10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher

To create a classroom culture of inquiry, we can follow these five techniques. Connie Hamilton, author of Hacking Questions: 11 Answers That Create a Culture of Inquiry in Your Classroom. www.coolcatteacher.com/e495 SmartBrief Keeping up with the news is challenging. Today’s sponsor, SmartBrief, has some email newsletters that will help you stay current. Whether you want to follow education technology, special education, math, or just teaching best practices, SmartBrief has an email newsletter for you. Check them out at coolcatteacher.com/smartbrief and sign up today. Connie Hamilton - Bio as Submitted Connie Hamilton Ed.S. has 25 years in education as teacher, instructional coach, elementary/secondary principal and K-12 district administrator. She is currently the curriculum director in Saranac Community Schools, is an international educational consultant and presenter, and the author of two books, including her latest, Hacking Questions. Teachers describe her workshops as meaningful and engaging as she models quality instructional methods that can be used in the classroom tomorrow. She applies her deep understanding of pedagogy in workshops such as Questioning, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Student Engagement, Feedback, and more. Connie spends most of her year facilitating classroom observations in a collaborative setting so teachers can learn from one another as they implement new strategies with students. She brings these experiences to her workshops to help teachers put research into practice in ways that make sense. Visit Connie's webpage at https://conniehamilton.net/ or find her on Twitter @conniehamilton.

Jaime Casap, Google's Education Evangelist, grew up in poverty. Today, he shares his story and encouragement to help teachers reach children from a variety of backgrounds. You'll want to listen to this encouraging show! www.coolcatteacher.com/e494  Today's Sponsor: SmartBrief Keeping up with the news is challenging. Today’s sponsor, SmartBrief, has some email newsletters that will help you stay current. Whether you want to follow education technology, special education, math, or just teaching best practices, SmartBrief has an email newsletter for you. Check them out at coolcatteacher.com/smartbrief and sign up today. Jaime Casap - Bio As Submitted Jaime Casap is the Chief Education Evangelist at Google. Jaime evangelizes the potential of digitalization as an enabling capability in pursuit of promoting inquiry-based learning models. Jaime collaborates with school systems, educational organizations, and leaders focused on building innovation into our education policies and practices. In addition to his role at Google, Jaime serves as an advisor to dozens of organizations focused on learning, skill development, and the future of work. He is the coauthor of “Our First Talk About Poverty,” as a way to talk to children about poverty. Jaime helped launch the Phoenix Coding Academy, a public high school in Phoenix, AZ, focused on computer science as part of an inquiry-based learning model. He teaches a 10th-grade communication class at the school. He also guest lectures at Arizona State University. He speaks on education, digitalization, innovation, generation z, and the future of work at events around the world. You can follow and reach him on Twitter at @jcasap and watch his YouTube career advice videos at www.youtube.com/jaimecasap  

While we have to finish well, those of us who are returning to another year as an educator have to look forward to plan. Today, media specialist Amanda Johnson talks about the massive success of some new sections she added to the library last summer and how she's going to improve her library even more this summer. The goal is to encourage students to read and what Amanda is discovering might surprise you. Today's Sponsor: SmartBrief Keeping up with the news is challenging. Today’s sponsor, SmartBrief, has some email newsletters that will help you stay current. Whether you want to follow education technology, special education, math, or just teaching best practices, SmartBrief has an email newsletter for you. Check them out at coolcatteacher.com/smartbrief and sign up today. Amanda Johnson - Bio As Submitted Amanda Johnson is the media specialist at Meadow View Elementary in Henry County, Virginia. As a first year librarian, Amanda has hit the ground running with her students, setting up the library in Henry County's new elementary school. A 2015 graduate of Mary Baldwin College with a degree in English with minors in education, coaching & exercise leadership, and history, Amanda went on to receive a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from Louisiana State University in 2018. Amanda strives to be an innovative educator in a 1:1 iPad school, embracing the wide array of technology available in the media center. Wanting the library to be an enhancement and extension of the classroom, Amanda has tried to incorporate and further classroom lessons in the library through virtual reality, circuitry experiments, coding, green screen video production, and more. As a lifelong learner, every day is an adventure for Amanda and her 670 elementary school students!

