America is heading back-to-school, and students and teachers alike are preparing for an exciting, new year of learning ahead. While students are tackling their back-to-school supplies lists, teachers have their own preparation to do: locking in lessons, going over their curriculums and accessing the resources they need to best manage their classrooms.

Classroom management refers to the range of skills and techniques teachers use to keep students organized, focused, engaged, on task, and academically productive. Put simply, effective classroom-management strategies minimize student behaviors that impede learning and maximize behaviors that enhance it.

Everyone learns differently and at a different pace. With differentiated instruction tactics, such as flexible grouping, teachers can use these differences to better accelerate learning in the classroom.

 By using instructional grouping strategies, teachers can encourage students of similar or complementary levels to work together and collaborate on projects, discussions and daily assignments where students learn as a team. Here are some top tips to help you group students like a pro.

How this learning technique is helping teachers do the impossible.

As educators, we’re all in search of that “eureka moment” - that moment when a student fully grasps a new concept for the first time. These moments of discovery can change a student’s life forever. These moments are what we live for as educators. What if there was a way to maximize these eureka moments - to reach every student, and speak their learning language so they could understand new material and grasp new concepts faster and more fully?

In our last blog post, we provided an overview of how to setup your Google Admin console. This week, we're taking a look at how to use your Google Admin console to set homepages to open automatically for students.

Most of the time, Chromebooks will start with either a blank page or Google search when opened. While these are nice websites to have open, homepages can be much more useful with a little bit of extra setup.

The Possibilities

There are so many ways to use the startup page. Maybe you plan to show a school district’s homepage or an attendance roster in Google Docs? How about a light and fast learning game to get students' brains firing on all cylinders?

“The miracle of gratitude is that it shifts your perception to such an extent that it changes the world you see."
— Dr. Robert Holden

For Thanksgiving this year, we want to hear all about your gratitude. Specifically your gratitude for your students. We flipped the script and asked teachers to tell us about a time when a student taught them something about technology.

We hope these stories will inspire you to think creatively about utilizing technology in new ways in the classroom. We also hope these stories inspire gratitude - the key to creating a positive culture and growth mindset in and outside the walls of the classroom.