Group items tagged

"Once I believed that libraries were places where people went for books and reference materials. Now I believe that libraries are learning opportunities that promote pathways for people to "search, connect, communicate and make." Please do not miss superintendent Pam Moran's post today about the possibilities of 21st c school libraries. Please share her vision with at least one other administrator."

"I have spent most of educational technology career supporting secondary students. Projects and Presentations are always a plenty… but what I noticed is typically students have great presentations and poor content or great content and poor presentations. "Rarely, are students able to deliver a compelling message in a visually stimulating and engaging way with purposeful use of media and graphics." - Lisa Johnson So… being Type A, a perfectionist, and someone that relies on visuals to communicate… I went a googling in order to create a comprehensive guide (and yes, I also staged a few Lego Minifigure pics in my back yard for emphasis too.)"

"If there is a better guide to establishing a school-based center for sparking creative student-based making than Laura Fleming's small book, I have not yet found it. In Worlds of Making, Fleming describes her own experiences as a school librarian transforming her library into a vibrant makerspace and offers practical advice for anyone wondering how she went about doing it. Or as she puts it, her book is designed to provide "the nuts and bolts of imagining, planning, creating and managing your own makerspace.""

"As part of my research for updating my Makerspace for The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, I went straight to a source that I knew had done a large amount of the work for me already: The Robot Test Kitchen. At RTK, a group of librarians have evaluated a wide variety of technology tools that are typically incorporated into library Makerspaces as part of an iLead project. I highly recommend looking through the side and reading each individual post. However, for my purposes I wanted to create a quick comparison chart to help guide conversation and my own decision making. I used in the information from RTK and put it into a quick reference spreadsheet."

"You probably are already working on your digital toolkit making it ready for the start of a new school year. Part of your preparation will definitely consist of making decision on the kind of web applications and mobil apps you will be incorporating in your teaching. This means that you need to have a fairly decent knowledge of educational web tools out there and the potentialities they can offer to your instruction. To this end and to help you make informed decisions about the technology to use in your class,  we went ahead and did some digging into our archive and curated this collection   comprising some of the best educational Chrome apps out there.  We hope you will find it useful. Enjoy"

"I fell in love with Periscope, the free live-streaming app created by Twitter, this summer while at ISTE.  Free, instant access to events happening around the world - finally!  The myriad of ways I could see implementing it in my classroom overwhelmed me in a good way.  Kids could periscope our class at any time to bring the world in.  Students could interact with other students around the world.  Students could have a real-time audience at any time we needed.  We could explore every day moments in cultures around the world.  On and on, the ideas went. Yet, when I thought about it some more, I started to second-guess my love for it a little bit.  I didn't fall out of love, but I did start to question my own ideas, as well as the professional responsibility that I carry not just as a teacher, but also as an active conference goer/speaker.  So what has made me slow down?"

"You live in the age of robots. A robot built your car, opened your garage door, and made the espresso that went into your double mocha. In large and small ways, robots are everywhere in our lives. The robots in my classroom amplify learning for my students. Robots are another tool in my high-engagement toolbox. I use the term high-engagement as a description and a warning. In my experience, high-engagement tools need to be matched with high-challenge learning. If we are using robots to support learning goals, the learning goals have to be robust and demanding. Without a carefully crafted learning context to support a demanding learning goal, students end up engaging the learning medium and just playing with robots."

"A recent Fox News article asking, "So are men iPads and women Nooks?" raised my hackles….especially when the piece went on to say, "Nooks are smaller, lighter, and fit in a purse more comfortably…Conversely, iPads are big and heavy and make [the] statement: I'm into tech." (Come on, are iPads really that heavy?) "

"Yesterday was my last class with my 2nd grade GT students. I like them to do some sort of reflection at the end of the year, and we usually spend a lot of time reviewing the events of the past 9 months. (Otherwise, their favorite memory tends to be the very last thing we did.) This year, I decided to try something different. I showed the students how to access the categories of our class blog so they could view all of the posts for 2nd grade for this year. Then they went through the posts, and chose pictures that were meaningful to them. As they were on iPads, I taught them how to hold their finger on an image to save it to the Camera Roll (fair warning - this is a tricky skill for 2nd graders). After about 30 minutes, I showed them the Pic Collage app. They were allowed to add any pictures that they wanted to their collages. Many added text (and stickers, of course!) They loved the activity. When they were finished, each student had a personal poster to remind him or her of the year in GT. If we had more time, we would have made ThingLinks with reflections, similar to last year."

"Last year I taught third-grade math in a whole new way. Combining elements from the wildly popular sandbox game Minecraft, I had students thinking visually and creatively about mathematical models and theories that went way beyond a typical third-grade curriculum, transforming math class into what I like to call Mathcraft. Why Minecraft? I could say I am using Minecraft for a number of reasons, like how I find Minecraft enhances metacognition by increasing students' memory storage capacity. The game itself creates a relatable enjoyable experience that can be internalized and shared in a community of learners. The limitations on the working memory are minimized because the gameplay itself is an extension of our visual sketchpad. Working with students they always say, "I can see it," and when they see it they share it."

