Tween Insights

David Snyder

Engaging, tech-savvy, and relatable, Heather Wolpert-Gawron's blog, Tween Teacher, quickly earned a spot on my RSS reader after I discovered it. A middle school English department head, Wolpert-Gawron has a knack for sharing valuable tips and insights through anecdotes that draw you into her school and life.

For example, a recent post demonstrated how the popular phenomenon of Facebook quizzes could be translated into a unique lesson plan—complete with links to online tools that can help make this happen and instructions for low-tech alternatives. She describes how this can foster student ownership of work and create differentiated assessments, but not before sharing the results of several personality quizzes she took during the commercial break of So You Think You Can Dance.

Other posts comment on iPhone apps useful to classroom teachers, the genre-mixing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the concern over how "sexting" could affect ed tech advancement. Read her blog at http://tweenteacher.com/.

David Snyder is a reference librarian in ASCD's Information Resource Center.