Group items tagged

"The BBC's Skillswise website offers lots of good activities for learning and practicing skills in language arts and mathematics. A section of the site that could be useful in a lot of classrooms is the speaking and listening section. The speaking and listening section contains subsections offering lessons and activities to develop a specific skill. Those skills are listening for specifics, communication skills, formal and informal speaking, and giving presentations. Each section has a short introductory video followed by a set of quizzes and interactive games in which students test their skills."

"Creatures of Light is a beautiful free iPad app from the American Museum of Natural History. The app contains five chapter about bioluminescent animals like jellyfish, fireflies, and glow worms. In each chapter students learn about what causes bioluminescence and how it helps animals survive in their environments. Each chapter includes an interactive map of the world that students on which students can tap to learn about the bioluminescent animals of a particular region."

"Below is a list I have been working on for awhile now. the list features some very useful Math websites specifically handpicked for teachers to use with their students. The initial list I compiled contained over 40 websites but as I reviewed it deeper I decided to take some out and keep the rest here. I invite you to have a loom and share with your colleagues. "

"Making movies on the iPad is one of those activities that I often see in schools. I love to watch how quickly even very young students can produce a professional looking movie. It is a great way for them to illustrate what they have learnt. Normally I would say that editing movies on the iPad is best done using iMovie but it is not exactly cheap, especially if you have a raft of other apps you want your students to have. Here are a couple of apps for editing movies that do not cost the earth. Many of these apps also contain features found on the more expensive apps."

"My recent email conversation with Marilyn Just about the Art of Problem Solving website. Reminded me of a great source of fun mathematics pictures to use in the classroom. The Bad Maths Flickr group contains lots of examples of bad math spotted in stores and other public places. Some of the bad math is obvious as in this picture taken in a Walmart store. Other examples are not as obvious."

"Fizzy's Lunch Lab Fresh Pick is a free iPad app from PBS Kids. The app is based on the popular PBS web series Fizzy's Lunch Lab. The purpose of the app is to challenge students' math and problem solving skills. The app contains eight challenges for students to try. Students can go through the challenges in any order that they like. The eight challenges for students are Buying Groceries, Grocery Mapping, Neighborhood Mapping, Pantry Hunt, Fizzy's Invention, Customer Change, Find Freddy, and Food Matcher."

"The Maker Movement is one of creativity and invention. Of Do-It-Yourself ingenuity. Of making things with your own hands. Building something from scratch can shift a lesson from a lecture into an experience. Students can play, diverge, tinker, make mistakes, help each other, and express themselves with the appropriate guidance of a teacher/facilitator. The end result can be anywhere from an honest try to a creative wonder. Whatever the case, consider adding the following tools to your experiential learning toolkit. Curated by elementary school technology coach Elizabeth Espinoza, this comprehensive collection contains web, desktop, and mobile apps that can help your students become makers and inventors."

"Gen i Revolution is an online game designed to help middle school and high school students develop and test their knowledge of concepts in personal finance. Gen i Revolution contains fifteen "missions" in which students have to select "operatives" to assist them. Each mission is designed to help someone make better personal financial decisions. Some of the mission topics include credit, budgeting, and investing for the future. "

"ABCya Animate allows students to create animated GIFs containing up to 100 frames. On ABCya Animate students build their animation creations by drawing, typing, and inserting images. Students can change the background of each frame, include new pictures in each frame, and change the text in each frame of their animations."

"Draw Your Stories is a freemium iPad app on which children complete narrated stories by creating their own drawings. The narrated stories contain prompts for students to draw things to fill-in the scenes. Draw Your Stories gives students small templates to trace to help them draw various objects into the stories they're listening to. Students can choose from a wide array of colors and brush stroke sizes."

"Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services2 Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 12.02.54 PM Truss Me is an iPad app that students can use to design and test simple weight-bearing structures. Truss Me can be used in "challenge" mode or in "free play" mode. The challenge mode contains fifteen activities in which students are awarded points for strength and efficiency of their structures. For example, if a structure holds the weight but uses too many parts it doesn't receive as many points as a structure using fewer parts while supporting the same weight. Structures that won't work at all fall apart."

"In today's post I sharing with you a list of some of the best apps you should definitely try with your students. This list contains only apps I have not included in similar previous lists. Also, because of the increasing number of requests I get from you concerning Android apps , I decided to include links to the Android versions of those apps that are available in Google Play."

