Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Gen i Revolution is an online game designed to help middle school and high school students develop and test their knowledge of concepts in personal finance. Gen i Revolution contains fifteen "missions" in which students have to select "operatives" to assist them. Each mission is designed to help someone make better personal financial decisions. Some of the mission topics include credit, budgeting, and investing for the future. "

"At Branson Junior High, our amazing team of teachers and principals, along with the encouraging support of our school district superintendents to be innovative with a purpose, are on a journey to personalize learning for every child. We are starting small, but dreaming big and have already experienced some momentous transformations in our school culture. At this school year's kick-off orientation event for parents and learners, we built on the familiar analogy of a go-kart track to communicate the vision of personalized learning at BJH (Branson, MO is a big tourist destination in mid-America). Most junior high/middle school aged kids would be excited to hear their parents say they were going to the go-kart track for a night out of family fun. However, if when they arrived at the track the parent asked the attendant for a two-seater go-kart and then directed their son/daughter to climb in the passenger seat, the child's excitement level would immediately deflate. You can easily picture in your mind's eye the typical response a child would have to their parent's action: "I thought we were here to have fun?! Can't we each have our own go-kart to drive?" Likewise, if we desire fully engaged and responsible learners, then we must provide them the opportunities to drive their own go-kart. Just like a go-kart track, we set-up safe boundaries, provide some initial guidance, but then let the learner buckle-up and drive!"

"The start of a new school year is a great time to think about long-term plans for the upcoming year, but also the plans we need to make for our students for years to come. Each day there are news alerts on topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, digital citizenship and literacy and their relation to education. These are the trends and terms that are already a part of our world and will become an increasing part of our future. Beyond these technology-themed trends, we're learning more about social-emotional learning (SEL), mental health awareness, mindfulness and trauma-informed teaching. These are important issues and educators must stay informed on best practices and ways to make these 'themes' part of our daily practice. As educators today, it's no longer about simply planning instruction with our students in mind. We also have to consider how changing technology trends and important societal issues will impact our students both now and beyond high school. How can we best prepare them to not only find success for themselves but also make an impact on others? So the pressure is on, to really consider how we can best prepare students not just for this school year, not just for life after high school graduation, but well beyond. We need to prepare our students for the year 2030 and the future. But how?"

"iTooch Junior High School, by edupad Inc., is not only a state of the art and completely comprehensive educational app, it is exciting, effective and enormously fun! iTooch Junior High School has more than 10,000 exercises in ELA (reading, writing vocabulary, grammar) and Math (properties and operations, graphs, algebra, geometry, statistics and probability, and data analysis) and Health - Grade Six."

"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

"Google's policy of 20 percent time-giving employees plenty of free time work on whatever they want-is world famous for being the birthplace of innovative products- most famously, Gmail. But what would happen if schools gave students a similar amount of unstructured free time and allowed them to take control of their own learning? This spring Matthew Bebbington, a high school physical education teacher in the U.K., decided to find out. He organized a school-wide "Innovation Day" that let 80 students between the ages of 11-15 choose what and how to learn. B"

"The Palm Beach School System has an incredible wiki where members of the community share their favorite apps for specific disciplines. Below I've embedded their list for the top elementary school apps but they also have a curated list of apps for middle school and high school."

"Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist. To become a chef, a lawyer, a philosopher or an engineer, has always been a matter of learning what these professionals do, how and why they do it, and some set of general facts that more or less describe our societies and our selves. We pass from kindergarten through twelfth grade, from high school to college, from college to graduate and professional schools, ending our education at some predetermined stage to become the chef, or the engineer, equipped with a fair understanding of what being a chef, or an engineer, actually is and will be for a long time. We "learn," and after this we "do." We go to school and then we go to work. This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover."

"My school district is making history this month as we roll out an iPad to every high school student in our district. I've been told that this is the largest iPad deployment to date for Apple. "

"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")."

