Group items tagged

"In my work through school and organization visits, I have been fascinated to see the correlation between the speed of change and an individual who is "leading" the charge. The schools that have someone (or a group of people) helping to push the boundaries of what can be done in schools seem to move a lot quicker with a larger amount of "buy-in" through the process. As Malcom Gladwell describes in his book, "The Tipping Point", he states: The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts."

"Can you recall a time when you were so engaged in learning that you became unaware of your surroundings, that each step of the process energized you to pursue your goal further, and the learning became its own reward? Recently, I was working with a gathering of administrators from my county, contemplating the puzzle of student engagement. Most of the small groups in the room organized their exploration around the premise that on-task behavior is a necessary but insufficient step toward engagement. The T-charts they created focused on how an administrator observing a class might recognize subtle differences."

"Pinterest is growing in popularity in such a way that it presumably will be the top social bookmarking platform of choice for internet users in 2013. The visual concept Pinterest is built on is behind its popularity because the human mind is constructed in such a way to allow for easy and quicker processing of visual cues better than it does with the written code."

"I have been doing a lot of apps review here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning but I have never posted about the tools you as teachers and educators can use to create your own apps. Just lower your eyebrows down, you can do it without any coding knowledge. Of course Android and Apple do provide tech savyy guys with the tools necessary to create their own apps but for us who know nothing about SDK and app development skills, platforms like the ones below will serve the purpose. You can create your app in less than a minute and the process is completely free. Here are some of the apps I learned from Steven Anderson and which you can use to create your customizable apps. Enjoy"

"One of the things that really excites me about the iPad is the ability of the students to show their learning. I am not talking about the end product here, I am talking about the act of learning that can be shown by students recording their processes."

"If you're new to the K-12 Online Conference, please read our About page as well as as our Goals and Core Values. Since 2006, K-12 Online has hosted a free, all-volunteer online conference with 40+ free videos each year featuring some of the most creative and innovative teachers sharing their best ideas for engaging students with digital tools and effective learning strategies. All past keynote addresses are now available on our YouTube channel, and we're in the process of migrating all past presentations there too. Shannon Miller will kick off our 2013 conference with a pre-conference keynote on Monday, October 14th. During week 1 of the conference which starts October 21st, Steve Hargadon & Audrey Watters will keynote the "Open Learning" strand, while Kathy Cassidy will keynote "Outside Learning." During week 2, starting October 28th, Larry Ferlazzo will keynote "Leading Learning" while Sylvia Martinez & Gary Stager will keynote "Building Learning." Please forward and share this post on social media to get the word out about our fantastic keynoters for this year's conference!"

"Are you looking for some good learning games to improve your kid's mathematical capabilities? I have some new titles to recommend for you. The apps below mix fun, gaming and learning in such a way that kids get to learn some basic math notions without having to go through the painful and explicit process associated with learning Math."

"A few years ago I blogged about the concept of Video Tagging and how I was using it to improve performance in my PE Classes. Back then the process was much more involved and required a tremendous level of setup and expensive dedicated hardware and software. This ultimately led to minimal take up within the PE community regardless of the massive benefits to learning. Flash forward to 2013 and we are now in a position easily tag video with a couple of mobile apps, which have a combined price of $8.48. Not only is this price a mere fraction of the cost involved in the 2011 example, it is without a doubt a much more accesible option for the masses. Check them out below;"

"Create Google Slides with a photo of where you see math. Share it. The idea here is quick and dirty. If it's a whole process of making elaborate lesson plans we won't do it. Create a plain white Google Slides presentation, add a picture and a slide with your thoughts on how you could challenge students to see math in the photo."

""I recently learned, for the first time, about Aristotle's belief that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process)).... All of this led me to think about how this would translate into a full spectrum of making in the context of maker educator. Having such a framework would help insure that learning from the making experience is more robust, not left up to chance. I believe a fuller spectrum or framework would including the following elements:"

"Inspired by kids and grounded in research, Novel Engineering is an innovative approach to integrate engineering and literacy in elementary and middle school. Students use existing classroom literature - stories, novels, and expository texts - as the basis for engineering design challenges that help them identify problems, design realistic solutions, and engage in the Engineering Design Process while reinforcing their literacy skills."

