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Resources by Topic: Internet Safety and Cyberbullying Digital Responsibility Media and Digital Literacy Other Resources From Edutopia Additional Resources on the Web

"Explore this educator's guide to open educational resources for information about online repositories, curriculum-sharing websites, sources for lesson plans and activities, and open alternatives to textbooks."

"The Academy Awards are just around the corner, and there are a number of nominated films that can be great teaching tools for educators this year. With the abundance of media messages in our society, it's important to ensure students are media literate. The Oscars provide a great opportunity to use the year's best films to teach students about media and film literacy. Not to mention, films can also be an engaging teaching tool for piquing interest in a variety of subjects and issues. In this compilation, you'll find classroom resources from around the web that cover many of this year's nominated films, as well as general resources for using film as a teaching tool."

"When I hear the term OER, I don't automatically leap to "Open Educational Resources." Perhaps it just doesn't trip off my metaphorical tongue. Instead, my brain automatically translates it to "free online stuff to use in my classroom." Officially, however, the term OER, according to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, represents the "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.""

"I've recently been spending some time thinking about what I can do to help my students enter into a "state of flow" - completely absorbed in a learning task. The idea of "flow" has been developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I hope readers will point me in the direction of additional resources. Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About "Flow":"

179 392 12 inShare 12 Print! 14 Free Resources for Primary Source Documents Primary sources are resources that were first-hand created in a given period of time and never undergone any kind of editing or distortion. These sources are multimodal and they come in different forms. They can be artifacts, documents, pictures, recordings, essays, photographs, maps...etc. Now with the globalization of knowledge and the pervasive use of digital media, primary sources become accessible to everybody with an internet connection. However, the search for these materials is akin to a scavenger hunt and hence the importance of having a handy list such as the one below to keep for rainy days.

"With the abundance of media messages in our society, it's important to ensure students are media literate. The Oscars provide a great opportunity to use the year's best films to teach students about media and film literacy. Not to mention, films can also be an engaging teaching tool for piquing interest in a variety of subjects and issues. In this compilation, you'll find classroom resources from around the web that cover many of this year's nominated films, as well as general resources for using film as a teaching tool."

With millions of pieces of open education resources flooding the Internet, educators face a "needle in the haystack" problem of epic proportions. Sure, they can find hundreds, if not thousands, of free pieces of content to accomplish their mission with students, but how to find the right one, aligned to the right standard, for the right student, at the right time? That challenge lies at the heart of personalized learning, whether conveyed through teachers, technology, or some combination of the two.

"Social studies supervisors and teachers across the country are revising their unit plans to meet their state's content standards, as well as, the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History and Social Studies. Simultaneously, many states are implementing new evaluation and observation frameworks. The performance ratings employed by the most popular evaluation models encourage a shift away from teacher-led direct instruction to more student-centered activities incorporating inquiry and synthesis. In social studies, primary source document analysis goes hand in hand with the 9-12 Common Core reading and writing standards. Here are five top resources to align your curricula to the Common Core with student driven lessons. "

"Intrigued by game-based learning, but not sure where to begin? Edutopia's series takes a look at game-like learning principles in action and commercial games in real classrooms -- and offers tips and tools for bringing them into your own practice. The Made With Play series is a co-production with Institute of Play; visit their website for many more resources around game-based learning for both educators and parents, including a comprehensive games and learning reading list (PDF)."

"As I wrote in my last column, the traditional skill we have valued in teachers when paper was the dominant media-the ability to transfer knowledge of a subject-is becoming less important. Increasingly, a teacher's knowledge can be found online and in various learning styles. As the internet drives down the value of a teacher's knowledge, their ability to personalize learning with resources from around the world will increase. We will have more data generated about our students as we build out our online communities. We will need teachers who understand how to make meaning of this data to personalize learning for every student from a vast digital library of learning resources. Also, of increasing value is their ability to teach students to be self-disciplined about how "to learn to learn." Rather than losing overall value, teachers will be more important than ever. The big change is not adding technology to the current design of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning and fundamentally changing the job descriptions of teachers and learners. I offer seven questions we typically ask of teachers in the interview process, along with corresponding questions I think are geared to align with how the internet will force the redefinition of a teacher's added value..."

"The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. They are asked to read closely, make inferences, cite evidence, analyze arguments and interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents. "

"Organizing an Edcamp? Kristen Swanson, chair of the Edcamp Foundation Partner Program, has curated resources from Edutopia and across the web to help you on your journey."

"Looking for tools and strategies for effective assessment in project-based learning? To support you, we've assembled this guide to helpful resources from Edutopia and beyond."

Gooru is via Google Incredible learning and teaching curation and connection resource

"The U.S. Department of Education released a free, web-based survey Thursday that schools can use to track the effectiveness of school climate efforts and resources on how to best improve learning environments for students. The surveys, developed with input from researchers and the department's office of safe and healthy students, can be administered to middle and high school students, staff, parents, and guardians, providing real-time data about their perceptions of the school environment."

"One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage into their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techie terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; there is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field. This infographic is dubbed Ed Tech Cheat Sheet is a fabulous guide to help you learn about the important trends in educational technology."

"What is the best approach teachers can take towards homework? I think the guest responses today, along with numerous reader comments, provide a great perspective on the topic. If you'd like to read more research and discover additional ideas, you might want to explore my collection at The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues. Todays guests are educator/authors Dr. Cathy Vatterott and Bryan Harris. Reader suggestions follow their contributions."

"Friend Our World is an online learning hub for children to unite in friendship games of geography, languages and global citizenship. Friend Our World runs throughout September with a special focus around International Day of Peace on 21 September. Be part of the largest ever peace event for schools Great teaching resources and prizes Special global forum on anti-bullying strategies for schools Register and get started in less than one minute Open to all school children and completely FREE of charge"

"When students write a paper, it goes without saying that they must cite the sources that they use in creating it. For generations, students have created note cards to document and organize these resources and/or submitted a bibliography page with their finished work. In the modern classroom, student research and creation has taken on a new look. Before, when students created a poster, and then separately handed in a bibliography page to the teacher, justice was done and fair credit was given for the ideas used."