Introducing podcasts worth hearing: Every Classroom Matters

In the last podcast we recommended, Pushing the Edge, host Greg Curran discussed how to work social justice into the classroom. In this installment we introduce Vicki Davis and her podcast, which focuses on helping busy teachers work innovation and big ideas into their classrooms.

Davis is a teacher herself and interviews other educators in her informative episodes. Each one is around ten minutes long and they cover all sort of topics from bullying to Twitter, from making math interesting to dealing with trauma.

In a recent episode, Davis discusses how to find time to introduce innovation in the classroom with technology teacher Annette Lang. Both agree that the best strategy is to do it a little bit at a time. Over the past year, Lang has been doing just that and ended up collaborating with a teacher in Taiwan.

One of their projects had the students in Taiwan write fiction that Lang’s class created videos from. Another had the first group create storyboards about books they had read, which Lang’s students then turned into book trailers. Big, interesting projects that were made possible by Lang dedicating just a few minutes each day to planning and researching.

Another recent episode featured advice that would’ve been very useful for previous podcast subject, Nicholson Baker – how to help substitute teachers be the most effective. Tips included placing the day’s lesson into the greater context of the semester as a whole – what preceded it, where the following lesson is heading – as well as providing information about the students themselves.

For teachers with busy schedules and little time, Every Classroom Matters conveniently packs a lot of information into short episodes.