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"If interdisciplinary project-based learning is a goal for you and your students this school year, you might want to start with questions that put a premium on place. For example: Where are bicycle accidents most likely to happen in your community? Where's the best spot to watch for migrating Monarch butterflies? What's the safest evacuation route in the event of a natural disaster? How have the neighborhoods of New Orleans changed after Hurricane Katrina? To investigate such questions, students would need to gather and analyze data, look for patterns, think critically, and communicate their understanding with maps and other visual aids. In the process, they would also make connections across content areas and deepen their geo-literacy skills."

"This big, printable list of assessment strategies will help you identify new ways to check for understanding and verify what students have learned. Read more about these strategies in the associated post: ""

"To establish how we can maximize the impact of the iPad as a learning tool, we first have to establish what kind of impact we'd hope to have. In this case, we'll settle on understanding (as troublesome a term as that might be): Students being able to think critically about chosen standards or curriculum, and apply understanding in diverse, academic and non-academic environments. With that as the goal, here are some ideas."

We are the stories that we tell and it is the stories we share which unite us. This was the seed of an idea planted by a day with author, artist, musician and story teller Boori Pryor. Understanding the power that our stories have allows us to better value their role in our lives, to see them as more than recounts of the past or imaginings of the future. Stories should be viewed as the powerful agents that they are with the force to shape who we are as much as we shape them.

What are the mindful habits of successful learners and how can an understanding of these habits help us better achieve our learning goals? This is the question Art Costa Bena Kallick set out to answer with their study of the Habits of Mind. In 'Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind' Costa and Kallick identify sixteen habits which when utilised promote deeper understanding, unlock creativity, encourage reflective thinking and scaffold problem solving for individuals and groups. 

"One of the questions we're asked most often is "what is a Global Digital Citizen?" Being a Global Digital Citizen is about more than just being a citizen of Earth. These are leaders, learners, and creators. It's a way of living well in a world that's changing fast, and showing others how to do the same. Carl Sagan once defined an ideal citizenry as people "with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works." Global Digital Citizens are concerned with connection and contribution. They know our technology plays a part in a much larger communal picture. With all this in mind, welcome to your definitive guide to understanding the Global Digital Citizen. First our definition, and then our explanations."

"You may have noticed the conversation about ed tech vs tech ed and the confusion about what each is or if there is even a difference. This is understandable. The International Society for "Technology Education" calls themselves the largest teacher-based organization in the field of "educational technology." Wait? They're the society for "tech ed" but they are an "ed tech" organization with "ed tech" standards. Confusing! The Innovative Educator is here to help you understand, as well as determine where you fit in this whole picture.  To follow is your handy dandy guide."

"This week I'd like to talk about a topic that has been a focus in my role as an Instructional Coach this past year - that of mathematical thinking, reasoning and proving. I supported teachers in my schools in these areas and it has been great to see students develop and demonstrate their mathematical thinking, aligned with learning goals and success criteria. When students reason and prove in mathematics, they are explaining their thinking and providing the evidence in a systematic manner using a variety of representations. Many times, it is difficult to understand what a student is showing in his/her work. Before I provide some suggestions, we need to understand what reasoning actually is; what is reasoning?"

"I spend much more time and much more effort learning how to understand the people around me than I do code, systems, architectures, and technologies. I'm not an expert or even remarkable at it, but I work on it consciously and consistently. The it I'm describing here is called "empathy": the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner-Merriam Webster"

"One way to depict the cycle of education is that it moves between the development of learning and the subsequent expression of understanding ... and the amazing growth of inexpensive mobile technology tools is affording learners the ability to communicate their understanding in ever more creative and personalized manners. Media is moving center stage (yes, the pun was fully intended) and what once required tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and training can now be accomplished with an iPad and some inexpensive props."

"Even if your students are never going to become professional app developers, learning the fundamentals of programming can be helpful in understanding how software works. Learning programming basics also helps students develop a better understanding of "if, then" logic which can be applied to a wide variety of academic areas. Here are five iPad apps that can help students learn some programming basics."

"Bloom's Taxonomy can be a powerful tool to transform teaching and learning. By design, it focuses attention away from content and instruction, and instead emphasizes the "cognitive events" in the mind of a child. And this is no small change. For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they'll prove they understand them. This stands in contrast to the characteristics of the early 21st century, which include persistent connectivity, dynamic media forms, information-rich (digital and non-digital) environments, and an emphasis on visibility for pretty much everything. What does this mean for how you use Bloom's Taxonomy in your classroom? What kinds of adjustments should you make-if any-in light of these shifts in the 21st century?"

"The role of empathy in learning has to do with the flow of both information and creativity. A dialogic interaction with the world around us requires us to understand ourselves by understanding the needs and condition of those around us. It also encourages us to take collective measurements rather than those singular, forcing us into an intellectual interdependence that catalyzes other subtle but powerful tools of learning."

"Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services2 rocket_science Rocket Science 101 is a free iPad app offered by NASA. The app is designed to help students understand how rockets work and understand the differences between the four types of rockets most frequently used by NASA. In Rocket Science 101 students can build all four rockets in a jigsaw-like activity then virtually launch their rockets. When the rockets are launched students see the timing of each stage of the launch from surface to orbit."

"One of the stumbling blocks facing students learning math is the complex math terminology . Not understanding a set of math terms for a homework will eventually result in student not being able to do the homework. That's why having a handy math dictionary around can make all the difference in math learning. I have compiled for you some useful math glossaries that you can share with your students to help them understand the math lingo."

"You see it everywhere in K-12. Kindergarteners design toys for their friends to practice empathy, while learning to use a saw and glue-gun along the way. Second graders deepen their understanding of character traits while designing and sewing puppets to represent a character in a folk-tale. In high school physics, students make wind turbines in order to internalize an understanding of how magnetism can create electricity. The "it" I'm referring to is "Making," and simply put, Making is any activity where people create something, often with their hands."

"While not every student might want to write their own software, understanding the big ideas of coding is a skill that all students would benefit from, even the very young ones. Understanding the key ideas of computational thinking - identifying patterns, thinking algorithmically, manipulating data, solving real problems, etc - is an important step in helping our students build mastery over their world. This presentation aims to take you on a guided tour through some of the resources available to your students to help them learn the principles of creating code. It starts by looking at a range of desktop and mobile apps suitable for teaching very young students to program, right through to tools and websites that can help your older students learn to hack code, and much more."

"To establish how we can maximize the impact of the iPad as a learning tool, we first have to establish what kind of impact we'd hope to have. In this case, we'll settle on understanding (as troublesome a term as that might be): Students being able to think critically about chosen standards or curriculum, and apply understanding in diverse, academic and non-academic environments. With that as the goal, here are some ideas."

"Understanding HOW to learn is critical. But learning WHEN to learn is just as important. We talk a lot about the best ways to learn, the best tools for the job, and more. But what about identifying the best times to learn? I'm not talking about 'during school hours' or 'between 5pm and 7pm' or something. I'm talking about understanding a term that is slowly rising in popularity in the education and technology realm: the five moments of needs."

" When you fail, what is your thought process? Do you feel like you let yourself down because you didn't have innate ability? Instead, do you feel like you just haven't learned enough yet? Based on your answers, you might be able to easily distinguish between having a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. This is a critical thing to understand for anyone looking to better understand how they learn and how they let themselves learn."