Orca Digitals

If you’re a teacher who has a premium  dry erase painted wall  in your classroom, you’ve undoubtedly been in front of it many times taking notes during a problem-based learning (PBL) session, drawing a diagram to supplement a verbal explanation, or simply listing the main points presented in a lesson. In such cases, your dry erase wall serves as an invaluable tool for recording and communicating ideas and images to your students in a large, easy-to-see format. Regrettably, however, the ways in which dry erase walls are used in the classroom are often not especially original or creative. Generating mind maps, writing lists and outlines, and making drawings and graphs are the go-to dry erase wall activities for most teachers and students during the typical school day. However, it’s possible to use this classroom staple in much more imaginative and unusual ways to enhance the process of teaching and learning. Here are six novel dry erase wall strategies for your consideration that can add...

Nowadays, devising well-defined learning zones within classrooms and throughout school buildings are viewed as a key to fostering 21st-century high-impact learning, where students are actively engaged in the educational process, and learning extends beyond the classroom to outdoor areas and even the workplace. For teachers and designers, this approach creates both challenges and new opportunities to come up with creative solutions. High-impact learning has caused an increased demand in education for flexible spaces that address the individual needs of students who have diverse intelligence and learning styles. Children, adolescents, and adults acquire knowledge in a variety of ways beyond traditional “cells and bells” classroom settings, and learning zones are designed to address this diversity. Learning Zones Empower Students to Help Educate Themselves Recent decades have seen a sharp increase in the drive to support collaborative learning and other project-based instructional methods...