Alex Terego

Free Resources

ePrimer™ A Blue Ocean Strategy for Schools: Team Learning and Teaching
Ideas on fostering a culture of world-class team learning and teaching; strategies for education reform.
Two business professors, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne recently wrote a seminal book, "The Blue Ocean Strategy." It transformed the way many businesses look at themselves and the markets they compete in. If we are to reinvent and reform our schools, we must look at a "blue ocean strateg" in education .
 

 ePrimer™ A Guide to Lesson Planning--A Framework for Learning
Target-driven lesson planning for meaningful, lasting learning.
Lesson planning should be considered the framework for learning. In the face of all the complexity that comprises a child and its surroundings, a solid framework for planning their education is vital. It is the only clear path to success, and should be planned backwards and executed forwards. Learn how in this ePrimer™.

 ePrimer™ Authentic Writing/Reading With a Purpose: The Literacy of Words
Instilling purpose-driven reading and effective, authentic writing.
Good writing is a job requirement. A recent survey of 120 major corporations employing over eight million people clearly demonstrated the extremely high value employers put on reading and writing skills. The survey demonstrated that reading and writing ability is a threshold skill. If a person is being considered for either employment or promotion within the salaried, white collar, or professional ranks, their writing and reading abilities will be the first skill looked at.  This ePrimer addresses standards of literacy in the written and verbal arenas.

 ePrimer™ Changing Times: From History to Our Digital Revolution
Equipping students for rapid change.
Change is more a part of our children’s lives at the beginning of the 21st Century than ever before. The sheer pace of societal and technological change we are experiencing is disorienting because our Digital Revolution is not like the other historic revolutions. It is a “Perfect Storm.” John W. Whitehead wrote, “Children are the living message we send to a time we will not see.” Read more about change and how to prepare students for change in this ePrimer™.

ePrimer™ Critical Thinking
Imparting this critical life skill for success in personal and career problem solving.
Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it. In this ePrimer™ you will learn to help students completely engage with the material they are studying, think critically, and help them gain this 21st Century skill.

eTutorial™ Critical Thinking and Problem Solving in a Collaborative (Team) Setting
An interactive, easy-to-understand guide to equipping students with these critical soft skills.
There are two kinds of teaching: didactic, or lecture style, and maieutic, or team learning. The U.S. Congress identified four skills that students need in the 21st century economy: critical thinking, problem solving, communications and collaboration. In this tutorial you will learn how team learning can be used to learn all four skills, with the teacher as the guide on the side and not the sage on the stage.  This tutorial demonstrates how a team setting is the best framework for developing critical soft skills. It details the underlying theory and best practices, and includes multiple PowerPoint examples of actual case studies conducted by the author.
(Note: This eTutorial™ links directly to an included interactive PowerPoint slide show (.PPS) that offers examples of collaborative problem solving. To view the examples, you must have PowerPoint installed on your computer. You will download a ZIP file containing both the PDF and the .PPS files. You must EXTRACT the ZIP files before attempting to view the interactive examples.)

ePrimer™ Educating the Whole Child through their Multiple Intelligences: Sensory Literacy
Educating the whole child and maximizing students’ potential through multiple sensory intelligences.
The theory of multiple intelligences challenges old beliefs about what it means to be smart. Professor Howard Gardner believes that we focus too much attention on verbal and logical thinking—the abilities typically assessed on an intelligence test—and neglect other ways of knowing. Gardner’s work pluralizes the notion of intelligence, and encourages us to teach our children to use their entire arsenal of intelligences to learn. In this ePrimer™ you will learn what the best minds have to say about multiple intelligences and how to apply them for the optimum results in your students.
 

ePrimer™ Managing Information: Staying Safe and Smart--Infoliteracy
Teaching children to stay safe and smart while managing information overload.
Infoliteracy is the ability to consume information sensibly and discriminately. This skill is vital to today’s students because the amount of data available to them is doubling every two years. Overloads of raw data come into their lives uninvited.  Data, however, is not the same as information; and information is not knowledge. Your students experience a life of nearly continuous computing. And no one is teaching them the skills to cope with this overload—until now.
 

