One of the biggest challenges teachers face is keeping their students motivated. I personally teach my students two hours and forty-five minutes a day for one hundred eighty-two days a year, over the course of three years. That is over ninety thousand hours I spend with the same students. There is no way I could ever imagine that I would be able to keep each student engaged and motivated if I was standing in the front of my classroom lecturing. For this reason, I believe the most successful strategy I have deployed is allowing my students to personalize their learning, take risks, and learn from their mistakes.

In order to be successful in a 21st Century classroom, the teacher must understand that the role of the "instructor" is changing. This is in part due to the nature in which the students learn. Students have the resources to obtain information from a variety of sources 24/7. For them, a single resource is often not enough, and not necessarily the most effective when that resource is considered to be an outmoded method. In addition, students are often used to learning information within the context of solving a problem or learning a new skill. For this reason, teachers need to provide contextual learning environments while infusing project based learning to engage students in the classroom.

Educators and students alike are tired of hearing about the standards and standardized testing. At times this has altered the level of creativity a teacher can bring to his or her classroom. As teachers, we know the reality of the situation and understand the severity of the impact if we do not meet the standards. However, all that is needed is to creatively infuse the standards and not make the standards the reason "why" you teach what you do.

I often relate my classroom to the term “organized chaos.” There is often no real lecture to listen to, and you will often find my students spread throughout the classroom, in the hallways, and in other teachers’ classrooms. However, in order to provide the students this type of environment, there needs to be a lot of structure.

As I think back to the days when I was in school, I don’t think I ever remember any of my teachers asking me what I wanted from them. However, as the paradigm in education is consistently shifting, so should the way we approach our classrooms.

When I first started teaching, I thought I would have every weekend and summer off. That was a far cry from the truth. However, the efforts that I have put in since my first year as a teacher have paid off each and every year. I often explain to my students, “you get out of it, what you put in to it,” and it is my opinion that in order to be successful, you have to do what needs to be done regardless of your circumstances. I guess I learned this during my first year in the Philadelphia School District when I was expected to teach three classes of video production with twenty-eight to thirty-five students per class, and only one camera.

Pinterest, the latest social media site, lets you organize and share videos, links and images found on the Web using “pinboards.” Teachers have been joining this latest craze, using it to organize class projects and to explore certain topics with their students. It can be used to create resource boards, share links among colleagues at a conference, or to collaborate with others on specific projects. These creative electronic bulletin boards can be easily shared, as each new board has a separate link.

Meris Stansbury, of eSchoolNews.com, compiled a list of the best education blogs that contain useful information for educators. This is a portion of that list of blogs, which have won numerous awards and have been recommended by readers.

Teacher collaboration can be an extremely effective way to both share and receive innovative teaching tips, strategies and information. According to the Teacher Leaders Network, the following have been identified as six of the key attributes of effective collaboration: