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"Students at Snowflake Unified School District created a low cost detection system to alert drivers of animal crossing. Students were split into three teams; the software/hardware team, the design team, and the fabrication team. Community members assisted in tasks, such as cutting the metal and Plexiglas needed for the prototype. Students created a working alert system that uses motion detection and signals to light up roads with animal crossings."

"In the age of artificial intelligence, the answer to a more optimistic future may lie in redefining work itself. WORK, as an idea, is both familiar and frustratingly abstract. We go to work, we finish our work, we work at something. It's a place, an entity, tasks to be done or output to achieve. It's how we spend our time and expend our mental and physical resources. It's something to pay the bills, or something that defines us. But what, really is work? And from a company's perspective, what is the work that needs to be done? In an age of artificial intelligence, that's not merely a philosophical question. If we can creatively answer it, we have the potential to create incredible value. And, paradoxically, these gains could come from people, not from new technology."

"All over Canada, and at many schools in North America, today is the first day of school. Doing the work that I do today, I did not realize that until I opened up Facebook this morning and was hit by a barrage of "the first day of grade _____" pictures all over my feed.  The excitement on the faces of many students was contagious, but it also seemed that some parents were pretty happy to send their kids back to school as well What I have been thinking about a lot lately is about how we maintain that "first-day" excitement in our students throughout the year? Although this is something that I do my best to support in my work, I know that this is not an easy task for educators and schools as there are so many variables in the lives of our students and ourselves that have an impact on our experience in school. My focus here is on how do we create an experience in school that is both joyous while challenging.  The reason both elements are essential is that it is easier to "challenge" our students to grow in a space where they are excited to be in the first place. If a student hates coming to school every day, it is going to be a lot tougher to push them toward growth."

"Teaching a new language to non-native speakers may be one of the most challenging educational jobs out there, so ELL teachers can use all of the help they can get! Thankfully, many excellent resources for ELL and ESL exist online, from full-service websites to reference tools and communities, all designed to make the task of educating ELL students just a little bit easier and more effective. We've scoured the Internet to share 50 of the best of these resources, and we hope you'll find lots of valuable content and tools through these incredibly useful links for ELL educators."

"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"When it comes to organizing one's workflow and enhancing productivity iPad can do wonders. There are a wide variety of wonderful apps you can utilize to transform your digital experiences and be more productive. The collection below features some of favourite picks in this regard. These are apps that can help facilitate your workflow, manage your tasks and to-do lists, create, share  and sync your files and documents across different devices and platforms. We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page."

"Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c). All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy-simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers. And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway. If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment."

"Librarians do an amazing job at school. They are entrusted with various educational tasks. These include, according to Queen University library, help students with information-related activities, assist students in developing information literacy skills that allows them to navigate and search the web effectively, collaborate with teachers in creating challenging project-based activities, run different literacy clubs, build library collections and many more. In today's post we are sharing with you this handy visual we published last year featuring a number of interesting web tools to help teacher librarians in their work."

"Teaching in a digital world, while essential, can be a difficult task. The digital world is constantly evolving, and it can be hard to keep up with new trends. And while students often enter the classroom with a high degree of digital awareness, it is often confined to the world of social media. How then, do educators learn about digital literacy, so they can model and teach it to their students?  Thankfully, there are tons of apps, tools, and resources that can help. We decided to profile the best ones."

Pedagogy and curriculum that engages students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and is deemed personally relevant to the lives they live, are seen as important factors towards equality of outcome by Wrench, Hammond, McCallum and Price (2012). Their research involved designing a curriculum and pedagogy that would be highly engaging to students of low-socioeconomic status. 'The interventions involved curriculum redesigns that set meaningful, challenging learning task(s) (culminating in high quality learning products); strong connection to student life-worlds; and a performative expectation for student learning.' (Wrench et al 2012 p934)

"Much like cooking, computational thinking begins with a feat of imagination, the ability to envision how digitized information-ticket sales, customer addresses, the temperature in your fridge, the sequence of events to start a car engine, anything that can be sorted, counted, or tracked-could be combined and changed into something new by applying various computational techniques. From there, it's all about "decomposing" big tasks into a logical series of smaller steps, just like a recipe."

"Before computers can be used to solve a problem, the problem itself and the ways in which it could be resolved must be understood. Computational thinking techniques help with these tasks."

"Information literacy has been a hot topic of recent conversation. Many folks believe that web sites that traffic in false information and 'fake news' may have influenced the last United States presidential election. Traffic on the Snopes web site, which debunks false rumors, has never been greater. Ideological separation also is being driven by the ways that we sort ourselves in our schools, neighborhoods, friendship groups, political affiliations, and faith institutions. Already often isolated from the dissimilar-minded, we then also self-select into individualized news media and online channels that can result in walled-garden 'echo chambers' or 'filter bubbles.' To combat our growing concerns about fake news and filter bubbles, we're going to have to take the task of information literacy more seriously. And that means rethinking some organizational and technological practices."

"Earlier in the school year my students created whole-class videos using our large green screen studio. While I assigned students a variety of tasks (director, camera operator, acting coach), my students spent the majority of their time on the carpet as an audience member. At the end of these units I wondered how we could increase student ownership of the production. Could I have my students create a green screen movie without having to play the audience member for large portions of the time? Could they be empowered to create a movie independently of the teacher? Could this be done by kindergartners and first graders? For most of the school year I struggled with these questions. That was until I met Brenda Windsor and Mary O'Neil of Trumbull, CT at the Fairfield University "Education Technology Collaboration Day" in March.  Brenda and Mary presented on how they have incorporated green screens in the classroom, and shared the idea of using a pizza box to make a miniature portable studio. Here is a link to the video they created.  From that moment, I was on a mission to have my K-2 students write, direct, film & star in their own collaborative group mini green screen movies. "

"Michael Fullan (2013) describes critical thinking as the "ability to design and manage projects, solve problems, and make effective decisions using a variety of tools and resources" (p. 9).  Papert (1980) supports exercises that "open intellectual doors" (p. 63).  Minecraft tasks can be used to create experiences that can be otherwise challenging to design, which according to Drake (2014), should address real-world problems that may not necessarily have one clear answer.  Digital tools such as Minecraft demand higher order thinking skills, which include "the ability to think logically, and to solve ill-defined problems" and "formulating creative solutions and taking action" (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016, p. 12)."

"Educators and parents hoping to inspire boys to excel at school now have a new tool at their disposal; Boy Smarts - Mentoring Boys for Success at School. In this book, you will find 100 imaginative and practical guidelines for authentic engagement in meeting boys' varied learning needs. The guidance offered here can help parents and teachers in the challenging task of understanding each boy as an individual while also working toward a community plan to raise boys' school achievement. The common sense approach offers to lay the groundwork for an action plan to mentor boys for school success - a manual for kick-starting boys integrity."

"A decade ago professors complained of a growing "epidemic" in education: Wikipedia. Students were citing it in papers, while educators largely laughed it off as inaccurate and saw their students as lazy, or worse. As one writing instructor posted to an e-mail list in 2005: "Am I being a stick-in-the-mud for for being horrified by students' use of this source?" How things have changed. Today, a growing number of professors have embraced Wikipedia as a teaching tool. They're still not asking students to cite it as a source. Instead, they task students with writing Wikipedia entries for homework, exposing the classwork to a global audience (and giving students an outside edit by an army of Wikipedia volunteers). There's even a new peer-reviewed academic journal about using Wikipedia in higher education."

"It's time we considered the increasing impact of AI in education. Educators have already previewed examples of the changes coming their way. Automation technology has been introduced for a variety of basic teaching tasks."

" FAMILYPARENTING The Canadian Paediatric Society has released surprising new screen time rules Stop watching the clock, says CPS. But that doesn't mean parents shouldn't be heavily involved in their kid's media use BY CHRIS DEACON | JUN 6, 2019 PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) released new guidelines today for digital media use and screen time for kids aged five to 19. Today's guidelines follow recommendations set out in 2017 that focused on kids aged zero to five. But while those guidelines targeted screen time limits for kids in that age group (no screens at all for infants and toddlers under two, and less than an hour a day for kids two to five), the guidelines for kids and teens focus more on how and when screens are used rather than how long. "We really wanted to highlight that content, context and kids' individual traits are as important as specific screen time limits," says Michelle Ponti, chair of the CPS Digital Health Task Force and lead author on the statement."

"As elementary students learn how to read, teachers administer reading fluency tests and listen to students read passages. During these reading fluency tests, teachers listen for speed, accuracy, and expression. Nothing can replace this formal assessment, but it's helpful to teach students to track their words per minute between these reading fluency assessments. Tracking their words per minute can help students to appreciate that the more they practice reading a passage, the more words they will be able to read in a minute. In a coaching session with a second-grade teacher, I suggested we try using Voice Typing in Google Documents to help students track how many words they read in a minute. I hoped that giving them the tools to track their words per minute might motivate them to stay focused on the task of reading a challenging passage."