Career & Technical Education Blog

As a CTE teacher, discovering that you’ll have English Language Learners (ELLs) in your classroom can sometimes be overwhelming.

When students first walk into your classroom, they’re fresh off of all sorts of distractions, from friends to phones to life. Oftentimes the last thing they want to do is sit down and learn about health science.  For the dedicated health science teacher, this can be a problem: Disinterested students are students who aren’t learning, and because you want your class time to be as productive as possible, you need to gain and keep your students’ attention as soon as they take their seats. However, engaging your students quickly can be more complicated than it seems, and to do it well, you’re going to need some strategies to hook ‘em in. 

Teacher burnout is one of the biggest problems facing the American education system today.

In working with teachers for more than 30 years, one of the most common frustrations we hear across the board is the fact that students cheat to get ahead.

CTE teachers are faced with increasingly diverse students in the classroom, and finding ways to differentiate your lessons can be tough. Some students will come to your class with more knowledge and experience than others. Not to mention that students all learn at different paces and in different ways. It may seem like a never-ending task, but there is a solution! Using technology to differentiate instruction can help you save time while better meeting the needs of all of your students.

Even though your students spend so much of their lives connected to the internet, it can still be difficult to grab their attention when they walk into your computer class. Maybe they prefer using their phones, or maybe they’re just so immersed in technology that computers no longer impress. Whatever the reason, it can be incredibly frustrating for computer teachers to wrangle students at the start of every class period. As a computer applications curriculum developer, we’ve heard hundreds of teachers voice these complaints about student engagement, and in response, we’ve developed a list of activities--called bell ringers--designed to hook your students in as soon as they walk through your door.  In this article, you’ll discover 5 of the best bell ringers you can use to quickly engage students in your computer applications class: