Group items tagged

"Are you a fan of Rubik's Cube? Do you like to build something to solve a problem? Here is one of our favorite puzzles! "

"This is Which One Doesn't Belong?, a website dedicated to providing thought-provoking puzzles for math teachers and students alike. There are no answers provided as there are many different, correct ways of choosing which one doesn't belong. Enjoy!"

"Students in Grade 3 created their own I Spy pages. The items were gathered from yard sales, usually by the bag full, for a few dollars, and put through the dishwasher. The first class was spent exploring 'I Spy' books and arranging the items onto colourful card. I had 9 baskets of items so small groups or pairs each photographed the same designs but did their own clues. During the second class period, students cropped their photos and used PicCollage App to add clues. Image quality is an issue with closeups with our iPad 2s. Other classes will try to find the items in the images and they were included in a school assembly video.  Continue reading to see more examples."

"Fostering digital literacy skills is one of the most difficult tasks for educators. Evaluating and analyzing online resources for accuracy is something that many adults struggle with - we've all been bamboozled before, haven't we? But digital literacy is more than just determining if something is true or false - it's intelligently and responsibly navigating online, it's putting countless pieces together to form a puzzle, it's determining what's important and evaluating bias, etc - the list goes on. So, as an educator, how do we reinforce these crucial skills in our classrooms?"

"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."

"CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. The activities introduce students to Computational Thinking through concepts such as binary numbers, algorithms and data compression, separated from the distractions and technical details of having to use computers. Importantly, no programming is required to engage with these ideas! CS Unplugged is suitable for people of all ages, from elementary school to seniors, and from many countries and backgrounds. Unplugged has been used around the world for over twenty years, in classrooms, science centers, homes, and even for holiday events in a park!"

"One thing that always interested me about History was the growing realisation that even the supposedly simplest and most straightforward facts are quite often shrouded in a mystifying narrative; a trail of sources that leaves the true story open to a range of opposing interpretations and outcomes. Whilst we may think we have answered all the questions and arrived at the correct conclusions about the sequences of events, a differing theory or discovery of a contradictory source can suddenly debunk the accepted. That is what makes learning History so fascinating; the mysteries. The definite mysteries that we may never solve or we can see evolving into an answer as decades move forward, or the certain chronicle that suddenly finds itself turning into a cryptic puzzle as later evidence emerges. Within us all is a person who wants to know the answers when challenged by the unknown, and to embrace the exhilaration of cracking a Sherlockian case. Instead of a just a 'Whodunnit?', exploring history mysteries involves a wider spectrum of narratives and therefore can offer a far more rich tapestry of skills including analysis, questioning and the evaluation of places, events and persons. Follow me down the rabbit's hole into the wonderland of history mysteries."

" The Puzzled Driver The odometer of the family car shows 15,951 miles. The driver noticed that this number is palindromic: it reads the same backward as forward. "Curious," the driver said to himself. "It will be a long time before that happens again." But 2 hours later, the odometer showed a new palindromic number. How fast was the car traveling in those 2 hours?"

"Among the many ways to actively engage children in the learning process, educational games are one of the most fun. With so many award winning and cleverly designed games on the market, young children to teens (and even adults!) can develop new skills and reinforce other skills, without even realizing they are learning. Board, card, cooperative, puzzle games, and more encourage interactive hands-on learning in a humorous, light hearted environment. In a addition to math, reading, vocabulary, logic, problem-solving, and spelling skills regularly introduced by educational games, turn based and cooperative games foster with social interaction, communication skills, and self confidence. Consider adding one of these excellent educational games to your home or classroom collection."

"I came back from my morning run completely energized. I took my headphones out and continued to puzzle over Sugata Mitra's compelling segment on the TED Radio Hour of "Unstoppable Learning," which suggested that in many ways, teachers are getting in the way of learning. A tough pill for me - a teacher of seven years - to swallow. I scrawled some thoughts in my journal: "Students in pursuit of learning," "fostering curiosity," "CHOICE," "unstoppable learning," and grinned as I imagined what this transformation could look like in my classroom. A few weeks later, I told my students we'd be starting "Inspiration Time." I explained this time was designed for them to ask themselves what they are curious about and what they want to pursue."

"As defined by Jeannette Wing, computational thinking is "a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts of computer science." To the students at my school, it's an approach to tackling challenging questions and ambiguous puzzles. We explicitly integrate computational thinking into all of our classes, allowing students to draw parallels between what they're learning and how they're approaching problems across all disciplines. Our students rely on four computational thinking skills, as well as a set of essential attitudes"

"In response to some of the requests I received this week regarding iPad apps for early literacy. I decided to arrange apps into different categories and in different posts. Today's list features apps to help your kid or student temper with the notion of words. These are basically word games and puzzles that scaffold vocabulary and grammar learning. Enjoy"

"Understanding those on the verge of or in the trenches of middle school can be like finishing a complex puzzle only to realize there is a single missing piece - just when you think you have them all figured out, they pivot and leave you just as confused as you started. They sometimes feel like a walking contradiction: they want your love, but would prefer you did not show it in public; what makes them laugh one day, brings them to tears the next; going to school used to be the best part of their day, now they dread it. Whatever the contradiction is in your household, it is important to remember that the journey that these soon to be adults are traveling is a difficult yet AWESOME one. They are in a constant state of learning and discovery and as parents and guardians, we GET to be along for the ride!"

"Using games to teach can increase student engagement and add meaning to learning. Hands-on apps give children the ability to mix tactile play with a digital experience. Thanks to augmented reality, more and more apps in the market blur the line between digital and analog. For example, Bloxels, new from Pixel Press, uses color-coded blocks that can be scanned in with an iPad camera to create a video game level. Osmo is another digital/analog blend. The kit includes a stand and a reflector for an iPad camera, enabling users to play with physical tangram puzzles or word games."

"Contraption Maker provides a set of puzzles that are reminiscent of Rube Goldberg cartoons. Children use hundreds of parts like hamster motors, balls, and conveyor belts to fix broken contraptions. Moving down our knowledge funnel, kids can create their own contraptions and share them with the world. It's a digital sandbox that promotes creativity by experimenting with logical cause and effect consequences. A key component of excelling in a STEM career is learning via experimentation, which often means testing an idea, failing, reviewing the idea, and trying a new idea. Traditional teaching methods don't often have the latitude to encourage failure. However, experimentation and failure are key components in Contraption Maker. You learn by "failing" and testing new theories, and it is meant to be fun, not discouraging."

"Why are so many of our high school and college students so, so smart, and yet, at the same time so, so… foolish? It turns out they can't help it. The adolescent brain is a work in progress, "a puzzle waiting completion," says Dr. Frances Jensen, professor and chair of the Department of Neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and the co-author of The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults (Harper), with Amy Ellis Nutt. Recently, Jensen spoke with NEA Today about how the mysteries of the teenage brain can be better understood by parents and educators."