Group items tagged

"This week we've been reading a favourite winter time story! The children love the adventures the Gingerbread Man has as he runs away from the different characters in the story. They are always so sad at the end when he is eaten by the fox!     Today I challenged them to retell the story and help the Gingerbread Man outsmart the bakers, cow, goat, cat and fox by using a coding game. This activity helped the children to strengthen their retell as they recalled the story and sequenced the events of the story, and encouraged them to practise their coding skills, specifically oral language related to directionality and number.   We used a small stuffed Gingerbread Man, photos of the different characters from the text, our coding board (sensory table lid with tape), and directional coding cards. "

"here are lots of ways to incorporate video into the classroom. From capturing students' attention as you kick off a lesson, to providing context for a new learning experience, teachers use videos in lots of different ways. Whether you are looking for a clip to send home to students via Google Classroom or want to connect a video link for a QR code scavenger hunt, educational 360 videos are worth exploring. 360 video gives students the power to explore a space from every angle. YouTube hosts a range of 360 video content and one of my favorites is from the BBC. On the BBC's YouTube channel you'll find different types of video options for a virtual visit to places around the world. As you search through their content you'll see that they've tagged their videos as 360 to make it especially easy to find."

""Imagine that your mind is a television," I told the small group of students I was visiting at the rural Oregon school where I worked as a counselor. "And you have a remote." I then asked them to change to a sad channel and notice how it made them feel. "Now let's change it to a happy channel." How did that feel? What differences did they notice? We practiced this for a while, the students taking turns to see how all sorts of different channels made us feel. We tried it while holding a yoga tree pose. The students noticed that certain thoughts made it easier to balance; others made it harder. What they were learning, of course, was how to be mindful of their thoughts and how those thoughts affect their bodies. They were also learning that they could direct their thoughts - that none of us is ever stuck on just one channel; that mindfulness gives us tools for dealing successfully with all manner of challenges and difficulties."

"Many teachers have added 'digital literacy' as number four on the list of literacies their students should have (or be working towards, in most cases). Reading, writing, and math are now followed by digital literacy. Obviously, depending on the grade level you teach, your students will have different abilities in each of the four areas, so your expectations and your teaching approach may differ quite noticeably from your colleagues. But the nagging question still remains for many teachers - what exactly is digital literacy?"

"Librarians make a huge difference in our students lives. They are entrusted with a wide variety of educational tasks. Some of these tasks according to Queen University Library include: help students with information-related activities, assist students in developing information literacy skills that allows them to navigate and search the web effectively, collaborate with teachers in creating challenging project-based activities, run different literacy clubs, build library collections and many more."

"Minecraft is a "sandbox' video game that can be used in a variety of ways to support and enrich the curriculum. Through game-based learning, using Minecraft, you can support students who achieve differently, as well as foster social development and digital citizenship. Watch student intrinsic motivation explode (like those creatures called Creepers) and discover how game play and discussion helps to develop learning skills and make connections to different areas of the curriculum.   In this session you will learn the basics of Minecraft, discuss games based learning, and dispel the myths around "doing Minecraft"."

"Students aren't daunted by the iPad interface. They may take time to experiment and understand steps required to produce an outcome, but they will persevere. Having observed students at different stages of learning, across many subjects, it has become clear that students aren't a barrier to learning with the iPad. If a process doesn't work for a student they will try something different. They collaborate with peers to produce quality work and will heed advice to move forward."

Can one computer in a classroom really make a difference?

"I took a look at the free iOS app News360 more than a year ago and found it interesting and useful. The idea behind the app was to show you lots of different takes on a story, so you could see the subject covered from many different points of view. A new iPad version features a revamped interface, new social features and an option to more closely target your interests."

"With more than 500,000 apps available for use on the iPad, which ones are best for education? TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) helps by testing and recommending great apps for the classroom. They regularly try out new apps and list those that make the grade in the shared document available here for iPad. Apps are categorized into 46 different subject areas and 14 different personal use areas. Apps that are free are listed in white. "

Audrey Watters has an interesting article on early results from an assessment of iPads deployed in kindergardens in Auburn, ME. It's a perfect place for me to get to one of the core purposes of this blog- to look at educational research results and critique them from the perspective of a fellow researcher. The goal is to help readers be more saavy consumers of educational research. My take is pretty different from Audrey's (who I think is a brilliant ed tech journalist). I also want to start the post by applauding the team of researchers for tackling this important study, even though I disagree with their interpretation of the data.

