Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

The Character Tree Expands its Offering to Kindergarten

The Character Tree, an online resource that teaches character development though engaging videos and downloadable activities, has expanded to offer videos and content specifically for kindergarten-aged students. The videos are short and feature puppet characters sure to appeal to the youngest learners while they teach lessons on classroom citizenship such as hand-raising, full-body listening and other skills that are important for children who are just starting school.

A 2020/21 subscription to The Character Tree includes 36 episodes, 18 original songs, 36 sets of parent’s guides and 36 sets of useful supplemental resources. The videos are appropriate for use in classrooms, especially in live virtual classrooms, child care centers and for parents at home. To sign up, visit: https://charactertree.com/subscriptions/.

“Our first set of videos this year focused on students in grades 1 and 2 and we had such an amazing response that we are expanding to kindergarten,” said Bill Apperson, chairman of Apperson which created The Character Tree. “These lessons will help young students make that tough transition to school and teach positive character traits that will serve them well into the future.”…Read More

I gamified my classroom and students are soaring

An average child today will have played 10,000 hours of video games before the age of 21. If playing games is part of our culture, even part of our identities, then it stands to reason that students can be highly motivated by game-based learning opportunities. So what if we make classrooms the game?

Gamification means using game-design principles such as cooperation, competition, character development, and point scoring in a non-gaming context. In the classroom, it can be as straightforward as transforming learning activities into games or a more subtle application of game-design principles to learning tasks.

Gamifying your classroom can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. Some teachers choose to create their own game for their classroom in order to customize features including backstory, characters, rules, and objectives. At the same time, there are many user-friendly apps that teachers use to simplify those features.…Read More

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How our school is personalizing learning through co-teaching

Greenwood College School is a not-for-profit, independent, grade 7 to 12 school with about 450 students and about 60 teachers. We focus not only on academic achievement, but also on each student’s character development through connecting to their varied interests, both inside and outside the classroom. At Greenwood, we emphasize community service, extracurricular activities, outdoor education, the arts, and athletics. We want our students to venture out in the real world, experiencing life as much as possible.

Schools looking to personalize learning generally aim to increase interactions between the student and teacher. To achieve this goal, the most straightforward approach would be to have fewer students per teacher; the idea is that the teacher will have more time to devote to each individual student’s growth.

Did you know that it’s Digital Citizenship Week? Click here to learn more!…Read More

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Op-ed: Does this new curriculum cross the line?

New curriculum aims to stop spread of violence with “character development”

school-violence-characterUnfortunately, it seems that school violence has reached an all-time high, as ‘kids will be kids’ bullying has escalated from hurt feelings to suicide, and banned items from campus have gone from slingshots to guns. In a time when hardly any parent feels safe sending their child to school, or any student feels safe on campus, should schools now also teach what it means to be a good person?

At least one teacher thinks so.

Created by Bobbi Callis, a mother and full-time reading intervention teacher, Veracity Matters is a multimedia character education program for children in elementary school, which hopes to reduce the percentage of children who suffer from bullying and depression.…Read More

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