Group items tagged

NETS for Teachers 2008
\nUnveiled June 30 at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, ISTE's revised National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers mark a significant overhaul of the group's original teacher technology standards, which ISTE introduced in 2000. The revised framework focuses on what teachers should know to help students become productive digital learners and digital citizens.\n

The purpose of this resource is to provide "Just in Time" training through an online interface for K-12 educators based on the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). These standards are the basic technology skills every educator should possess. In the process, educators will develop their own skills and discover what students need in order to meet the NETS for Students, as well as the new MMC Online Experience requirement.

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom. Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

TThinkQuest Newswire Announcement: Students from 13 countries took top honors in this year's ThinkQuest International 2008 Competition. The competition is utilized by teachers to engage their students in developing critical skills for life and work in the 21st century.This year's winning teams collaborated in the research, writing and creation of websites on educational topics ranging from mathematics to promoting tolerance and preventing bullying.

ThinkQuest International 2008 included 972 teams from 60 countries and the winning entries included students from Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. Each team had approximately eight months to complete their final websites. The submissions were then reviewed by an international panel of volunteer judges who selected the winners in each of the three age divisions. The judges also awarded the "Global Perspectives" prize to the team best exemplifying respect for diversity and recognition of global interdependence.

Teachers wishing to foster digital literacy in their classrooms and states wishing to demonstrate it in their students face a common challenge: no comprehensive, established approach exists to guide the teaching, learning, and assessment of specific digital literacy skills. To begin addressing this challenge, we have developed this website, which was part of a two-year project funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. The site articulates the skills comprising digital literacy with the goal of helping schools and districts implement a new approach to digital literacy teaching.

May 2008 : THE Journal. The challenge for teachers is to find ways to support in-depth learning and increased student achievement, "...while also employing a variety of measures, including standardized tests." What kinds of new methods would provide the kind of learning environments and learning measurements that truly reflect the learning that is taking place? What new skills are needed if instructors are to meet this challenge?

The Six Principles of e-Teaching: Integrate, Lead with "Hands-On," Build Hard Skills, Involve Students, Connect Students with Real World, Showcase student work. A database of lesson plans is included on this site. LearniT-TeachiT is a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting business, industry, governmental agencies and other organizations to use the power of technology to prepare teachers, students, and learners of all ages to develop 21st century skills that will provide a basis for their ongoing engagement in learning and personal achievement. \n\n

HE Journal recently spoke with Knezek about the myriad of opportunities schools and teachers have available to them, both for exploring new technological tools and solutions in education and for making optimal use of the resources already at their immediate disposal. "The real goal," Knezek explained, "lies in moving all the programs in a school forward toward 21st century learning, or digital age learning."

TED@Palm Springs presentation on game-based learning. Teachers become mentors, students become engaged.

The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education.

Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging

The Common Sense Media policy agenda aims to empower parents, teachers and young people themselves to take control of the media and technology in their lives, in order to help keep kids learning, thriving, and safe.\n\n * Promoting Digital Literacy and Citizenship - Key to 21st Century Learning and Online Safety.\n * Addressing the Major Public Health Issues Related to Media\n * Improving Consumer Tools and Ratings to Empower Families to Make Smarter Choices\n

What are the characteristics we would expect to see in a successful 21st century educator? Well, we know they are student-centric, holistic, and they're teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the subject area. We know, too, that they must be 21st century learners as well.

This teacher had his physics students describe Einstein by creating his Facebook profile. Since they couldn't access Facebook at school, he had his students create a mock-up of the profile using Microsoft Publisher. He provided the students with a Publisher template, some screenshots of actual Facebook profiles and links to Einstein information to get them started.

The prevalence of blogs, wikis, and social-networking web sites has changed the way students learn to write, according to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)-and schools must adapt in turn by developing new modes of writing, designing new curricula to support these models, and creating plans for teaching these curricula.

Part of an 18-unit curriculum developed by Renee Hobbs and integrating media literacy into common state standards in English, Social Studies, Math, and Health. Provided by Temple University's Media Education Lab.