"Adaptive learning means different things to different people, but adaptive learning technologies are usually designed to adapt content to the abilities and knowledge level of the user. In turn, the user is presented with a personalized learning experience. According to CEO Jessie Wooley-Wilson of adaptive learning company Dreambox Learning, "I think that in a matter of a few years, blended learning with apps is going to be so ubiquitous that people are going to expect this technology to have a place in the classroom.""

"Close reading is definitely a "survival skill" particularly in a world drowned in information. Close reading is all about reading differently, it is reading for deep understanding through paying attention to what others would normally oversight. Being a close reader entails focus and dedication to your reading material. It empowers readers to delve deeper into the latent meanings of text searching for cues that make the reading a totally different experience one that resembles the detective wok. Close reading is also about critical reading, reading that does not take things at face value but rather investigates for what is hidden between the lines."

"Schools across the country are increasingly starting to use mobile devices like tablets and smartphones as classroom tools. But some educators are still skeptical that devices will distract students as much or more than they enhance the learning environment. Because it's still fairly new, there have been few quantitative studies, but Project Tomorrow and Kajeet for Education recently completed a study of mobile learning among 136 fifth graders at Falconer Elementary School, a Chicago public school where 94 percent of students receive free and reduced lunch. The Making Learning Mobile Project study documents how four different fifth-grade teachers and their students used the tablets they were given both in class and at home once the school day was over."

" want to quickly share with you this awesome little graphic I came across in iLearn different. The graphic outlines the different steps teachers and educators can follow to apply SAMR model to iPad apps used in the classroom. " This graphic is not intended to be an exhaustive list but it will give you an idea of how you can integrate the SAMR Model into your teaching and learning. ""

"Watching my two-year-old nephew Dashiel interact with his mother's iPad made me realize that he was born into an era unlike any in history. As he grows up his expectations about how information should be presented and processed, and how interfaces should respond, will be profoundly different from how we experience technology today. Mobile is now the channel of choice for everyone, but even those of us who use technology with great alacrity are still digital immigrants. Dashiel represents a new age: the Mobile Born - a generation of kids that have been raised while literally gnawing on the equivalent of a supercomputer - otherwise known as mom's smartphone."

Watching my two-year-old nephew Dashiel interact with his mother's iPad made me realize that he was born into an era unlike any in history. As he grows up his expectations about how information should be presented and processed, and how interfaces should respond, will be profoundly different from how we experience technology today.

Watching my two-year-old nephew Dashiel interact with his mother's iPad made me realize that he was born into an era unlike any in history. As he grows up his expectations about how information should be presented and processed, and how interfaces should respond, will be profoundly different from how we experience technology today.

"I still miss that beautiful visual presentation, but you can still use Google News to search contemporaneous news. Contemporaneous news offers students unfiltered, personal connection to the past and forces them to wrestle with issues of bias and historical perspective. Contemporaneous news focuses a media literacy lens on how news is/was reported. How many different ways is the same story reported? How does the story evolve over the course of days, weeks, years? How do stories reported at the time differ from the way a story is reported with the benefit of hindsight or without the homongenization of textbook coverage? We can engage learners in considering why a story is placed where it is placed in a newspaper, why a particular headline was crafted, how our language has shifted, and why search terms may be time-contextual. (For instance, why searches for World War I, African Americans, the Holocaust, might not be effective in contemporaneous sources.)"

Sadly, moments of full immersion are not the memories that most of us have from our years as students. It is clear that schools -- and learning -- are more powerful and effective when students are deeply connected to their work. What would it take for students to regularly experience the kind of engagement where they are fully immersed and "lost" in their tasks? Learning that leads to deep engagement should be thoughtfully and carefully structured to work for many different types of learners. One of the wonderful challenges of our craft is to structure learning so that it draws in young people with many different interests, abilities and skill levels.

Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge. Learning style is an individual's natural pattern of acquiring something that is new and knowledegable. Different people have different learning styles. Some learn by reading, some by hearing, some by writing while many others do so by watching. Learning may

"PBL or Project Based Learning is a method of teaching that has been around for a long time that is getting more and more attention due to all the tools technology leads itself to. Basically, PBL allows for teachers to "ask" a question that allows students to solve in a variety of a ways using many different analytical methods. Since, Project Based Learning incorporates a lot of different techniques and tools to use I've decided to create a list of resources rather then just one of sites or apps."