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"Let's Grow Together Through Creation, Collaboration and Celebration This year, at Discovery Education's Spring VirtCon, innovative educators will take the lead and run the agenda.  They will share classroom strategies around the creation of authentic work, methods of collaboration and the benefits of reflecting upon and celebrating our work."

"Math teacher Laura Kretschmar gave students a rubric with specific goals around collaboration, communication and instructions to use various functions in the program, but not a lot else. She's intentionally giving them a lot of freedom to play with the program, create cool designs and figure out what the functions do. "I think "y" means, like, going up," says Juritzy Maldonado. "So to pull it up, I'm going to try to change the number." She punches in 200 for "y" and watches the image she's creating shift upward. Another group discovers that if they hit "repeat" multiple times, they can create a parachute-like design that they've figured out how to color in various ways. That wasn't their original plan, but they're running with it now."

"Dougherty hopes that if students raise their voices, parents demonstrate support and passionate teachers are willing to champion the cause at individual school sites, maker spaces could become a fixture of school. They don't have to include the fanciest 3D printer, they just have to be spaces for exploration, hands-on learning and a playful attitude towards discovery."

wired

Nice video on using cell phone in class - polling

"If you're not familiar with the Ignite format you create 20 slides, and have exactly 15 seconds per slide to share your story. It's a five minute pressure cooker because if you get off on one slide it can mess you up for the rest of your presentation. Or not... :-) Unfortunately I don't think my ignite session was recorded but I will try to share it here. I will include the script I had written, but any one who was there will know that in the end I completely ignored my script. I'm hoping this script was close enough to what I shared on Wednesday night."

"Ultimately, one question always arises. "There's so many apps on the ipad - just how do you expect me to learn it all!!" Here's my quick answer: Don't! While it is important to attach deeper understanding to specific apps for specific purposes, sometimes the introduction can be offered within a framework of "discovery learning". For those of you who have access to an ipad cart or a group of iPads, here's an introductory process for both you and your class:"

"Songza is a music discovery service designed to play the perfect tune for whatever mood or activity you are doing. Think about Pandora and how it designs its stations based off of other artists and songs. Songza does the same thing, but bases its music off of activities such as "Relaxing at Home" or "Cooking." Let's find out more after the jump."

"The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model."

Ken Robinson's Discovery Conversation archive May 6, 2013

Ask any teacher what they wish they had more of and the most common answer is likely to be time. Schools are inherently busy places and there is always much to be done. We all want to meet the needs of every student, add value to their education with breadth and depth, ensure adequate coverage of the curriculum and include aspects of play and discovery. Add up all that is done in a day over and above face-to-face teaching and you can only wonder at how we manage to fit it all into the time we have. So is there an answer to this dilemma, is there a secret method to finding more time in our schedules to achieve all that we want to?

"It is common for people to group themselves into two categories; those who are good at art or design, and those who are good at math or science. The reason for this is that many people believe that the skills needed to be successful in creative services do not relate to the skills that are required to be successful in the analytical. Even though mathematics is in the list of the most difficult college classes, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Many design concepts, such as symmetry, have direct ties to mathematical concepts and discoveries. So, if you are an artist or a designer, there is a good chance that you are already incorporating math into your work, you just may not be doing it consciously. Here are some very specific ways that mathematics has not only influenced design but has acted as a true game changer."