Group items tagged

"when we let the kids use the tools they are currently hiding in their pockets, great things happen"

"Since I act like I know what I am doing and I carry an Ipad, a number of parents, teachers and friends have asked me which apps I recommend. This list is really just an inventory of what is currently on my Ipad, for each app I will discuss why I have decided to keep it. There have been many apps that have cycled through my iTunes, but only the most useful and least annoying get to have a permanent home."

With the interest of helping teachers improve their instructional practices and enhancing student learning, FADS (Formative Assessment Delivery System) is a computerized system that will allow classroom teachers to design, develop, and deliver formative assessments and to monitor and report student progress within an interpretive context. This online accessible system will allow teachers to accurately diagnose students' comprehension and learning needs by providing real-time assessment, logging, analysis, feedback, and reporting. The current five-year FADS project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is focused on designing activities deriving from middle school mathematics and science curricula aligned with state and national standards.

"There are thousands of apps out there that allow you to compose music, but I'm going to show you 10 of the greatest ways. These apps have all been of use to me at some point, and whether you're a current producer or simply a production enthusiast, you'll be able to get some use out of them too."

"This is our first year of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and boy, did the students bring it. They brought it all! We have iPads, Surface RT and Pro, iPhones, Droids, Chromebooks, Macs, and PC laptops. Here's my current thinking. Please share yours in the comments section below. "

"Chances are, if you have a smartphone or tablet, you've played Angry Birds. While Candy Crush Saga might currently top the charts, Angry Birds is the best selling app of all time. From an educator's perspective, what's exciting about Angry Birds' popularity versus something like Candy Crush is that getting good at Angry Birds means skillfully - and often unconsciously - using conceptual physics knowledge. It's something video games have been doing for years, but Angry Birds brought it to a mass audience, sneaking a bit of science into many students' digital diets. Here are five other games for the Angry Birds fan that do an even better job of integrating physics and problem solving into addictive, just-one-more-try experiences."

"The Winter Olympics presents a great opportunity to work some science lessons into your students' interest in a current event. The National Science Foundation offers a YouTube playlist of sixteen videos on the science of Winter Olympics events. These short videos teach lessons on the physics and engineering behind the events we see on television. That playlist is embedded below."

"As apps and digital projects become more important to how we live and play, learning how to design and create those ideas is going to become more important as well. And if the current trend continues, more accessible than ever. While many coding resources for students exist, many of these look like they were designed by lifeless robots. Coding already has a reputation as geeky, dry, and alphanumeric, as opposed to the svelte, elegant, and engaging interaction that code produces. Kind of ironic."

"This week I got an email from Apple inviting me to try out the Beta version of iWork for iCloud. I was keen to see how useful this could be for educators in the classroom, and whether or not it could be a serious contender to my current favorite online productivity suite - Google Drive. So, I logged in to iCloud with Chrome on my Mac and there they were - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - complete with all the documents I had created on my Mac and iPads."

"Having been involved with student robotics programs for many years, I feel that robotics just may be the most perfect instructional approach currently available. It offers classroom activities that teach high-value STEM content as well as opportunities to powerfully address ELA Common Core Standards. In fact, there are connections to robotics across the full spectrum of the curriculum. Robotics is also a highly effective way to foster essential work skills like collaboration, problem solving and project management. It does all this while keeping kids so motivated and engaged that getting them to stop working and move on to the rest of the school day can be a challenge -- a good problem to have! "

"A couple of years ago NOVA aired a program called How Does the Brain Work? The show explored what scientists currently know about the human brain and the research that will help us to know more about the human brain in the future. One of the online supplements to How Does the Brain Work? is this interactive collection of images of brain scans. The collection of images, titled Mapping the Brain, allows you to choose from six imaging methods and choose the part(s) of the brain that you want to see highlighted in the scans."

"10 Go To Blogs To Make You Think"

"As an educator, I am constantly looking for new ideas to shape my educational philosophy and pedagogy. While I don't always have the time to read a book on current trends in education, I can always find a few moments each day to peruse the blogs that I follow and read a few posts to get my mental wheels spinning. Here are 10 of my favorite sources for inspiration:"

" Knowledge in Action Research Helping to Make the Case for Rigorous Project-based Learning One of the Foundation's current initiatives is a research program, called Knowledge in Action, designed and managed by a collaborative group of learning scientists, curriculum experts, teacher leaders, and Foundation staff. The research team is applying a rigorous PBL approach to college-preparatory courses, so that students can participate in authentic tasks that provide an experiential platform for learning that prepares them for college and careers."

""Imagine a classroom where everyone started off an academic year with an "A" grade, and in order to keep the grade, a pupil had to show continuous improvement throughout the year. In this classroom, the teacher would have to dock points from a pupil's assessment when his or her performance or achievement was inadequate, and pupils would work to maintain their high mark rather than to work up to it. How would this affect effort, expectations, performance, and assessment relative to current practice?" This is one of the questions we pose in our report Everyone Starts with an A, which explores the application of behavioural insight to educational policy and practice. Using research from behavioural science and our evolving understanding of human nature, we explore how effort, motivation, learning enjoyment, resilience, and overall performance at school can be influenced in ways not often traditionally recognised."

"I've shared some ways that word clouds can be used in the classroom, and here's another activity that works for all ages and subject areas. Find a website that you are planning on sharing with students. This could be an informational text on a science topic or simply a current events article. Copy and paste the website URL into the online tool Tagxedo. This website will create a word cloud using text from that website."

Creating live padlet pages in iBook author ADEHow to guides April 3, 2014 - 2 comments 0 (0 votes) apple_official_ibooks_author I have been playing around with iBook author for a while and love its potential for engaging students in the classroom. I am currently creating a book to support our upcoming PE conference and wanted to use the book to support everything from signimg up to sessions to giving feedback. Padlet sprung to mind as a great way to share the feedback live and to use as a promise wall for delegates to show what they were going to do as a result of the conference. To keep things neat and tidy i wanted this process to be linked up into the book. Here is the process i used.

"This hand selected set of sources will provide teachers who are new to the iPad with the information they need to get started, and offer both new and current users information they need to successfully integrate the iPad into their teaching practices. I purposely limited the list to a few resources that were the richest in content, covering a breadth of important concerns and considerations for new iPad users and teachers who want to get off to a good start with the iPad in their classrooms."

"In the first week of April, I participated in a Twitter chat for the ASCD Leader to Leader initiative, hashtag #ASCDL2L, on the role of the modern teacher. As the conversation unfolded, it caused me to think more deeply than I have before about what elements teachers might consider on their path to developing a more modern version of their current role."

"Web connected classrooms provide opportunities for students and teachers to read original material, discuss current events, and analyze multiple perspectives in search of truth. There are numerous ways in which readers can access news. Here are five free apps that can bring a steady stream of news, and information to the connected learner."

"For the last two years, everyone's been talking about learning to code. From Google chairman Eric Schmidt, to will.i.am and Barack Obama. But what is coding and why is it important for our kids to learn to do it? Coding, also known as programming, is giving a computer instructions to follow in a language that it understands. It can be as simple as programming a short sequence of instructions into a robot to make it move, or as complex as creating an app using a language called Objective-C. Political leaders and technologists believe it is important for the current generation to learn to code, so that in the future we have people with the necessary skills to create the new technologies we will need. This is going to be great for our economy in the future, but there is much more to it than this: it's also empowering, creative, social and great for developing problem solving skills."