The first person to walk on Mars has already been born and is in our classrooms today, so the  experts tell us. He or she could be in your classroom or mine. The question is if we're equipping that child and the others to go behind them with the knowledge and intuitive exploration of making things work together for success through rich making and STEM spaces. Today we talk to Rachael Mann, author of The Martians in Your Classroom: STEM in Every Learning Space. Today's Sponsor: SmartBrief Keeping up with the news is challenging. Today’s sponsor, SmartBrief, has some email newsletters that will help you stay current. Whether you want to follow education technology, special education, math, or just teaching best practices, SmartBrief has an email newsletter for you. Check them out at coolcatteacher.com/smartbrief and sign up today. Related Resources The Martians in Your Classroom: STEM in Every Learning Space "The Spaces You Will Go" by Rachel Mann  How Does STEM Bring the Real World Into the Classroom? Other Podcasts with Rachael Mann I will curate a Wakelet collection to go along with the podcast: https://wakelet.com/@RachaelEdu Rachael Mann - Bio as Submitted Rachael Mann is the founder of #TeachlikeTED and coauthor of The Martians in Your Classroom. She speaks and writes about the future of education and helps educators rethink the learning spaces of today. Prior to #TeachlikeTED, Rachael was the Network to Transform Teaching and STEM Professional Learning Director for Northern Arizona University’s AZK12 Center and State Director for Educators Rising Arizona. A former high school Career and Technical Education teacher and hailing from a family of educators, she has 14 years of classroom teaching experience. Rachael is a Google Certified Educator with a master’s degree in Educational Leadership. She is a founding member of the Council on the Future of Education, President-Elect for the NCLA Executive Board, and serves on the Region V Policy Committee.   Blog: https://rachaelmann.co/ Twitter: @RachaelEdu

Schools are being targeted with "spearfishing" attacks - a new form of phishing that is quite deceptive. Citizenship encompasses digital citizenship and the importance of lateral reading are three of the motivating topics tackled today with education thought-leader Dr. Alec Couros. Sponsor: SmartBrief Keeping up with the news is challenging. Today’s sponsor, SmartBrief, has some email newsletters that will help you stay current. Whether you want to follow education technology, special education, math, or just teaching best practices, SmartBrief has an email newsletter for you. Check them out at coolcatteacher.com/smartbrief and sign up today. Dr. Alec Couros - Bio as Submitted Alec Couros is a professor of educational technology and media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada. An award-winning educator, Alec helps his undergraduate and graduate students take up the incredible affordances of our connected world through the integration of educational technology in teaching and learning. Alec is also a well-recognized scholar and researcher who has given hundreds of keynotes and workshops around the globe on diverse topics such as connected/networked learning, digital citizenship, social media in education, and critical media literacy, providing educators, students, and parents with the knowledge necessary to take advantage of and thrive in our new digital reality. Finally, Alec is a passionate advocate of openness in education and demonstrates this commitment through his open access publications, considerable digital presence and contributions, and highly successful MOOCs and open boundary courses. Blog: http://couros.ca/ Twitter:@courosa

Play belongs in every classroom. Today, Jill Vialet shows us how. www.coolcatteacher.com/e490 Bio as submitted Jill Vialet is the Founder and CEO of Playworks, the leading nonprofit leveraging the power of play to transform children's social and emotional health. For more information, visit: www.playworks.org.   Blog: https://www.playworks.org/about/staff/meet-ceo-founder/   Twitter: @jillvialet  

