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"I wish geometry was taught in this way when I was in school. Curriki's new Project-based Learning (PBL) high school Geometry course is now available. For so many students, it's difficult to make a real-life connection between math and their everyday lives. By adopting a Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach, students learn that geometry is not only theoretical, but practical and necessary. Students will move beyond a basic understanding of concepts to an enjoyment of discovery. This free Geometry course not only leverages the popular PBL "active" approach but is also aligned to Common Core State Standards. Thom Markham, Ph.D., President of PBL International, is the designer of the course. He notes that Project-Based Learning points us toward the future of education. "It's a proven method for integrating the 21st century skills of communication and teamwork into the delivery of core subjects.""

"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! "

"I'm assuming you've seen at least one of the eight Harry Potter films. In the films, one everyday magical experience is that photos are always moving as if they were video screens, even though they are 'printed' on paper. Newspaper photos act out the news event as film too, whilst you walk down the road reading. It seems so magical and yet, like so many things these days , there's an app for that!"

"In New Haven, Connecticut, where I live with my husband and two sons, we are lucky to have nearby the Eli Whitney Museum. This place is the opposite of a please don't touch repository of fine art. It's an "experimental learning workshop" where kids engage in an essential but increasingly rare activity: they make stuff. Right now, looking around my living room, I can see lots of the stuff made there by my older son: a model ship that can move around in water with the aid of a battery-powered motor he put together; a "camera obscura" that can project a real-world scene onto a wall in a darkened room; a wooden pinball game he designed himself. (You can view an archive of Eli Whitney Museum projects here.)"

"At Cindrich elementary school in Surrey, B.C., 10-year-old boys are putting themselves to bed earlier, an enthusiastic girl in Grade 6 takes herself for a run when she's feeling hyper, and a diminutive boy who is still learning English tells his teacher he will do better work if he sits on a special cushion. It is all part of self-regulation, a philosophy of education that is moving into public schools in British Columbia."

"Getting students to "mastery" implies that they have mastered a concept, have learned everything there is to know about it, and are ready to move on. This definition of mastery doesn't sit well with me. I've studied topics for years and never "mastered" them. In fact, I earned my master's degree in education more than a decade ago, but I learn how to be a better teacher every day. Each interaction with a student, every conference I attend, and daily conversations with colleagues continually expand my understanding. I can always learn more and explore a topic further."

"While there has been a bit of question as to the effectiveness of SAMR, a shift to move beyond SAMR, and a few proposed changes to the structure of the model floating around online, I have to say that hearing Dr. Ruben Puentedura (you may know him as the father of SAMR) speak at iPad Summit a few weeks ago still felt like a rare app-ortunity and a truly inspiring treat. As I am still collecting my thoughts and ideas from the event, I wanted to share some really great resources from the Dr. SAMR. ;)"

"Last year, we took a shot at understanding how twitter could be used across a range of "cognitive actions," which yielded the "twitter spectrum." langwitches.org has done something similar-albeit a bit broader in nature. In the graphic below, they start with the idea of why a teacher should tweet with students (literacy, citizenship, etc.), then moves on to the idea of a "twitter routine" which helpfully offers some ideas for introducing younger students to twitter."

"To be subtle. To be true. To be original. To be on. * To sing without moving your lips. * To explore the conventions of a thousand genres and befriend a thousand tribes. * To set your love free. * To tweet and be RTed. * To convince someone to give you money. * To get better at doing hard things. "

"As our 1:1 initiative moves forward, I see that there are three kinds of teachers that are part of the process: 1. The teachers who are ready for change (!!) 2. The teachers who are willing to change 3. The teachers who just want to get by I wish someone would have told me about this! But, I'm glad I had the chance to be a teacher before becoming an Instructional Technologist. That background has led me to approach the teachers as students first & teachers second. I pondered and pondered how 1:1 should be implemented (after I had also read some literature on it). I came up with the idea that because I target three different groups of teachers, my sessions need to be differentiated to meet their needs."

"We all know that from September 2014 the national curriculum is changing to include Computing as a programme of study and I am sure I speak for a lot of teachers when I say "but I know nothing about programming or coding?!" Before we panic too much about how we teach this new area its important to note that the subject of Computing is not solely about coding and importantly involves a whole range of areas that we may already be delivering in other subjects such as maths and science without realising it. The skills that encompass computer programming are those that will also transfer into the real world such as problem solving and thinking logically, which will obviously transfer into the world of work and are useful skills for learners to develop moving forward in their careers irrespective of the job area."

"Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to. "I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I'm moving again," says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University. Gallery Lynda Barry: The 20 stages of reading: If there are stages of grief and steps to recovery, isn't the act of reading a complicated, evolving thing over time? Cartoonist Lynda Barry, one of scores of writers at the National Book Festival on Sept. 21-22, certainly thinks so. (Related: 12 authors, 12 reasons why they write) Click here to subscribe. But it's not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. "

Student Social Network Use Declines as Social Apps Move to Take Their Place

"n a rainy Saturday at Hackbright Academy classroom in San Francisco, a group of 35 adults sat at tables, desks, and on couches learning how to code. Marcy, a former artist and now programmer for Uber, taught the class. During a break, Marcy shared that she'd never taken a programming class prior to starting a job in art media. After completing courses at places like Hackbright and General Assembly, she realized how much she enjoyed coding and switched careers. Today she volunteers to teach coding on the weekends. Real world. Compare Marcy's story to Daria's, a high school junior. Daria applied to take her school's AP Computer Science class and was rejected. The reason? She lacked the math prerequisites. Even if she had the prerequisites, she lamented, the counselor told her that her grades probably wouldn't have been high enough to compete for one of the precious 30 seats in the single section that was offered. School world. Learning In The New Economy Of Information | MindShift Teaching in the New (Abundant) Economy of Information How We Can Connect School Life to Real Life Daria's and Marcy's stories speak to the differences between school world and real world. In Marcy's world learning is abundant and artists become coders. In Daria's world, learning is scarce and limited by classroom space and teacher availability."

"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."

"Thursday I'm sharing two presentations at iPadPalooza in Austin, Texas. Here are the titles, descriptions, and slides for these breakout sessions. Both are hands-on workshops, however, so most of the time we'll be exploring and playing with the apps Hopscotch and Brushes!"