"When I don't have an image of my own to use and cannot find a public domain image to use in a presentation I turn to searching for Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr. Alan Levine developed a browser bookmarklet that helps me quickly formatting Creative Commons licensed images found on Flickr. To use the Flickr CC Attribution Helper drag the bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar. (If you're using Chrome, you may have to go into the settings and select "always show bookmarks bar" before dragging the bookmarklet into your browser). Then whenever you're viewing an image on Flickr you can click the bookmarklet to get a pop-up window (make sure your browser allows pop-ups) containing the properly formatting attribution information. "

"This is the last post in a series of posts on Tony Vincent's " iPad As Teacher's Pet". In today's post, I am sharing with you a list of some of the top educational iPad apps that teachers favour to use at school. The apps you will see below are based on a March 2014 survey delivered on Twitter to 558 iPad-using teachers. These teachers were asked about their favourite apps to use in school and they came up with this selection. As an educational app reviewer, I find this selection to be highly relevant and contains the best educational apps that teachers should know about. The apps are arranged in order of priority."

"My Incredible Body is an iPad app (currently free) designed to help students learn how the human body works. The app features eight sections. Those sections are circulation, muscles, senses (vision, smell, hearing, touch), kidneys & urine, skeleton, respiration, digestion, and brain & nerves. Each section of the app contains short animated videos that explain the functions of each system and how it works."

"Free Books is a great free iPad app that provides you with a huge library of eBooks and audiobooks. It actually contains over 23.000 classic books that are all in public domain. These books span a wide variety of topics and different fields in human history including letters of leaders, the collected works of geniuses, the finest Victorian novels, the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. It's all here, along with tens of thousands of other books."

"Marie Curie, Martin Luther King Jr, Albert Einstein, Sir Alexander Fleming, Mother Teresa; all of these amazing individuals have one thing in common - winning the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is one of the most highly regarded awards given to people working in the fields of literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, peace, and economics. But the Nobel Foundation is more than just an award giving Foundation, and has branched out into creating educational content related to the hard work done by Nobel Prize winners. Not only does their website contain video clips, documentaries, literature and history related to the winners, but it has over 29 interactive educational games for students to learn about key scientific, economic, literature and peace concepts."

"Free to all schools, the Innovate My School Magazine contains a range of innovative educational insights that will inspire, challenge and excite schools, teachers and educators across the country."

"Will Smith once told a story from his childhood in which his father broke down the brick wall at his business and told him and his brother to rebuild it. It took them a year, but they finished the job and learned a powerful lesson contained within a memorable metaphor. He explains, "You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say 'I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You don't start there. You say, 'I'm going to lay this brick as perfect as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day and soon you have a wall." This story from Will Smith captures the very essence of the Slight Edge philosophy that we will discuss in this article. Applying this idea within the classroom will help students develop a strong long term sense of accomplishment that is necessary to achieve their goals."

I am a huge proponent of using hands-on, interactive learning activities to explore ill-defined problems as a way of teaching for all age groups. Given the spontaneity and uncertainty of these types of active learning environments, I believe educators should observe, reflect on, and analyze how learners interact with the materials, the content, the educator, and the other learners. This practice is in line with the teacher as ethnographer. In my role as a teacher as ethnographer, I made some initial observations during my first two weeks of teaching maker education for elementary age students. With half the kids under 7, I learned a bunch about young makers. Young makers are more capable than what people typically believe. Young makers need to be given more time, resources, strategies to learn how to solve more ambiguous and ill-defined problems (i.e., ones that don't have THE correct answer). Too many don't know how to approach such problems. If a project doesn't "work" during the first trial, they way too often say "I can't do this." They have a low tolerance for frustration; for not getting the answer quickly. Young makers often celebrate loudly and with extreme joy when making something work. Young makers like to work together but lack skills or desire to peer tutor one another. Young makers usually like to stand while working. Young makers are more capable than what people (adults) typically believe. During our maker education summer camp, the young makers made LED projects, circuit crafts, and simple robotics. Looking at the instructions for similar activities, the recommended ages were usually 8 and above. Yet, my group of 14 kids contained half under that age. The kids of all ages struggled a bit - as is common with making type activities but all were successful to some degree with all of the activities.