Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Happy Tuesday, edtech fans! Yeah, I realize we're about 72 hours from having a TGIF moment, but the good news is you have three days left in the week to incorporate this super cool tool into classroom activities! So, here it is: The next time you need an engaging prewriting or postreading activity for your students, then be sure to check out the Cube Creator from ReadWriteThink, an interactive that provides students with a visual organizer to summarize information in one of the following categories:"

"If your school is planning to employ BYOD and is looking for some theoretical background about this trend then this comprehensive literature review is a must read. This review represents a reasonable and representative scan of the available literature on BYOD. The visual below is based on this literature review and sketches a general framework of what BYOD is all about, its models . reasons to use it and many more.This infographic is created by Pip Cleaves and the original version can be viewed from this link."

"Here is a good infographic that grabbed my attention today as I was leafing through Debra's creativity Pinterest Board. The visual features some interesting tips to help in brainstorming creative ideas. I have gone through these ideas and I think these could be a useful resource to use with students. When students are working on a writing task or a classroom project, these tips could probably help them generate some innovative ideas and boost their thinking process."

This is an amazing illustration of Sir Kenneth Robinson's presentation on schooling in the 21st century.  It's fascinating to watch an illustrator create a visual map of Robinson's ideas as they are spoken.  The content of the presentation is enormously important to any educator struggling to change the system.  It's even more important to those who've been subdued and mislead by old ideas into thinking they can't learn or create.

"As we usher in the start of a new school year, it's time to hit the ground running in your classes! Math can be pretty tough, but since it is the language in which scientists interpret the Universe, there's really no getting around learning it. Check out these gifs that will help you visualize some tricky aspects of math, so you can dominate your exams this year."

"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."

"Students and teachers alike continue to look for cool design tools to give any project that extra visual punch, and we continue to find great ones all over the Web. This post features 7 fairly unique free online creative image maker tools that are easy to learn and lots of fun to experiment with. Make things like motivational posters, memes, Keep Calm posters, Webcam pics, and so much more with these great image generators. Have fun trying them out and having students add creative flair to lesson projects of every kind."

"The students in Molly James's kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence - such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects. After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. "I had expected them to learn something about number composition," James said, "but I didn't expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs." For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors. James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that "creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician."  In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers."

"Getting started with Spark is easy for users of all ages. This is one reason that I love sharing with teachers and students. When I lead a professional development session or visit a classroom, everyone can jump in and create a dynamic, visually stunning artifacts of their learning. So if Spark is entirely new to you, it won't take long for you to dive into this user-friendly tool with your students! You can turn students into movie-makers, website creators, and graphic designers with the Spark tools. From book trailers in the English Language Arts classroom to lab reports in the science classroom, the possibilities are endless!"

"This course introduces computer science through the Python programming language. It is built on the feedback of thousands of educators and hundreds of thousands of students who have used it to learn computer science and apply it to everyday problems. The lessons are designed to be easy for beginners, and test your understanding through problems and visualizations. "

A great collection of interactive stories to use as mentor texts for more dynamic content.

"Nobody said that raising an adolescent was easy, and schooling one is even more of a challenge! Parents are taking on a lot of school responsibility, and let's face it -- things are different than they used to be. How are parents supposed to know how to handle the homework load without some guidance? Take studying, for example. If you are a parent of a struggling or resistant learner, you've probably heard more than one person suggest, "She just needs to study more." Most kids think this means filling in a study guide or rereading a chapter. But many don't learn by writing or reading. Their strengths lie in the visual, kinesthetic, musical, or social realm. How, then, are we to help our children develop their studying skills? The task does not have to be daunting. In fact, it can actually be simple and effective!"

"When you're the big fish, it's not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can. That's an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it's wrong to bully others. The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. "You felt like you were in that story," she said. "By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn't good, and why you shouldn't act this way." The puppeteer's show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students' compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students' scores on writing tests. It's just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn't at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research - which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. "Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes," write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri. The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools - which predominantly served low-income students of color - that expressed interest in participating in Houston's Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher."

"I've been exploring the new PuppetMaster app and I am enchanted. I see serious potential for this free, intuitive, open-ended tool to encourage creativity across a wide range of ages, from pre-school to adult! PuppetMaster allows children to animate anything and to record their action and sound to create movies. It encourages the creation of visual art in any medium and it encourages active storytelling and sharing. And the learning curve is tiny!"

"Pad has tons of awesome features that can help you make the best of this versatile tool in both your professional and personal life. In today's post we are sharing this collection of iPad tips we curated from Apple's Tips App for iPad. Our purpose is to provide you with a handy visual aide to use in class, in your office at home, or take anywhere you go. We have included what we think are important functionalities to boost your productivity and enhance your overall 'iPadding' experience. "

"ou've probably heard the latest brain research focused on cementing learning that says that drawing something can help a person better remember it. This works regardless of the age of the student or the content he/she is trying to master. And, good news for folks like me who can't draw a straight line, the benefits of drawing are not dependent on the students' level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well. So when we draw, we encode the memory in a very rich way, layering together the visual memory of the image, the kinesthetic memory of our hand drawing the image, and the semantic memory that is invoked when we engage in meaning-making. In combination, this greatly increases the likelihood that the concept being drawn will later be recalled. (Source: https://www.edutopia.org/article/science-drawing-and-memory)"

"In issue 2 of Hello World magazine we talk to Mitch Resnick about ten years of Scratch, the visual programming tool that revolutionised learning for an entire generation. We also offer practical advice and inspiration for education beyond the classroom, and much more…"

"Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets"