Prime Teachers Hub

[Magdalen Dano]

JeffBezos and his squad have developed several exciting services that either target or benefit teachers in the USA and further afield. These perks and features can help you save money, improve your classroom facilities and create a better learning environment for your students.

Cloud-related learning is becoming ever more important in schools all across the country. So is the need for cloud-based employees involved with multiple aspects of the learning process and running efficient, modern schools. Amazon Web Services Educate is a global initiative to give schools access to tailored, cloud-based services. It allows you to reach out to cloud-based professionals and accelerate cloud-based learning initiatives.

Naturally, some education costs will be passed onto the student, such as buying books, course materials, and educational supplies. Amazon Prime Student is a program designed to help make purchasing such items easier and more affordable. After signing up, the student gains access to free Prime shipping for an entire six months. After that, the cost is just $49 per year, which is half the cost of regular Amazon Prime.

If you own a website or blog where you help provide additional support to either teachers or students, then the Amazon Affiliate program is a great way to monetize it. Sign up and insert custom tracking links on your site that take visitors to recommended products. If they purchase through that link, you receive a small commission, ranging from 4% to 10%.

Amazon Education Publishing is a fantastic platform for teachers looking to enter the world of publishing their learning materials. It allows you to publish and sell things like eBooks, books, and audiobooks directly to your students. You maintain complete control over the finished product and receive a royalty commission on every unit sold.

Amazon Business for Education is the ideal way to set up an administrative account to track all educational purchases for your school. You benefit from discounts, tax-exempt purchases, and free shipping on orders over a certain amount. It allows you to enroll multiple other teachers in the account and make large savings across the school year.

Amazon is a great company and since they offer students (who are usually on a budget) a great discount, why not offer it to teachers who are also usually on a budget as well. Especially since the membership price comes out of our pockets and not the schools.

Of course not every item a teacher buys off of Amazon is for their class. Some teachers with Amazon Prime may not order anything for their students or classroom. I still think it would be great for Amazon to offer, as appreciation, a teacher discount equivalent to the discount they offer students.

Last week, I started reading the Sports Gene by David Epstein and jotted a few notes down about the development of teachers in relation to the chess masters Epstein was discussing. Last Monday, Matthew Kay tweeted this thread:

In The Sports Gene, Epstein describes how researchers have tested players to determine the difference between their abilities to understand and then react quickly and effectively to a game scenario. Using memory and vision tests, scientists have been able to determine how elite athletes and players can read the many pieces of information to make a great decision faster than their opponents.

Great teachers have a successful anticipatory skill set that allows them to see where to steer a discussion, or when to shift the lesson because the kids need something different that day. In his own book, Not Light, but Fire, Kay offers examples of his own successful and unsuccessful lessons, as he attempts to guide students through difficult conversations. Kay describes, in my opinion, the art and science of teaching. He provides specific strategies and approaches that any teacher could use, but to be really effective, you have to work through those lessons, strategies, and approaches, to know when and where to step in, or what specific questions or responses will steer the work in a more productive direction.

It is obvious to say that more experienced teachers are typically more effective. Teaching programs attempt to give young educators the chance to develop some of these skills, but with such limited time in the classroom to really test these skills out, can teaching programs effectively prepare teachers for their first classes? Which programs are doing this effectively? Do we even have the tools available to do this research?

Most teachers have an endless shopping list. From essential classroom supplies and storage to must-have products to help you do your job comfortably, there's a lot to shop for! We found the best Amazon Prime Day deals for teachers on everything you need to take with your from your commute to the classroom. With huge summer savings on Stanley, Cricut, JBL, along with staples like markers, sticky notes, and more, these Prime Day deals are gold star-worthy. Shop the discounts below before Amazon Prime Day ends tonight, July 17.

Arthur, who is also a member of the National Education Association and holds National Board Certification, pointed to pay as the main reason for both teachers leaving the profession and parents not wanting their children to become teachers.

For the 2023-24 school year, a whopping 86% of K-12 public schools in the country documented challenges in hiring teachers, according to an October report from the National Center for Education Statistics.

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Priming is a strategy that introduces a new topic to students in a way that facilitates their academic learning because they know what they can expect. Priming prepares students for upcoming information or a learning activity before they receive the information or participate in the activity in a course. Priming exposes students to new material in a way that influences their learning behavior later, without them necessarily being aware.

According to cognitive psychology, priming is a process in which we use a mental framework (or schema) to organize and understand the world around us. Schemas of information are stored in long-term memory. The activation of these schemas draws related information into our memory and can either be increased or decreased in a variety of ways to make memories easier to access or less likely to be retrieved. When our minds have been primed to think of this new information, we can think and act quickly when we come across it again.

There are three key ideas that underpin the strategy of priming. These are: pre-exposure, activating prior knowledge, and retrieval practice. When we understand the different ways of priming and how they work, we can better identify opportunities for incorporating priming into our courses and programs.

When students are pre-exposed to information, the pre-exposure provides a framework for recall and may improve student learning. This scaffolding of new information helps students to understand, organize, and extract meaning. For example, multiple-choice pretests appear to make subsequent studying more effective than other activities that pre-expose students to the information (Little & Bjork, 2012).

For example, an undergraduate psychology course sends out a welcome letter that has a sequence of pre-course exercises designed to prepare students for online learning and guide them through the first steps of studying the course.

Prior knowledge is what students already know before learning new information and provides a framework for them to better understand new information, and to see the connections between previous knowledge and new instruction.

Activating prior knowledge is good for tailoring the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the students as well as preparing students for the common misconceptions that they may have about a topic.

For example, an undergraduate history course provides an ungraded, self-test quiz at the start of every online unit that allows students multiple attempts at answering a question and provides prescriptive feedback for each attempt. The content of the questions is aligned to the learning outcomes and is linked to the subsequent assignments.

Retrieval practice is where students deliberately recall information to mind to bring prior knowledge out and work with it. Retrieval practice draws together theory and practice, enabling students to organize and construct meaning from their prior knowledge which can then be applied to solve problems and in new situations.

Retrieving knowledge, skills, facts, concepts, or events from memory increases long-term retention and is more effective than rereading notes or learning materials. Retrieval practice really means testing yourself which primes the mind for learning and retention (Brown et al., 2014).

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