Music education helps students engage with learning and has many positive benefits. Today's guest, Tiffany Kerns, Executive Director of the CMA Foundation talks about remarkable music teaching and their quest to recognize the top music teachers in the United States. www.coolcatteacher.com/e489   Related Resources Music education gives students an exciting and creative reason to be in the classroom. Student engagement in music class creates better attendance, which translates to higher test scores and graduation rates. There is significant data proving the positive impact music has on a student’s ability to retain, learn, and articulate information. This is seen especially in reading – without an improvement in literacy alone, our country will not be able to properly support this generation. Some of the benefits of music education include higher graduation rates, a greater chance of post-secondary success, social and emotional development, and shaping the next generation to be collaborative, creative and forward-thinking leaders.   Previous Shows Relating to This Topic Seesaw in the Elementary Music Classroom with Amy Burns K-6 Educational Music Videos: Selecting the Right Videos for Learning Making Music with iPads and #edtech   Tiffany Kerns - Bio as submitted A common thread throughout Tiffany Kerns’ career has been her dedication to creating meaningful change and advocacy for nonprofit organizations. Paired with a steadfast focus on improving the philanthropic model of giving, Kerns has lead the Country Music Association (CMA) Foundation in their mission of enriching music education programs across the United States, working to ensure every child has the opportunity to participate in music. Established as the philanthropic arm to the Country Music Association (CMA), the CMA Foundation has invested over $25 million into music education programs across all 50 states. As executive director, Kerns is responsible for the growth, development, and execution of the nonprofit’s charitable investments by creating strategic partnerships, working with policy leaders and implementing an impact-driven grant process. Kerns works with each and every grantee organization to provide strategic planning, compliance, project management, and community impact. She oversees advocacy efforts for the CMA Foundation at the state and federal level, which includes working with more than a dozen community partners to elevate the cause. Kerns also oversees the CMA’s collegiate program CMA EDU, which currently has 25 collegiate chapters nationwide and works to educate students on the music industry by providing opportunities to hear from industry professionals and participate in a hands-on work experience alongside marketing and tour production. Before joining the CMA Foundation, Kerns was the director of development at The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. For over six years, Kerns filled various roles in special events and development. Driven by her passion to grow the organization and fueled by her exceptional leadership skills, single-handedly, Kerns implemented new fundraising initiatives and opportunities across the Southeast and Pacific Northwest regions. After expanding her footprint in nonprofit management and learning the biotech industry in San Francisco, Kerns moved to Nashville to develop and strengthen the donor portfolio for CFF which ultimately led her to CMA. Kerns is a graduate of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where she received a BA in Political Science and a minor in Business Administration. Blog: https://www.cmaworld.com/foundation/ Twitter: @cmafoundation

When I shared a USA Today Article on PBIS on my Facebook page, teachers started responding and yelled volumes about mis-implementation mis-understandings and mis-use of discipline -- specifically PBIS -- in their schools. So, Melissa Man, special education teacher with her Master's in Counseling agreed to come on the show and talk about the topic. What do you think? Melissa Mann's Bio as Submitted Melissa Mann is a special education teacher with the Madison County School System. She has taught both self-contained and collaborative students in grades Kindergarten through 6th grade. Melissa is dual certified in Elementary Education and Special Education. She also has a Master's in School Counseling and is a certified school counselor. Melissa presented at ISTE in 2015, and she has presented for the past eight years at Alabama's state technology conference and at various local conferences. Melissa is also a trainer with Simple K-12.  Her portfolio can be found at: www.bit.ly/TechTreasures   Blog: https://techtipsforthek-6classroom.blogspot.com/ Twitter: @mnmann  

Matt Timmons-Brown is the "Raspberry Pi Guy" on Youtube. If you don't know what the Raspberry Pi is, it is an amazing small computer from which you can make amazing things. Matt is the author of Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi. This 19-year old student at the University of Edinburg talks about how he interested himself in Computer Science and shares his insight on how to engage his generation in a powerful career. www.coolcatteacher.com/e487  Matt Timmons-Brown - Bio as Submitted Matt, The Raspberry Pi Guy YouTube channel, author of Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi, available now: http://mybook.to/raspirobots, BEng Computer Science & Electronics Undergraduate at The University of Edinburgh

Students need to trust their teachers. The result is better relationships, better learning, and a better quality of experience for everyone -- teachers and students included! Today's featured educator is CJ Reynolds, a teacher in West Philadelphia. CJ shares how to build relationships with students in some unconventional and cool ways. He also talks about why his YouTube channel has become so popular and how teachers can get motivated every day (not just Mondays.) www.coolcatteacher.com/e486 CJ Reynolds - Bio As Submitted CJ Reynolds teaches high school literature and The History of Hip-Hop in West Philadelphia. He is also the creator of the YouTube channel, Real Rap with Reynolds which aims at helping new and burned out teachers be the teacher they always wanted to be.   Blog: https://www.realrapwithreynolds.com/ Twitter: @realrapreynolds