 ePrimer™ Protecting Children in a Multimedia Age--Media Literacy
Preparing students to be leaders in life. 
Media literacy is rarely taught, even though a recent poll of teachers conducted by the Association for Syllabus and Curriculum Development found that almost 79% of all teachers thought that more emphasis should be placed on media literacy. If we do not teach students about the media and its influence and methods, who will? What happens if a child grows up getting all of her information about life and the world from the media, without any countervailing advice? 

 ePrimer™ Public Schools: The Realities of Education Today
Exposing a nation at risk.
A well-regarded 2007 book entitled “Tough Choices and Tough Times” had this to say:“While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education; their young people are getting a better education as well. American students place anywhere from the middle to the bottom of the pack in all three continuing comparative studies of achievement in mathematics, science and general literacy.”  In 1921, H. G. Wells wrote, “Human history is a race between education and catastrophe.”  Read more in this ePrimer™ and draw your own conclusions about where the U.S.A. stands.

 ePrimer™ Raising Productive, Moral, and Ethical Citizens--The Literacy of Right Conduct
Raising productive, moral, and ethical citizens through character education.
Dr. Maria Montessori wrote “It is easier to build a peaceful child than repair a violent adult".  And I say is that what lubricating oil does for machinery, good manners does for society. Courtesy, good manners, and civility are skills that can—and should—be taught. In this ePrimer™ I take a secular and ecumenical look at conduct.

 ePrimer™ Stronger Bodies, Healthier Minds--The Literacy of Nutrition and Exercise
Developing stronger bodies and healthier minds to combat childhood health issues.
As we all can plainly see, there is an epidemic of childhood health issues and obesity in the west. All are related to what goes into children’s bodies and what does not: chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food; and also what children do with their bodies; or rather what they do not do in increasing numbers—that is, exercise.  In this ePrimer™ I will discuss the issues and remedies.

ePrimer™ Teaching Ethical Leadership
Preparing students to be leaders in life.
Preparing today’s students to enter the workforce with an understanding of leadership skills is mandatory for the 21st Century. In this ePrimer™ you will learn how to prepare students to lead their own lives and to be leaders in life.

ePrimer™ Thinking Groups--Teaching Students to "Think Around the Box™"
Coaching students to think critically, collaborate effectively, and write persuasively.
The new economic realities demand a different set of skills from our students. Four of them are collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and communications. In this ePrimer™ and in the Power Point eTutorial™, I show how Thinking Groups can be used to get students to deliberate in a team to practice and learn these four skills.


ePrimer™ Understanding Generational Differences
Teaching across the ages to reach a new generation of learners.
The majority of teachers and parents are either Baby Boomers or Generation X. The majority of middle school through college-age children are Generation Y (Millennials). Teachers must understand and appreciate generational differences before they head into the classroom to teach 21st century soft skills. Bridging the teaching/learning gap between the generations is important to the teacher, the taught and the families of students.

ePrimer™ Understanding the Mind and the Brain: Educational Psychology
Understanding your child’s brainpower: the roots of behavior and learning.
Understanding what is known about the brain, the mind, and how we learn is important because students all own and operate their very own control center—the brain. As with any complex system, studying the owner’s manual is a good idea. You probably have a good idea about how your car or computer works; can you say the same about your students’ minds?


ePrimer™ Why do Children Need to be Taught Anyway?
Finding answers to the big questions in life.
Have you ever thought about why we teach our children? The simplest answer is that our children need to be educated so that we can build the next cohesive and informed generation of participants in western democracy. A more selfish answer is that children need to be educated so that when they leave home they can survive on their own, no longer depending on their parents. This ePrimer™ delves more fully into this topic and helps better prepare you for the challenges of teaching our children.