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So much talk about how relationships matter. So. Much. Talk. If you're an educator and you've been paying attention lately, you are no doubt familiar with the push to improve relationships between teachers and students. Relationships will get students to behave better, be more engaged, learn more, be more emotionally intelligent, and so much more. I recall a training I was at about a year ago. The training was supposed to be about teaching students who come from poverty. But for a training that was a couple of hours long, the overwhelming majority of the training was about defining poverty, characteristics of students living in poverty, and other things of that nature. At the very end, literally only the last few minutes, it was suggested that the way to reach students from poverty was to build, you guessed it, relationships. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere are much the same. Relationships are everything. They're the future. They'll fix all of your classroo...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the fourth in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Part 3 Recap : Being on Twitter introduced me to ideas in education I would not have heard otherwise. My past experience with coding gave me some perspective on the l...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the third in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. I thought I had changed some big things about how my classes operated and was only seeing small changes in the outcomes. But the truth i...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the second in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. The following August I began the school year using Khan Academy in my Algebra 1 classes. It wasn't the only thing we used, but we used it plenty. While Khan Academy did offer students the opportunity to practice specific skills with instant feedback , ...