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Today was Dr. Davey's first Maker Day, and an amazing one at that! Here's a look at our day. All of the Grade 1-Grade 7 students participated in today's Maker Day. Students attended two of seven different sessions based on their interests: Minecraft/Coding, Collaborative Art, Beautiful Junk, Positive Graffiti, Making Music, Lego/Blocks, and Egg Drop. Staff members paired up together to facilitate the learning at each of the sessions, and the students directed most of the learning based on their interests. I (Aviva) worked with an amazing Grade 4 student that led the Minecraft/Coding session, and even worked with small groups of students on coding the Arduino. It was really quite incredible! After two sessions, students reflected on the day and on their learning, and then extended the "Maker Learning" back in the classroom. Today was all about the Learning Skills, problem solving, creativity and critical thinking. As you can hear in our video reflection, there were also links to our classroom learning including Science (Structures) and Math (shapes, figures, and non-standard measurement). There was also a lot of Arts learning today (with creating music and creating works of art including the elements of design). What an amazing day!"

"This curriculum has been designed by the Maker Jawn team and is based on activities that have worked well at our program sites. Most of the curriculum aims to introduce skills that participants can go on to use for self-directed projects. "

"Innovating thinking is one of those awkward concepts in education-one that is often espoused, but isn't measured, reported on, trained around, or celebrated. It's just sort of there. Innovative thinking in students will flower when we design classrooms that absolutely can't survive without it. Same with critical thinking, self-direction, creativity, and so on. Until we reach that point, it's on the shoulders of the classroom teacher to tease it out of students through a combination of inspiration, modeling, scaffolding, and creating persistent opportunity. The following graphic by Mia MacMeekin offers 27 ways to think about this idea. As usual, some of the tips are better than others-"Flip: Start from the End" makes sense, but may or may not promote innovation. The same with "Grow: Grow with each approach.""

More information from NY TIMES - http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/travel/15Prac.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

What is the Technology Integration Matrix? The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells as illustrated below.

Direct link to comic: http://cstrips.bitstrips.com/0b5c66611088660ea35fdd9a95f3c27b.png

A no-cost, self-directed, virtual school built for the vocal health of U.S. teachers

The purpose of the interactive notebook is to enable students to be creative, independent thinkers and writers. Interactive notebooks are used for class notes as well as for other activities where the student will be asked to express his/her own ideas and process the information presented in class. Requirements vary from teacher to teacher and is set up according to the directions of the teacher. Some go left/right, others go right/left, and still others go sequential. It really does not matter, so keep that in mind when looking at the suggestions. The purpose of this page to give teachers a starting point for setting up their own notebooks with their classes. The links presented on this page were shared by teachers on T-Net, A to Z, and Pro-Teacher , and of course, TCI, the originators of the Interactive Student Notebook, as examples of good interactive notebooks and guidelines. Credit belongs to the creators of the individual sites. I have tried to divide the sites by subject categories, but many are inter-changable.

This is a collaborative project to generate Social Media Guidelines for school districts. The goal of this guideline is to provide instructional employees, staff, students, administrators, parents and the school district community direction when using social media applications both inside and outside the classroom.

Custom Google Search based manuals search engine that aggregates direct links to free manuals in PDF or HTML format from across the web, with an index of more than 5 million manuals in wide variety of topics. You can search from the website or directly from your browser search bar by installing the plugin.

Online activity for future bakers from Robin Hood. Kids might have fun making and decorating digital baked foods. Good for having students follow directions.

"Noterize allows you to view and annotate any available PDF or PowerPoint document. The built-in web browser enables direct importing of files from the web (including university and corporate sites), while integration with Box.net and Dropbox makes transferring documents between your computer and iPad as simple as can be. Once your documents are in Noterize, use the PDF search functionality to quickly find what you are looking for. "

"How can participant-led, one-day events open up new possibilities for professional learning? "I have heard more positive feedback on this day than any other professional development I have ever been a part of. I keep wondering why we didn't take our professional development in this direction a lot earlier. If we want classrooms where we are teaching students to be collaborative and more proactive in their learning, don't we have to set up a culture where we trust teachers to do the same?" -Patrick Larkin (2010), assistant superintendent Hundreds of quotes like this one have been circulating within the Twittersphere and Blogosphere since May 2010. What's all the buzz about? Edcamp."