"There is no secret recipe to enhance one's productivity. It all boils down to how much dedication and will power you have and are willing to invest in your work. But sometimes people do have the will power to be productive and achieve more  but they just can't put it down  to action. The distractions in their lives are too many to let them work as they want. This is where tips such as the ones cited in this visual come  in handy. They provide some useful hacks to set you in a productive mindset. I went through them and selected the ones I liked the most."

"I went home last week and did everything one normally does over the holidays: I got together with my family and, in the spirit of Christmas, grilled my teenage cousins about what apps they're using on their iPhones. They named two of the usual suspects, Snapchat and Instagram. They laughed in my face when I asked what they thought about Facebook. "It's for mums," one explained to me.  Insightful, but not out of the ordinary. Then my 13-year-old cousin asked me if I knew what AirDrop was. AirDrop is a feature on newer-model Apple devices. It uses WiFi and Bluetooth to let you transfer any kind of file - photos, videos, phone contacts, and even Map locations - from one person or device to another nearby."

"A few years back (Wow! We can't believe Edudemic has even been around that long!) we wrote about an awesome video that was recorded by a classroom of students and their iPads. The song was such a huge success that it went up for sale on iTunes! Considering that when I was a kid, music class included me banging randomly on a wooden block with a small mallet, I think it is fair to say that technology has brought music class a long, long way. Store Van Music embarked on a tour of schools in the UK and help the students create outstanding music using iPads and their minds."

"I received a couple of requests over the last few days to feature a post about tips for managing iPad classrooms. I know several of you, if not at the start of the school year then at least at some point during this school year will probably be drawing on iPad as a teaching resource to scaffold students learning. To this end, I went ahead and compiled this list hoping you will find it helpful. Enjoy "

"Our PYP evaluation went really well and it was gratifying to hear the evaluators' positive observations of our school. They talked about our dynamic learning spaces, the energy of our teachers and learners and the respect that is evident between staff and students. They were impressed by how articulate our students are and the openness of our teachers. It was clear to them that the entire school community has a deep understanding of the PYP philosophy and that we have a strong culture of learning. Almost all their recommendations are things on which we are either working already or have identified for action through the self study. There's only one thing I found jarring in their feedback and it relates to my beliefs about inquiry learning. They noted that neither students nor teachers seem able to identify what particular inquiry cycles we follow. They said the children to whom they spoke didn't seem to be aware of the specific 'stages' of inquiry and that most teachers couldn't articulate how an inquiry cycle directs our planning. To be honest, I'm glad."

"The rush to grit is pretty intense, but so is the push-back. I've been writing about grit in articles and a book (Fostering Grit) and giving lots of presentations on the subject. I've spoken to schools and parents; presented at conferences; and have been a guest on NPR. Universally, grit is embraced. Everyone sees the merit in teaching our kids to accept challenges, step out of their comfort zones, and know how to respond to failure. So far, so good. Grit is hanging in and never giving up, but it's more than that. Grit is being comfortable when you are outside of your comfort zone, and it's forging ahead when you hit the wall because you know that you'll get up and continue moving forward. Grit is a life skill! But sometimes teachers are uncomfortable with the notion of fostering or teaching for grit. They're uneasy with the role they must play and I get that. We went into education because we wanted to help students: we like it when they succeed and it gratifies us when our class is filled with smiles. When our kids do well, it tells us we've done a good job!"

"If you have sometime this weekend, you might want to check this list of TED talks on the human brain. The original list curated by TED contains only 9 talks but we also added our favourite talk which is that of Jill Bolte.   Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist and brain scientist,  who one morning woke up to a massive stroke that was gradually paralyzing some of her brain functions including speech, movement, and understanding. In her popular talk "Stroke of Insight", Jill shares her story of what she went through in the process of regaining her brain functions."

"When a U.S. psychology professor offered her students a bonus credit if they would silence and surrender their cellphones at the start of class, little did she know how rewarding the experiment would be. Sixty-one per cent of her students at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee "loved the activity," citing the improved environment for concentration, participation and even peacefulness when the phones went dumb. Of the 82 students, not a single one disliked the exercise."

"Today as I was wading through my bookmarks I came across this resource which I have saved awhile ago. This is a chart featuring what its author called 21 things every 21st century teacher should do this year. This chart is created by Sean Junkins based on a blog post by Carl Hooker. I went through the ideas suggested here and thought of providing you with some good web tools to apply to some of these ideas. The tools I am sharing are based on posts I have published in this blog. "

"Over the past couple of weeks I have shared two of Elise Gravel's wonderful non fiction children's books on disgusting critters. We have read The Slug and The Rat. After reading The Rat, and knowing that Elise is on twitter I asked my students if they wanted to tweet her and tell her what they thought about her book. To no surprise the answer was YES! Since I teach a combined grade one and two class I started by modelling how to tweet with the entire class. I ask my grade one students what they wanted to say to her and I typed their tweets as they spoke them. In the process I modelled how a tweet is written and what we needed to include in a tweet. With a few tweets sent, my grade two students were encouraged to tweet to her too while I worked with some of my grade one students. Of course, the rules never change, and I saw each tweet before it went live. Actually one tweet did sneak out without my eyes but it was quickly brought to my attention. This tweeting provided my students an authentic opportunity for writing. "