"he Khan Academy is an online non-profit organization whose goal is to provide a "free world-class education to anyone anywhere." Think of it as TED for everyone, except Khan's videos, resources, and lesson plans can actually help you be one of the TED speakers one day. Currently the Khan Academy is only accessible through a browser, but, John Resig, Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at the non-profit, has shown off a few alpha screenshots of the upcoming Khan Academy iPad app, and it looks awesome"
"If you're interested in building your own website, or developing a web app or service for others to use, you'll need to get familiar with how the web works and the tools you'll need to develop for it. Mozilla's Webmaker project can help you learn, with fun, interactive activities and lesson plans designed for people of all skill levels. "
"Genius Hour in the classroom is an approach to learning built around student curiosity, self-directed learning, and passion-based work.
In traditional learning, teachers map out academic standards, and plan units and lessons based around those standards. In Genius Hour, students are in control, choosing what they study, how they study it, and what they do, produce, or create as a result. As a learning model, it promotes inquiry, research, creativity, and self-directed learning."
"Ready-made lesson plans about digital citizenship can serve as the perfect launchpad for discussing this topic in class. The following resources have what you need to help you organize your thoughts and present digital citizenship in an appealing way:"
"Happy New Year! I'm beginning a bunch of curriculum design work in districts this year, and I thought I'd share a few things that are emerging from the process. As I explained before the holidays, the teachers that I know are eager to get their hands on simple but powerful units for primary writers. They have little time to unpack lengthy documents, and while many appreciate the sort of tight guidance that fully articulated plans provide, others prefer to craft their own while aligning to agreed upon targets.
This first unit engages K-2 writers in research and information writing. You'll find the overview, calendar, and very first lesson in the document below. I'll be adding another each day until the entire unit is complete."
"ReadWorks is a free service that I have been recommending for about a year now. It provides teachers with hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. Recently, ReadWorks expanded again. The latest expansion includes poems and question sets. The collection is organized by grade level. In the collection you will find poems by Frost, Dickinson, Stevenson, and other notable poets. "
"And as I looked at you there wearing all that worry under all that strain, I said it's about being there for your kids. Because at the end of the day, most students won't remember what amazing lesson plans you've created. They won't remember how organized your bulletin boards are. How straight and neat are the desk rows.
No, they'll not remember that amazing decor you've designed.
But they will remember you."
"To help fill this gap in K-12 STEM education, Harvey Mudd created its first MOOC for middle and high school teachers. Middle Years Computer Science (MyCS) walks a teacher through the lesson plans, activities and exercises of a curriculum developed to appeal to students with a broad range of interests and no prior CS experience. Schools that have been using it have found it to be easy to use, accessible and engaging for their students.
Our second MOOC offering, How Stuff Moves, supports students in their first course in calculus-based physics, a fundamental building block to further physics study in college. The course provides lectures, demonstrations, problem sets, worked solutions to every practice problem and concept tests- a wealth of resources to help students master the material, whether they are considering taking a high school AP physics course or their first mechanics course in college."
"For the past few years, Edudemic has covered the rise of the flipped classroom and its subsequent evolution. Each year, we find that more teachers are testing this new learning strategy and creating new ways to improve current methods.
While some teachers are trying it out for the first time this fall, others who used the flipped classroom method in 2013 are making changes to build on their lesson plans for the 2014-15 school year. Read this brief guide to learn why flipped learning is an increasingly popular choice, and review a few steps for teachers wanting to try it ou"
"During the month of June, I took a hiatus from blogging so that I could do some fun things and perform professional development. The fun things were:
Watching my daughter graduate PreK.
Watching her win the "Symphony" award. :)
Taking both my girls to great places like the beaches and zoos.
The professional development opportunities included:
Finishing my free resource iBook titled Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with One or more iPads! This book is the second in my Help! Series. These free resource iBooks are books for elementary music educators to use to assist them with integrating technology into their classrooms or teaching situations as well as access to numerous lesson plans. My first book was Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with a SMART Board!
This new book compliments two courses that I am teaching in the next few weeks."
"No matter what subject they teach or what age group their students fall into, all teachers face the same basic challenge: They have to find a way to actively engage students in the learning process. Today's learners tend to respond best to interactive teaching methods, so many instructors have integrated technology into their lesson plans. Here are five ways to engage students in your classroom."
"Computer Science Custom Search is a great place to identify activities for your classroom. You can search on any combination of terms, such as by grade level (e.g. "middle school", "high school"), the type of material (e.g. "lesson plan", "tutorials"), or the computer science topic (e.g. "variables", "loops")."
"Are you looking for ways to integration technology in your lesson plans and courses that provide for an engaging experience for you and your students? Fans of instructional technology know that it can be fun and inviting, and engaged students are far more likely to be learning.
I believe that if you can get students involved and motivated effectively enough, you can improve their learning habits over the long term.
With that in mind, here are 10 highly engaging uses of technology in the classroom, along with dozens of tools and resources for implementation. Most of these involve free web based tools, so that's an added bonus!"
"Want to strike up a conversation with your younger relatives this Thanksgiving? Ask them about Minecraft.
If they don't play themselves, they'll know friends who do. And maybe, just maybe, they're even using it in the classroom.
More and more teachers are finding ways to integrate game play into their lesson plans. Using an educational and security-friendly version of the popular building game, called Minecraft EDU, teachers are engaging their students in social studies, language arts and engineering. "
"The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reports that children spend an average of seven hours a day consuming various types of media. This data illustrates that society's voracious appetite for media makes media literacy more important than ever.
How can you teach your students to interact responsibly with the media? The following resources can help you plan thought-provoking lessons on the subject."
"Having taught PE using iPad since it first came out in 2010 I have seen it grow rapidly as a tool to support teaching and learning.
Having purchased one for personal use I could straight away see the opportunities it lent for me as a teacher with no fixed classroom. All of a sudden I had access to information wherever I was round the school. iPad 1 had its limitations though, namely the lack of a camera, but even without this it allowed me to make notes on learning, share videos with students about model technique and numerous other things to support my teaching, even simply planning and evaluating lessons on the go.
Then came iPad 2 and the camera. This changed everything and I knew straight away that this was the way forward for the whole of the department."
"Mobile devices as teaching tools are becoming a more and more common part of the American education experience in classrooms, from preschool through graduate school. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 58% of U.S. teachers own smartphones - 10 percentage points higher than the national average for adults. Those teachers are building that tech-savviness into their lesson plans, too, by embracing bring-your-own-device policies and leading the push for an iPad for every student. In 2013, an estimated 25% of U.S. schools had BYOD policies in place and it's reasonable to assume those numbers have risen in the past two years.
What do these mobile devices really add, though? Is there more to this tech trend than just grabbing the attention of students? Is mobile technology boosting classroom instruction, or is it all just a flashy way to accomplish the same things as analog instruction?"