30 Things To Tell Students You’ll Never See Again

From TeachThought

At the end of every school year, you lose dozens of relationships that changed you. That’s no small thing. Teaching is a personal act that binds teacher and student together even if that binding isn’t made in mutual affection. To teach and learn is to come together.

Every year when students walk out of class for the last time, there can be a lot of emotions. I always have the urge to leave them with one last nugget that they can take with them and use when they get in a tight spot. Hopefully the school year was full of these, but the last day of school–well, that’s it. Your last shot to make that kind of impact.

Yes, through email, social media, and return visits to the school you can still “talk” to students, but once they’re gone it’s not the same. It changes somehow.

So below are 30 ideas to get you started, based off a similar post we did last year. You may have to adjust them for your own grade level and content area, but then again, don’t you always?

Note Taking Upgrade

I only took the one class this summer and it was a lot of fun.  I was nominated to give a class this Fall to a conference and will try to be able to be there.  The focus of that talk is to be using Technology to Teach Technology.  A subset of the overall issues if you will.  Still, the problem remains, if when students are in a classroom filled with computers, one can’t use Technology in an area, well….

And that led me to one of my annoyances, that while my school focuses on using Cornell Notetaking as a consistent method across classes, there was no easy way to implement it via a computer.

Then as the summer rolls to an end LifeHacker utilizing the HackCollege staff, had this article on Five Classic Ways to Boost Your Notetaking which then spun off to not only my favorite Evernote which I use all the time and benefit from on my iPhone and iPods but also this Cornell Note software application Notalon.

Download Notalon and start using it today.  Oh, click on the Downloads tab near the top of that page, and then select this link (or just click it right there) and it will download the Windows software package.  This application is built for Linux and MAC as well, so it should work on all the machines at our school.

On first glance and use, it seems to support the Cornell Notes format very well, and exports to a PDF as well.  Let me know what you think.