is a fantastic way to get your whole class talking and engaged in whatever you're discussing. It has stood the test of time and continues to be a strategy that we can fall back on regardless of age or subject matter.

🤔What is think-pair-share?

Think: Pose a question to students and ask them to think about the answer on their own.

Pair: Have students turn to their partner and share their responses with one another.

Share: Get back together as a whole group and have students share their own or their partners’ responses.

💡Why this strategy works

The think-pair-share strategy works because all students can get time to think before they share with their partner. It’s also great because all students can share their responses at least one time, once with their partner and again out to the whole class.

🚀 Variations

Think-Listening Pair-Share: To work on students’ listening skills, tell them that they can only share their partner’s viewpoint during “Share.”

Think-Pair-Square: After “Pair,” have partners “Square” with another pair to discuss their ideas, making a group of 4.

Think-Pair-FigJam-Share: With this FigJam template your students can record their ideas and prepare for what they want to share out with the whole class.

Think-Pair-AI-Pair-Share: Students think about a prompt, and then discuss it with a classmate. Then they do any searches they want on ChatGPT (or another AI chat bot). They pair back up to discuss what they've found. Then they share with the class.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!