🗑 Your new favorite teacher tech tool

📢 Announcing: A NEW email newsletter from Ditch That Textbook 📰

🖍️ Do you work with K-2 students or teachers?

Our new "What's New in K-2" newsletter is your weekly source for fresh ideas and practical resources designed to spark joy and learning in your classroom!

Each week, we'll dive into a curated collection of helpful content to make your teaching life a little easier and a lot more engaging.

Inside each edition, you'll discover:

• 💡 Tips, Tools and Templates: Ready-to-use strategies and resources to streamline your lesson planning and classroom management.

• 📺 Teaching with Teachflix Junior: Creative ways to leverage educational videos and media in your lessons.

• 🛍️ Teacher Finds for the Classroom: Discover exciting and practical products to enhance your learning environment.

• 😄 Giggle of the Week: A guaranteed dose of laughter to brighten your day.

• ❤️ Share your ideas with us! A place to connect and contribute to our growing community.

We're passionate about supporting you in creating a vibrant and engaging learning experience for your young students.

Don't miss out on these weekly gems! Subscribe now to receive "What's New in K-2" directly in your inbox and unlock a treasure trove of helpful resources. Let's make every week a wonderful learning adventure together!

🎯 QUICK TEACHING STRATEGY 🎯

🪑 11 smart student desk layouts

You might use traditional rows — or a horseshoe arrangement for your desks.

But do you know why?

Each classroom desk arrangement has its strengths and weaknesses. Examples:

• Clusters encourage collaboration.

• “Jigsaw groups” allow for peer teaching.

• “Socratic circles” encourage discussion and critical thinking.

In a recent post, Edutopia’s Youki Terada gathered research for 11 student desk layout and shared when each one works or doesn’t.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🚀 10 ways TeachAid will transform your teaching

Unit planning can be tricky.

• If you’re a new teacher: It’s a huge, complicated, multi-step task. And it can be super time-consuming.

• If you’re a veteran teacher: It’s where you teaching can start to feel stale — if you use the same unit plan over and over without revising it.

One summer, a few years into my high school Spanish career, I spent waaaaaaaay too much of my summer creating units, aligning them … making sure they had everything they needed for the year to be a success.

(Yeah … I was a young teacher and I was excited about the work. I enjoyed it! But I did spend too too much of my personal, unpaid time planning those units.)

If I had TeachAid (teachaid.ca) back in those days …

• I could have spent more time customizing and adjusting content.

• I could have spent less time creating ideas from scratch.

• TeachAid could have suggested new ideas I wouldn’t have considered.

• I would have LOVED the interactive student activities in TeachAid. (More on that in a moment …)

Today, I wrote about 10 ways TeachAid will transform your teaching … and below, I’ll tell you a little about my experience with it.

FYI: Their website is TeachAid.ca, and even though the .ca means Canada, this is a tool everyone can (and should!) try out.

What sets TeachAid apart

After using TeachAid myself, a couple of things stood out immediately to me ...

• A whole unit in minutes -- It's kind of incredible to watch. You describe a unit (and include any supporting resources or documents that you have). Then TeachAid starts creating lesson plans, student activities, resources ... even interactive digital activities. Now, you're the teacher and you're still in control. You can adjust anything TeachAid gives you ... but customizing a unit made for you is WAY faster and easier than creating it yourself from scratch.

• Localized lessons: down to your own town! -- This is something a textbook could never do! Ask TeachAid to create localized content, relating learning to your location (with local foods, local festivals, local attractions, what you're known for locally). It might suggest ideas you had never considered before!

My experience with TeachAid

I logged into TeachAid and went right to the “Create new unit” button.

• TeachAid lets you create a new lesson, activity, or assessment from scratch … but I wanted to put all of that together in one big unit first.

Choose your curriculum, grade level, subject, and the language for your unit plan. Then describe your unit. I wrote a quick general summary … then I copied text over from a study guide so it would have specifics.

Advance through the steps and it’ll create a basic overall unit plan you can read with a description, learning goals, success criteria and such.

But that wasn’t the most impressive part to me. It was the sidebar on the left.

Sure, it had my text unit plan at the top. But it broke the whole thing down into lessons — and it suggested materials I could create inside of each lesson!

I started building a few practice activities that would help students learn regular present tense verbs in Spanish.

Notice at the bottom where it says “+ Application: School Routine Sentences”? That’s where TeachAid suggests new activities you might want to use. Just click it and it’ll make that activity right away — aligned with the unit plan and any description you gave it at the beginning.

I thought, “This is nice, but how am I going to give these practice activities to my students?”

That’s where I came across the “Interactive Classroom” button …

TeachAid builds slides and activities — and it lets you present them without leaving the app. 😲😲 Launch interactive mode and you’ll be able to present your slides from the app (no need to export to PowerPoint or Google Slides).

Students can join your interactive slide presentation on their own devices. And that’s when it gets interesting …

See the two buttons at the top? “Accept student responses” and “Enable AI tutor”?

• Turn on student responses when you want students to type answers, brainstorm, or suggest their own ideas.

• If students are working on an assignment, you can turn the AI tutor on so they can ask questions if they get stumped. (And yes, you have access to their AI tutor transcripts so you can see the whole thing.)

The student can toggle between the content on the slide, their typed answer, and the AI tutor.

And on the teacher side, you can display student answers on the screen.

This is something I love about TeachAid — it’s all right there in one app.

Keep going deeper with TeachAid and you’ll see that you can …

• Customize a full unit in just minutes

• Translate to 100+ languages to break down language barriers

• Blend subjects seamlessly with cross-curricular design

• Get hyper-localized examples from your own geographic location

• Drop in your pre-made resources (slides, documents) to enhance and add them to the unit

How to get started with TeachAid

TeachAid’s free plan includes unit and lesson planning, basic differentiation features — and you can generate presentations and create student resources.

The premium plan — which you can try for 30 days for free — includes:

• advanced differentiation

• IEP support

• creation of assessments

• generation of custom assignments

• cross-curricular capability

• theme and inquiry integration

The premium plan is $13 USD per month — or only $78 yearly, which is only $6.50 USD per month.

They also have school/district licenses that open up even more options, like custom curriculum, district-wide professional development, and more.

👋 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!