"If you visit Lighthouse Community Charter classrooms this fall, you'll see kindergarteners using power tools, second graders doing logo programming, third graders building circuit blocks, sixth graders programming microcontrollers to respond to sensor inputs, eighth graders using hot-glue guns, and high school students building chairs, building and programming robots, and using a laser to cut out pieces of wood for prototypes. As we look across our school, we're pretty excited by two things. First, we're pleased to see making (broadly defined as using your hands, heart, and mind to create or improve things) happening as part of our students' core classroom experiences. And second, we're thrilled that our students - poor, urban students of color - have access to making, especially because our educational system so often provides them with experiences filled with seat time and back-to-basics instruction. Lighthouse operates two high-performing, K-12 public schools in Oakland: our flagship campus, Lighthouse, and our brand new campus, Lodestar (to open in East Oakland in the fall of 2016). Our mission is to prepare a diverse, K-12 student population for college and the career of their choice by equipping each student with the skills, knowledge, and tools to become a self-motivated, competent, lifelong learner."

"Walk into our school library and you're bound to see scores of iPads propped up on the tables. Our students at Westlake High, a large suburban school on the outskirts of Austin, TX, are using them to read ebooks, download assignments, edit videos, write blog posts, and to do much more. Since we rolled out our 1:1 iPad program a year ago, more than 4,100 teachers and students, including eighth graders at the nearby middle school and even some of our elementary school classes, have taken advantage of these devices. In fact, they've become as much a part of students' everyday lives as their notebooks, backpacks, and textbooks."

"School has started for most of us around the country. Alarm clocks are set, bleary-eyed kids stumble their way to class, and iPads are being handed out. Just a typical day here at Eanes and many districts across the country. As the amount of 1:1 schools and districts continue to grow with many different devices, but specifically the Apple iPad, I thought it might be good to reflect and share the laundry list of items we've prepared in getting ready for our roll-outs. (all high school students, 8th graders, and 2 grade levels at the elementary schools are 1:1 this year) I've already written about 10 things NOT to do in a 1:1 here (the list is growing in year 2) but what about things we SHOULD do?"

"If science is inquiry and inquiry is a fire, when does that fire start? When the world talks about STEM education for the most part they talk around elementary teachers rather than to elementary school teachers. This should not be seen as an insult or slur upon our value, but as a matter of course. Most "real" science does not start until middle school or even high school, and for school in poverty perhaps not even then. However, with the need to develop more students ready to step into STEM careers, and the corresponding efforts to grow educational foundations in those area elementary science will play a pivotal role."

""Have you seen this video?" The Twitter message from my good friend and fellow thought-instigator Daniel Scibienski pointed me toward If You Build It, a recent PBS documentary about designer/educator/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller persuading an underfunded school board to create a new kind of design-based program for the students at Windsor High School in Bertie County, North Carolina. What I saw affected me profoundly: students, confused and reluctant at first, gradually developing skills and abilities with tools they'd never used before, designing and building increasingly complex things; failing, trying again, improving, collaborating, and ultimately succeeding and celebrating. I, too, have a vision for a new kind of classroom. I, too, am building something radical, exciting, and even revolutionary. I want to tap the power of design thinking to transform learning in my classroom. We're bringing shop class back to my middle school -- but this time, it's digital."

"So how should educators handle the death of a student's loved one? A new website - GrievingStudents.org - is trying to help teachers and school leaders answer that question. It's a database of fact sheets, advice and videos. The materials were produced by the Coalition to Support Grieving Students, a group including 10 national organizations that represent teachers, school administrators and support staff. Using census data, the group estimates that 1 in 20 children will lose a parent by the time he or she graduates from high school. And that doesn't include the many more kids who will lose a sibling, grandparent or close friend. Grief is a fact of life in our nation's schools; 7 out of 10 teachers have a student currently in their classroom who is grieving, according to research by the New York Life Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers."

"CK-12 has long offered tutorials and practice exercises for middle school and high school science and math students. Today, CK-12 unveiled a new collection for resources for elementary school mathematics. The collection is organized by grade level (grades 1 through 5) and skill. The resources are a mix of videos and online practice exercises."