September eBook Top 5 Collection OCM BOCES Instructional Support would highlight these selections from our eBook Professional Library. View Professional eBook Library.

Cell Phones in the Classroom Provides practical ways teachers and administrators from schools around the world are using cell phones for classroom projects, homework assignments, and communication with parents. Read more

Freedom to Fail This text provides a raft of strategies for ensuring that students experience small, constructive failures as a means to greater achievement, and offers practical suggestions for ensuring that constructive failure doesn't detrimentally affect students' summative assessments. Read more

The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching Drilling down into 12 daily touchstones of great teaching, this book makes it easier for educators to stay focused on the hallmarks of effective instruction. Read more

How to Make Decisions with Different Kinds of Student Assessment Data Identifies the critical elements and nuances of assessment data and how that information can best be used to inform improvement efforts in the school or district. Read more

Web 2.0, How-to for Educators Explores the very best online collaborative tools available today (including blogs, wikis, and social networking) and Web 2.0 applications (Skype, Google Earth, Wordle, and more) that make a difference in education. Read more

September 9, 2016

Flip the assessment story, suggests Nicole Dimich Vagle who was here from Solution Tree for the RTI at Work conference in Syracuse in June. Balanced assessment means shifting the attention that standardized tests get to focus on formative assessment. The two graphics demonstrate the flip that is needed.

Image: CC Eli Christman

Beloit College prepares a list of characteristics about their incoming first-year class each year. Their list contrasts the experiences of the educators with those of their incoming frosh class. It’s an eye-opening list!

Evidence shows that learning increases when students understand exactly what they're supposed to learn and what their work will look like when they learn it. This half day session on September 29th will focus on designing, implementing and assessing learning targets so that students have clear goals and a clear vision of what success looks like.

The fall catalog of offerings from Curriculum, Instruction & Assessment is up. Click here to learn more about standards-based instruction, leadership, deeper learning, literacy, standards-areas, culture, assessment, and much more!

It’s not too late to review the basics of classroom management. This advice is always timely. This list of routines to teach at the beginning of the year might be helpful, too (everything from going to the nurse to turning in work to finding the right book).

In Finland, most of the 6th graders participate in a hands-on economics simulation, which sounds an awful lot like Enterprise America, a program available in Central New York through WCNY and OCM BOCES.

Leveled Literacy Intervention is offered at three levels: primary (grades K-2 starting September 20), intermediate (starting October 5) and middle/high school grades (starting December 17).  OCM BOCES also provides an ongoing group for educators who are already implementing to deepen their knowledge and refine their skills by collective learning and sharing.

Illuminations, which is a joint project between NCTM and University of Arizona, has some new math resources to check out. These are all well-aligned to the standards.

Learn more about the mathematical practices in this publicly-available article from NCTM. The article explores the myths about the practices in order to better understand them.

The social studies collaborative gets underway on September 28th. These facilitated sessions are for K-12 teachers and administrators who participated in the summer 2015 and 2016 social studies curriculum work to continue the process of curriculum mapping, unit design and inquiry writing.

Registration is now open for the regional science conference set for November 8th. Space is limited; included districts have a limited number of spaces. Don’t hesitate to claim yours before registration is open to a wider audience.

Very few of our students take statistics. Yet, that might be the most important math course of all. This article describes the situation.

Image: CC Travis Wise

It will be Constitution Day before you know it (September 17th). Start your resource search here.

This video expresses the experience of English Language Learners. Anyone who has a student for whom English is a new language should watch it. It also expresses some of the problems that might be present in our system. The video was recommended by Larry Ferlazzo, and he’s included in one of his great “all-time” collections.