"If you were happily downloading the update to iOS 10 today when your dreams were crushed by a black screen with a Lightning cord connecting to an iTunes logo on it, you're not alone. Something has gone wrong during the installation process with iOS 10 and many of us are feeling the punch. Technically, this hasn't "bricked" your device. It just needs some special care and attention. We only mentioned "brick" because we know that's what a lot of you are thinking. If you're iPhone or iPad looks like I described above, don't worry. There is a way to get you back to the way you were before. You just have to connect your device to iTunes."

"Tracy Fullerton, director of the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab, wrote the textbook Game Design Workshop, now in its 3rd edition. Paper prototyping and iterative design is something that The Game Innovation Lab has done for over a decade. Many academic institutions use the methodology to create innovative games. In March 2014 I asked Fullerton how teachers could apply techniques such as paper prototyping and iterative design in the classroom. She pointed out how similar the process was to constructivism, or learning from doing. She said, "It's a version of constructivist education, more focused on systems thinking than just making.""

"Being able to create your own robot gives students and kids a great sense of achievement, with the added bonus of allowing children to develop patience, imagination and problems solving skills. There are a number of impressive kids robotics kits on the market that even parents will enjoy playing with. Plus, these types of projects provide valuable bonding time for kids and parents as it's a toy that both can really relish. In classrooms, robotics are perfect for teaching coding to kids, there are many programmable robot kits that use a simple drag and drop programing language based on Scratch. Making your own robot is also a creative a process, where kids and students utilize their design skills to come up with interesting robot designs. The 10 best make your own robot kits for kids on the market are listed below."

"It has been one of my goals this year to make math authentic, when and where possible. To make it a hands-on, active, and practical. To not just be numbers on a page filled with hypothetical situations, but to have the problems come to life. It's not the only way we practice math but it is part of our repertoire. My hope is that by making math real, when students do encounter the hypothetical, they will have a context for their understanding. They will see the relevance because they've experienced it. One of the ways we have begun to do this is through sewing. As we go, the process of creating through sewing has brought many grade four curriculum expectations to life and provided many opportunities for prompting students' thinking."

"As the world economy shifts away from manufacturing jobs and towards service industry and creative jobs, there's a consensus among parents, educators, politicians and business leaders that it is crucial students graduate into university or the workforce with the ability to identify and solve complex problems, think critically about information, work effectively in teams and communicate clearly about their thinking. While many teachers agree with this premise, they don't often know exactly how to teach these skills explicitly, especially because many of the mandates and required curriculum seem to push in the opposite direction. Process-oriented skills are hard to pin down; teachers can see them in certain students, but developing these competencies in students who aren't already demonstrating them can be tricky. A few teachers in Ontario, Canada have been experimenting with tools they think could make the difference."

"Coding brings young children rich opportunities for language development and the "notion of learning from mistakes," says Chip Donohue, the dean of distance learning and continuing education at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school in child development. "We actually don't do enough of that with young kids." The sequencing and patterns involved in programming reinforce skills that have always been taught in the early years, but now also create "habits of mind that are essential for the 21st century," adds Donohue, also senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center, which provides resources and information on media use with young children. When children code together, they are also learning from each other. "In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things. They are not just learning to code, they are coding to learn," Mitchel Resnick, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, wrote in an EdSurge article. "In addition to learning mathematical and computational ideas (such as variables and conditionals), they are also learning strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas." Resnick adds that these skills are useful to everyone "regardless of age, background, interests, or occupation.""

"I'm not sure of the way most people learn the complicated process of programming Arduino projects because I only know my own convoluted journey. I started the hard way following projects from the Arduino Starter Kit by building photo sensor theremins and electronic magic 8 balls. Here is one of my first Arduino projects I created at a class at the Denton Public Library. (The tweet below is a flashback to the Coding Bonanza I led at Lamar Library in 2014.) I quickly found that I wanted to do things OTHER than what the projects outlined, but I just didn't have the code knowledge to hack projects and make them my own. I continued following projects and attempting to tinker with code. For someone with absolutely no background in coding, it was quite an arduous journey. Imagine my surprise when I found out about the ScratchX extension from Kreg Hanning at SXSWedu in 2015!"

"Interactive and collaborative - Whiteboards are a great way for teachers to explain concepts to their students. With the ability of some iPad apps to record, you ensure that students who did not develop understanding of the concept the first time have the opportunity to watch and listen again and again. Working in small groups or brainstorming as a class, collaborative whiteboards are a great way to share ideas. Work in the same room, on the same network or even from different parts of the country. No matter what you are working on these interactive whiteboards are a great way to document or record your thinking process. "