Group items tagged

"If you are a K-12 student in the United States, your challenge is to create a digital 3D model of an object that could be used by an astronaut to maintain physical health on a 3-year mission to Mars. Your design must be intended to be 3D printed and could be used for a range of medical needs including diagnostic, preventative, first-aid, emergency, surgical, and/or dental purposes. While exercise, psychological, and nutritional health are important, they are not priority areas for this challenge. Retired astronaut Scott Kelly�s historic one-year mission on ISS provided insights on how the human body reacts to long duration spaceflight, but the Journey to Mars will take approximately 30 months. What health-related items do you think an astronaut will need on that journey, and why would these items require a 3D printer? It�s time to start flexing your problem-solving and design skills to find a solution � good luck!"

"Filmmaking is increasingly being used in the classroom by teachers who understand the wants, hopes and aspirations of their pupils. Recent BBC documentary The Rise of the Superstar Vloggers was an extremely interesting insight into what many people wrongly perceive to be a frivolous activity and an easy route to fame and fortune. Contrary to popular belief, becoming a superstar vlogger involves hours and hours of researching and writing content. When we consider how popular video is with children, it becomes clear that filmmaking is the secret weapon for accelerating progress in schools. By using filmmaking as an incentive to write, pupils are working to produce the kind of media that they love, while the teacher is easily able to coerce them to improve their writing and reading using video as a constant hook. One such school who took the plunge into filmmaking is Northway Primary School in Liverpool, nominated for the Educate Awards Innovative & Creative Literacy Award. Over the course of 11 weeks, the pupils planned, drafted, edited, performed and filmed their very own adventure film based on El Dorado, the search for the lost city of gold in Colombia made famous by Christopher Columbus himself."

"It's a golden age of education podcasts. Teachers, professors, education innovators, and tech skeptics have switched on their microphones to share their insights and analysis-and you'll find plenty of lively characters and fresh voices via your earbuds. After all, let's face it, teachers can be great talkers (we mean that in a good way), and they're also seasoned storytellers. Check out the latest reboot of the EdSurge On Air podcast! Take Michael Wesch, for instance. Inspired by the long-running radio show This American Life, he tags along with his students to better understand their lives and struggles on his Life101 podcast. (That includes crashing a frat party-you'll want to check out that episode). Other education podcasts take a more Socratic approach, drawing out their guests through dialogue. When asking around, several folks we talked to praised Teaching in Higher Ed as a podcast with particularly engaging discussions. Below are our favorites (including our own podcast, which relaunched this week), organized by topic. Please share your own picks in the comments section below."

"Critical thinking skills truly matter in learning. Why? Because they are life skills we use every day of our lives. Everything from our work to our recreational pursuits, and all that's in between, employs these unique and valuable abilities. Consciously developing them takes thought-provoking discussion and equally thought-provoking questions to get it going. Begin right here with the Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet. It's a simple infographic offering questions that work to develop critical thinking on any given topic. Whenever your students discover or talk about new information, encourage them to use these questions for sparking debate and the sharing of opinions and insights among each other. Together they can work at building critical thinking skills in a collaborative and supportive atmosphere."

Use these photos as stimulus for writing. This Flickr group offers eccentric and experimental images produced by the Flickr community's aspiring creative minds. Surrealism, in all mediums of art, is a constant source of inspiration due to its limitlessly artistic nature and photography is no exception. The style allows photographers to visualize their wildest dreams and conceptualize their strangest nightmares. Photographs in this group spark new insight on creativity and perspective, welcoming the unusual crossroads where fact and fiction converge.

"Time for another What's on Your iPad post. I'm still finding these great fun - partly because I just love seeing how others get the most out of their iPad and also because they're a great source of ideas"

"FreeSpeech is a communication tool based upon research in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and human-computer interaction, as well clinical insight and expertise in speech and communication disorders."

Every day we aim to make technology so simple and intuitive that you stop thinking about it-we want Google to work so well, it just blends into your life. But sometimes it's helpful to step back and take stock of what you're doing online.

"Securing those expensive iPads should be one of the biggest things being discussed on sites like Edudemic every day. But it's not. Lucky for us, the folks at Intellerum offered us some important insight into the world of iPad, Netbook, and other device security. Long story short, there's a lot you probably don't know about."

"This week's pick is Storehouse, an app that claims to be 'the easiest way to create and discover beautiful stories' and does a great job of living up to that promise. I've seen a large number of iPad apps with similar purposes, but Storehouse stands out right away due to the spectacular photography in the stories and the app's wonderful, gesture-based interface. "

"Students feedback can sometimes host a treasure trove of new insights not only about their own comprehension but also about our teaching. Giving students the opportunity to share their own response on the learning taking place in the classroom is highly beneficial to them particularly in the way they position themselves vis a vis the content being taught. They also feel empowered because they know their voice does matter and therefore become more engaged and involved in the learning/teaching process."

"Our weekly picks for Best iPad App of the Week are published here every Saturday. Check out all our picks via the link at the end of this post and you'll soon have a collection of stellar apps for your favorite tablet. This week's pick is Curious, and app that's touted as being 'designed for the lifelong learner in each of us'. It's full of video lessons and courses covering a broad array of topics. "

"Project Tomorrow®, the national education nonprofit organization that annually facilitates the Speak Up National Research Project, conducted a special Speak Up survey in Spring 2012 for college students in teacher preparation programs. Since 2007, Project Tomorrow has collaborated with Blackboard Inc. to create a series of annual reports that focus on key trends in the use of technology to increase student achievement, teacher productivity and parental engagement. This new report, "Learning in the 21st Century: Digital Experiences and Expectations of Tomorrow's Teachers," is the latest in the series and provides new insights that will inform college and university based teacher preparation programs as well as the induction and professional development processes within K-12 schools and districts. Tomorrow's teachers may have the keys to finally unlock the potential of technology to transform teaching and learning, but much depends upon their experiences in their preparation program and how well future school leadership can support their expectations for essential technology tools and resources."