Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Caine Monroy became famous for his creativity at the age of nine, but the 14-year-old high school freshman has never stopped learning and imagining. Imagination is how he created Caine's arcade, arcade-style games made out of his cardboard nestled in a corner of his father's auto parts shop in Boyle Heights. Five years ago, Nirvan Mullick became the first Caine's Arcade customer. The filmmaker put together a flash mob to get more people through the door. NBC4 was there. We were one of the first to chat with the then 9-year-old Caine just as the viral moment turned into a movement."

"Flash forward eight years and the classrooms look very different in my same school district. In the two years since my district began our 1:1 laptop initiative our classrooms have evolved once more. New technology, new standards, and new content. Throughout this process I have tried my best to stay on top of where education is headed and what are the emerging "next" practices. Now when I talk to teachers in my district and around the country, I try to focus on the key elements of innovative teaching. With technology, standards, and content continually changing…these "innovative commandments" give teachers a starting point regardless of their situation."

"To be completely clear, taking a screenshot in iOS 10 is the same as it was before: just press the Home button and Power button concurrently, the screen will flash, and the screenshot is captured and stored in the Photos app. So why does it appear different for some users in iOS 10? This is where the minor behavior adjustment matters."

"Erika Christakis' new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, ditch the tired craft projects (yes, you, Thanksgiving Handprint Turkey) and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word: NPR ED Why Kindergarten Is The New First Grade Play. That's because, she writes, "the distinction between early education and official school seems to be disappearing." If kindergarten is the new first grade, Christakis argues, preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten. And that is "a real threat to our society's future.""

"Last week I wrote a post about AlfaTyping which is a good site for creating and managing online typing courses for your students. Since I published that post I have received a couple of requests for other online typing instruction and practice sites. Here are some of the others that I've tried over the years. I have tried to exclude Flash-based games from the list."

"Inspired by the short film, 'Caine's Arcade,' the Global Cardboard Challenge is an annual event presented by the Imagination Foundation that celebrates child creativity and the role communities can play in fostering it. This September, kids of all ages are invited to build anything they can dream up using cardboard, recycled materials and imagination. Then on Saturday, October 10th, 2015, a day that commemorates the flash mob that made Caine's day in the short film, communities come together and play!"

"As someone who primarily taught math and science when I was a classroom teacher, I associated robots, robotics curriculum, and robot apps as things that were only used in those subjects. However, this past year my school received a robot grant that provided ten robots for us from the company Sphero. Sphero emphasizes the power of play in education and has a variety of lessons that are aligned to the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards on their website. They also have a number of STEM challenges  in the form pre-designed engineering projects designed for collaborative group work with students and are helpful for teachers using the robots in their classes. Sphero is a robotic ball that can pair with an iPad, tablet, iPhone, or smartphone through Bluetooth, and getting started is relatively easy. Once you are ready to use Sphero, you take it off the charger stand and give it a "tap-tap" to "wake it up." When the robot wakes up, it starts to flash three different colors until it pairs with the device you are using it with via Bluetooth. Once it turns blue, then you know that it is paired and ready to go. There are at least 14 different education related apps that are available with Sphero: some of them use augmented reality technology, some of them teach the basics of coding, while others allow students to draw on a tablet to manipulate the color and movement of the robot. During the last week of June, I did a presentation at the ISTE conference with many other educators from all over the country who also received the robot grant. What amazed me was that people who taught subjects like language arts and social studies found incredible ways to integrate robotics into their curriculum to create some really engaging lessons for their students."

"Menomonee Falls - Once every few weeks this past school year, kindergarten teacher Tiffany Fadin corralled her squirmy young charges at Valley View Elementary to get feedback about their recent math lessons. "What specific things did we do in this unit that helped you learn?" she asked recently. "What things did not help you learn?" Behind Fadin, data points flashed on a board, showing how many more students could add and subtract within five digits than in weeks prior. The exercise was deliberate, underscoring a major shift in Menomonee Falls that's training everyone to use data to make decisions, from teachers and custodians to kindergartners. The strategies employed over the past four years have attracted national - even international - attention to Menomonee Falls, including visitors from Sweden and researchers from the Carnegie Foundation. Other districts around the state and other educational institutions, such as the State University of New York, are taking notes. Armed with promising new outcome data, Menomonee Falls Superintendent Pat Greco said she believes what they're doing is working, and that the district is the case study for how K-12 systems can increase achievement and efficiency. And they're doing it by employing methods rooted not in education, but in the manufacturing and health care industries. "Teachers were reticent about posting student performance data. They were reticent to invite feedback from students," said Greco, who began engaging a small core of staff in the work in 2011. "Now, student performance is the highest it's ever been," Greco said."

"Jewelbots are colorful, programmable, smart friendship bracelets to get girls excited about coding. Sure, they're pretty and interactive: but what Jewelbots founders really want is to inspire tween and teen girls to understand the basics of coding, and take on building features of their own. Girls can program the bracelets right away without writing code, using simple if-then statements-the foundational logic of engineering-from the linked mobile app. The bracelets light up, vibrate or flash, letting girls communicate with each other in Morse code. They can also communicate when other Jewelbots wearers are near. The bracelets are connected through Bluetooth, and can be used with or without a linked phone."

"We've all been there. You've spent hours curating a document, editing a video, or photoshopping an image, only to be told the file is too large to send as an attachment via email. Of course, if you want to share the file locally, you can easily load it onto a flash drive - but what about if you need to send it to a friend or colleague on the other side of the world? It used to be a nightmare scenario, and although web-based file transfer services started to become popular in the tail-end of the last decade, they were still slow, cumbersome, and frequently failed. Thankfully, the advent of smartphones has helped streamline the process, and there are now a plethora of apps that let you share large files directly from your Android device. Here we look at the best options for you."

"The slow death of Adobe Flash has been hastened - YouTube, which used the platform as the standard way to play its videos, has dumped Flash in favor of HTML5 for its default web player. The site will now use HTML5 video as standard in Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8, and in beta versions of Firefox. YouTube engineer Richard Leider said the time had come to ditch the aging Flash in favor of HTML5 as the latter, used in smart TVs and other streaming devices, had benefits that "extend beyond web browsers.""

"Video production is a favourite pursuit for students in developing project-based learning solutions to real-world challenges. But where can students get the music to flash up their videos and give them great sound? McCoy Productions has the answer!"

"As an eighth-grade teacher, I constantly hear from high school teachers how "we" don't teach certain topics in middle school. The students, they claim, don't know how to write a thesis statement or don't know how to use proper grammar, and this is clearly because we don't teach it. News flash: We're not just twiddling our thumbs down here in 'tween-land. It's taught. Retaught. Revised. Reworked. All those gaps you might see as deficiencies in the middle school teaching are misguided. What you are seeing, however, is the curse of the summer slide. "

"Synopsis is the new iPad app for students allows you to read any PDF document and create notes by highlighting text. You can then modify these notes and add your own. This free app helps users summarize any text effortlessly so you won't ever need to go back to the PDF document. Each individual note can be converted to it's own flashcard - a fantastic feature of the app. There is no need to buy flashcards or manually type and create them thanks to Synopsis."

"I have recently discovered Flippity.net, a Google Spreadsheet conversion tool that creates online flashcards in an instant. This is NOT an iPad app, but rather a web tool that can be accessed on PC or mobile device. Making the flashcards is quick and easy, but will require a computer."

"Have you ever wondered if you can keep your entire iTunes Library on an external drive, freeing up disk space and providing for a portable music and media library? The answer is yes, you can, and it's actually pretty easy to offload an entire iTunes collection to another drive, whether you're using a Mac or Windows PC. "