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"George Takei knows how to tell a great story. In this case, a true story of his life. The famed Star Trek actor, activist, and social media star was in town recently to give a remarkable talk as part of a very special TEDxKyoto event. I was invited to watch the rehearsal just before the live event, so I arrived early and grabbed a front row seat. George did not give a speech in the traditional sense. There was no lectern, no notes, no teleprompter. George obviously was reciting the speech from memory-his live version was exactly the same as in the rehearsal-but the speech did not seem memorized. That is, when I was listening I was not aware that he was giving a speech or a prepared talk, I was just lost in the narrative flow of his story."

"Last week, I spoke at a TEDx event hosted by the Upper Perkiomen School District. It was an unforgettable experience and I was honored to be a part of it. Once the video is edited, I'll share my talk on this blog. So, one of the things I loved about the event was the STEM-related, maker projects they showcased. Students demonstrated their apps and games they had created. We got the chance to tour a design space with 3D printers, CNC routers, and, more importantly, a group of empowered students who were owning the creative process. I found myself gushing about this space -- about how cool it was to see kids going through the design process actually testing out prototypes. I remember, at one point, saying to a student volunteer, "Don't you wish more of school was like this?" He shook his head. "Not really. It's not really my thing." "But you get to make stuff." "I get to make stuff all the time. Have you ever been a part of a theater production?" he asked. "It's called a production for a reason.""

"Perfect Storm: an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically.  The term is also used to describe an actual phenomenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude. "

"I often wonder if what we see as teaching at professional learning events would be acceptable in a high school classroom. If the purpose of professional development (Pro-D) is professional learning, then what is our evidence that learning does, in fact, occur? Are we using effective teaching practices in Pro-D? Although Pro-D is evolving, the "Sit'n'Git" way of learning seems to still be alive and well in many conferences and workshops throughout Canada and the U.S. In the past five years, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat in a large conference room for a number of hours with hundreds of other dedicated educators and not been provided with the opportunity to even talk to the person beside me. People are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to attend these events to listen to a series of lengthy lectures without the opportunity to network and wrestle with the presented ideas. I'm not opposed to a keynote address to start off the day with some inspiring, thought-provoking ideas; however, if there is no opportunity to take these ideas and move deeper, many of the thoughts that are initiated in the keynote get lost as I move on to the next session or listen to the next presenter. It's no secret that in order for deeper learning to occur, we must DO something with a new concept; we must apply new learning to take it from an idea to implementation. Our current typical model of Pro-D makes deeper learning a challenge and often only leaves participants with a few ideas that are unfortunately left on the shelf with the many glossy white binders from workshops of years past. At some point we need to stand up and say that a high volume of "Sit'n'Git" style of Pro-D is no longer acceptable and is an insult to those who have spent money, time, and effort to attend. While doing this, we also need to rethink the conference model and professional learning so that it better aligns with what we want to see in classrooms."

"f you're planning to give project-based learning a try during the coming school year, you may hope a spark of inspiration will strike during the summer months that will lead to a memorable PBL experience. And maybe that's just the excuse that hard-working teachers need to take a hike or daydream by a pool. But here's another surefire strategy for PBL planning: borrow project ideas from your colleagues and adapt or remix to fit your context. Here are ten project ideas that I've gathered from a busy season of summer conferences and professional development events (including ISTE 2015 and PBL World, an annual event hosted by the Buck Institute for Education). By sharing their thinking at this early draft stage, teachers invite feedback from peers. That's another strategy for effective project planning. (Most project ideas were shared anonymously and some are mashups of similar suggestions. Thanks to the creative teachers behind these PBL plans.)"

"For their first ever event, TEDxYouth@Austin, a TEDx event organized entirely by high school students and mentors, asked Hackidemia to collaborate with a group of students to design an interactive play space for their 800 attendees. Over the course of a week, the students planned, prototyped, and built a room you can play like an instrument."

"For their first ever event, TEDxYouth@Austin asked Hackidemia to collaborate with a group of students to design an interactive play space. Over the course of a week, the students planned, prototyped, and built a room you can play like an instrument. Thanks to the students and TEDxYouth@Austin for an amazing event and experience."

Move the gold Life Span Bar at the bottom to navigate through social, political and cultural events. Rollover a circle, triangle or square to get event details. Click on these shapes to find out more.

Archival Collection: The March of Time® From 1935 to 1967, Time Inc's newsreel series, "The March of Time®" chronicled the events of our lives. The March of Time® separated itself from its competitors using its trademark "pictorial journalism," mixing highly-produced, long-form, documentary-style stories with dramatic re-enactments. These award-winning motion pictures recorded global events and brought them to big screens around the world and then later, television. The collection also contains historic footage dating back to 1913.

"In celebration of Media Awareness Week (November 2-6, 2009) we are encouraging students, teachers, and the general public to create videos, digital stories, text, images or any digital media that showcases the different ways they are Media Literate. To get things started, we have created a video that is hosted here on our YouTube Channel (also located at http://drop.io/medialiteracyvideo). Watch the video and then we encourage you to create your own short digital representation of media literacy. Anyone can then upload their video responses or link to any digital artifact you create here in the comments to this video. Celebrating and Sharing: Teachers and students are encouraged to take part in this exposition of student media literacy, we encourage you to promote your activities with local media outlets and draw attention to the critical importance of developing media literacy in the digital age. We hope you choose to participate in this exciting event with your students. You may attend the Media Literacy evening in person on Monday, November 2, 2009, from 7:00 - 8:30 PM CST at the St. James-Assiniboia School Division's Professional Staff Development Centre (PSDC) - 150 Moray Street (access off of Portage Avenue) or via our uStream channel (http://www.ustream.tv/lwict) where everything will be archived. If you have any questions regarding any aspect of this event, leave us a comment here. Category: Education Tags: lstu manace literacy medialiteracy mediaawarenessweek media education lwict "

"Samantha Shires, a middle-school social studies teacher in Guilford County, North Carolina, wants her students to understand that history doesn't unfold in a series of unrelated events. "History is messy and chaotic," she says. "Students need to see how events are connected and interrelated." ChronoZoom, a free tool developed by Microsoft Research and an international team of collaborators, is helping her students visually explore the history of, well, just about everything, from the Big Bang right up to the present day."

"This week's pick is Animoto Video Maker, a great little app for turning your iPad and iOS photos into polished and pro looking videos in just a few minutes. Animoto is easy to use so you can produce a short video to share with family and friends very quickly. I've used it often to send a video link to family members who couldn't make it to an event within minutes of the event ending."

"This Saturday and Sunday, TEDx communities across the globe will be celebrating TEDxYouthDay, a weekend of TEDx events dedicated to the ingenuity of kids worldwide. Every year we're taken aback by the amazing things that come out of these events, and to celebrate, we're featuring some of our favorite TEDx Talks from young people. Below, three great TEDx Talks from kids you have to watch."

Handing Assessment Over to Students I have been giving a lot of thought about how to give my students more of a voice in their learning and in our classroom. Initially, I was focused on increasing their presence on our classroom blog through podcasts, videos, and blog posts. I even gave thought to asking my district IT to unblock Twitter so that we could create a class account (which I am still going to do). But never would assessment have crossed my mind. Fortunately, I took my thoughts to my PLN. Janine Campbell (@campbellartsoup) responded to my tweet about amplifying students' voices with rich insights and a couple articles that got the cerebral wheels turning. If you like what you read here, be sure to follow Janine on Twitter. Assessment for learning is a pedagogical golden nugget. No one ever said that the teacher had to do it alone. Why not give your students a voice in how they are assessed? It might tell you more about where they are at than assessing your class conventionally. Rubrics are my favorite way to assess student projects. I'm even pretty good at creating them. By doing so, I completely understand the assignment and learning outcomes for any given project. But do my students? Is there a way to better utilize rubrics as assessment of learning where students' voices are intensified. Yes! Allowing students to create the criteria for assessment does just that. It doesn't just serve the purpose of better summative assessment. Student-created rubrics also provides a medium for formative assessment as well. If my assignment is for students to analyze the effects of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on post-war America, I will be able to formatively assess the class' understanding of the main points of this event by the criteria that they suggest this assignment should be graded on. I will know that I need to reteach aspects of this event in American history if students believe that including a description of John Wilkes Booth's escape from Ford's The

"The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can organize an Hour of Code event. One-hour tutorials are available in over 30 languages. No experience needed. Ages 4 to 104."

"Motivating and engaging students is the goal of most teachers-priming them to receive instruction, or otherwise align themselves to a pre-set process you've sketched out that you hope will yield a learning goal you selected beforehand. But I've also been thinking recently of how learning actually happens-the causes of learning. Learning events, maybe. Eh. So I came up with 60 (of millions) of these "learning events" (for lack of a better term)-circumstances in which students seem to learn effortlessly. They can learn when they are coerced-to start, to increase the pace, to finish, to revisit. But what kind of conditions or contexts promote effortless learning? Learning when they don't even know it's happening? When they're (essentially) tricked into deep understanding?"

"Another cardboard activity along the side of the Large scale & Small scale stop motion animations in the event of Infinite Versatility of Cardboard was Making Cardboard Costumes. This time, we set up our favorite "Tinkering photo frame" for people to capture their cardboard costumes, and to take this photo booth experience online, we also set up a hashtag #cardboardtinkering and used a social media wall "Walls.io" so that we could collect all the pictures with the hashtag and display them as a live-updating photo album on the large monitor during the event."

"In this half-hour presentation at Education Week's Leaders To Learn From event in Washington, Aileen Owens, director of technology and innovation for Pennsylvania's South Fayette school district, describes her efforts around cultivating students' "computational thinking." At the event, Owens was recognized as an exceptional school district leader for her leadership in innovation in curriculum. Since being hired at South Fayette in 2010, Owens' passion has been on cultivating students' "computational thinking." That includes coding. But the real emphasis is on helping students learn to problem-solve; to think algorithmically, in step-by-step sequences; to debug and revise; and to work with abstract concepts."

"This site is intended for home learning use during our extended spring break... or anytime! I've collected some of my favourite sites, YouTube channels, and special events here for you. In this time of uncertainty, it is so amazing to see all of the individual teachers, artists, musicians, and authors as well as some of the big educational companies come together to offer free, fun activities and learning opportunities for kids and families to do at home. I hope you take some time to visit the links, and have some fun together. I know I will be visiting them with my own children! I will update this site as new events are scheduled and as I find more to share! "