A Very Good Resource of Educational Posters for Chemistry Teachers

March 29, 2015
Here is an interesting resource we want to bring to your attention. Compound Interest is a blog by Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher in the UK. Andy creates and shares a wide variety of educational posters and graphics on everything related to chemistry and chemical reactions. We spent sometime browsing Andy’s collection of graphics and we found them really worth mentioning here.

Andy’s graphics are licensed under Creative Commons License, free for educational uses. You can find more about this site's copyright guidelines from this page. Also, the graphics are available in high quality PDF format which you can download and use with your students in class. Andy’s graphics have been featured in several popular media sites including:The Guardian, Huffington Post, Forbes, Business Insider and many more.

Here is an example of one of Andy's posters on how to spot bad science. We learned about this poster together with Compound Interest from Educational Technology Guy.

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Wonderful Mini-posters on The 21st century Literacies

December 31, 2014
The concept of literacy is notoriously elusive and hard to define. Aside from the shallow and intellectually-impaired  definition that sums up  literacy in  reading and writing printed text, any serious and profound investigation of literacy does, by implication, entail an analysis of the new ways of learning and meaning-making afforded by digitality. New digital media have provided learners with novel and revolutionary ways of producing, discussing, sharing and interacting with text.

These ways, to say the least about them, are multimodally complex and call for an integrated set of skills that go beyond the mere ability to code and decode meaning. In this sense, to be literate in such a multimodal environment requires understanding and using a wide range of interconnected literacies. We are no longer talking about a single literacy as was the case since the invention of writing some 6000 year ago, we are, instead,  in front of multiple new emerging  and interdependent literacies. Today's students are asked to have a working knowledge of these literacies in order to be able to thrive in a globalized knowledge economy. Katchy Schrock has this wonderful resource where she features some awesome mini-posters defining the key literacies making up today's Literacy (with capital letter) landscape.  These visuals are ideal for classroom inclusion. I invite you to check them out and share with your colleagues.

Here is a quick round-up of the major literacies included in these posters:

• Information literacy
• Visual literacy
• Critical literacy
• Media literacy
• Tool literacy
• Digital literacy
• Data literacy
• Global literacy
• Economic literacy
• Civic literacy
• Health literacy
• Historical literacy
• Traditional literacy

Here is an  example of Kathy's posters. Check out the rest of these posters from this link.

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6 Questions Every Critical Thinker Should Ask

November 11, 2014
They key to critical thinking is the ability to pose challenging and provocative questions to yourself. To think critically is to delve deeper into those hidden layers of meaning and dissect the message in a comprehensive way. Of course, critical thinking is a very important skill mandated by the cognitive demands of a highly conceptual era.

For instance, living in an age where information overflow is the currency, it becomes imperative that students use their critical thinking abilities to sift through and assess the information they come across both online and in print. In this regard, the folks in UBC Learning Commons has this wonderful visual featuring 6 questions every critical thinker should be able to ask. These are the kind of questions students should learn to ask themselves anytime they are to evaluate a particular resource. I invite you to have a look and share with your students.

UBC Learning Commons has this excellent Pinterest board where you can access a wide variety of other similar visuals to use in class with students. Check it out.

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Interesting Poster Featuring 6 Presentation Skills You Should Know about

November 10, 2014
Creating and delivering successful presentations is a skill that requires some serious practice and learning. In the course of our work as educators and teachers, we are all likely to be in positions where we have to present in front of an audience. But do we really have what it takes to engage our audience and keep them focused? People can easily get distracted especially if your presentation is not intellectually and visually attractive.

University of British Columbia Learning Commons has this wonderful poster featuring some of the core presentation skills you need to keep in mind when preparing for your next presentation. They have also provided this excellent cheat sheet that you can download in PDF format. Have a look and share with us what you think of it. Enjoy


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A Beautiful Classroom Poster on Essay Writing

November 5, 2014
Essay writing is a tedious task that demands a lot of thinking and rethinking. It is also a skill that can be developed through stages the first of which is reading. It is a truism that reading is a key to good writing but not the sole key for there are other factors that impact one's writing style such as practice, grammatical and syntactical knowledge, genre to mention a few. Generally speaking, essays have a common stylistic pattern that consists of introduction, body and conclusion. The development of each of these sections is regulated by a set of standardized conventions. For instance,  the introduction should be crafted in such a way that it sets the scene for what will be discussed in the main body of the essay. The body should contain multiple paragraphs cohesively related to each other. And the conclusion should sum up the core of the argument running through the essay.

A good and illustrative way to explain the steps to writing a good essay is through this analogy We Are Teachers made in this beautiful visual. The Bones of A Good Essay mimics essay components to body parts and provides some useful tips and pieces of advice on how to work on each part. I believe this could be a very good material to use with students in class especially that it is provided in a PDF format that you can download and print for free.

Click HERE to download the PDF format of this visual. Enjoy

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Tons of Great Free Downloadable Classroom Posters and Educational Infographics

November 2, 2014
Looking for some very good resources for educational infographics and classroom posters? We got you covered. The Pinterest board of our blog has a section dedicated entirely to visuals and interactives you can use in your classroom. We have over 300 beautiful infographics which are all education related. Besides that, we are also introducing you to another great resource from We Are Teachers that we have recently discovered. This page has tons of infographics and classroom posters that you can download and print for free. These materials cover a wide variety of educational topics including dyslexia, fluency, technology, and more. "Through these infographics, you can absorb information at a glance and expand your knowledge about diverse topics relevant to education."

The visuals featured in  this resource are arranged into four main categories: infographics, classroom posters, comic relief, teacher inspiration and classroom handouts. Browse through this collection and pick out the ones you like. To download any visual just click on it and then in the next page click on "download". Enjoy.

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