Literacy with ICT

"Our series explores the many facets that technology can bring to a school to help them be as digitally effective as possible through the eyes of educational experts who have already been through it. The areas we covered, which of course is never exhaustive, covered some of the most important areas that schools could and should be exploring. "

"To reap the benefits of music on learning, kids need consistent and abundant musical practice, according to the latest cognitive research."

"Considering the ongoing traumatic upheaval on school communities in recent years, and the unrelenting pressure on educators to work under difficult, uncertain and constantly vacillating circumstances, it is not a matter of if educators will experience the corrosive effects of prolonged and extreme stress, but rather when. The question is, what can schools do to prioritize and support the mental health and well-being of the invaluable educators at the heart of their school communities?"

"Here's how to double your search outputs using half the time and energy"

"When it comes to optimizing learning, we don't value breaks enough, neuroscientists suggest in a new study."

"The YouTube site can be messy. Did you know it's possible to watch YouTube videos without going to YouTube?"

"Over the summer of 2021, I collaborated with our 6th grade science teacher as part of a grant to find ways to incorporate makerspace activities into the curriculum. (Look for posts coming soon about some of the projects we did).  Part of our work was reading the book, Making Science: Reimagining STEM Education in Middle School and Beyond.  I found it to be a fantastic, practical resource for bringing hands-on maker learning into the classroom.  Reading this book as a maker librarian gave me a ton of ideas for new ways to collaborate with our STEM classes.   And it's an excellent resource for classroom teachers as well."

"We wrote about fake news earlier this week (How to defeat fake news-one teacher's ideas). Here are additional resources you'll find helpful in teaching about this topic:"

"As the role of technology in education is growing day by day, it's important to understand not only its advantages but also its disadvantages."

"Wordle's popularity has led many teachers to incorporate it into the classroom. And as much as we love Wordle and how educators are using it to teach, it's not the only word game that provides learning opportunities. "

"Perceptive adults and savvy students know that saying something doesn't make it a fact, and neither does publishing information on the internet. But how to know which websites are sharing accurate information? As middle and high school students conduct research or access the internet on their own time, they need to be able to determine the accuracy of what they're reading by reviewing websites with a critical eye."

It's interesting, thanks!

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"Disinformation Toolkit 2.0 builds on its predecessor by looking more broadly at the many ways disinformation impacts the work of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are active in defense of human rights, humanitarian action, and across sectors of international development around the globe."

"My favorite unit to teach the last two years to my middle school students has been on "Fruit Loop Conspiracy Theories." Rather than study and discuss controversial political topics, we focus on the Apollo Moon landings and the skeptics (who are sometimes also "flat-earthers" on YouTube) who believe NASA never landed on the Moon, and the entire historical episode was faked thanks to Stanley Kubrick's moviemaking special effects. This lesson was the result of summer work I did with my Chicago colleague Brian Turnbaugh (@wegotwits) in 2020, which I archived on the website, "Fact or Fiction? Apollo Moon Landings." Brian and I met through the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy in Rhode Island. I've served as faculty for the Institute the past two summers, in 2020 and 2021."

"If only everything could be simple.  Life is anything but an easy journey.  While this, for the most part, has been manageable in the past, the pandemic has upended professional and personal lives.  Just when there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, a new variant materializes.  For now, Omicron is the current curveball.  As I write this post on the first day of 2022, I can't help but reflect on the resilience educators showed the year before.  They stepped up to the plate every time for kids and each other because that is in their DNA.  As the curveballs kept coming, they hit them.  In the midst of immense adversity, they persevered.  What the future holds, no one can know for sure.  Many schools have or will be making the decision to revert back to some form of remote learning.  While this can be frustrating and challenging, educators have been here before.  The silver lining is that lessons learned in the past can be leveraged to make it a smoother process.  There were many successes when it comes to remote learning that have value now and will for years to come.  I made sure to capture these in chapter 6 of Disruptive Thinking in Our Classrooms.  Good teaching and leadership shine through no matter the circumstance.  If you are in need of remote learning resources I have you covered. Just click HERE. "

"There was a time when I would work myself to death. All day, every day. There was a time when I would come to school sick beyond belief because I did not want to disappoint anyone, and let's face it, because the hassle of leaving lesson plans for subs who never completed them drove me absolutely crazy. Late nights in the building, extra hours at home planning and grading, and various extracurricular activities required all of my attention and energy. I preached self-care to other people, but I did not practice self-care myself. There was a time when I put my job before my family, before my health, and before my sanity. That time ended just as the pandemic began."

"Critical thinking is the heart and soul of learning, and-in our estimation anyway-ultimately more important than any one specific content area or subject matter. It's also an over-used and rather nebulous phrase - how do you teach someone to think? Of course, that's the purpose of education, but how do you effectively optimize that concept into lasting knowledge and the ability to apply it broadly?"

"Carol Dweck's work on "growth mindset" has caught the fancy of organizations the world over, and why wouldn't it? The core supposition of a growth mindset is that an individual's talents and capabilities can evolve over time; at its core are the underlying beliefs that people hold about intelligence and learning. It is with deep sadness that we report that the function charged with building this growth mindset in most organizations remains hostage to deeply "fixed mindset" thinking. Although the idea of a growth mindset is commonly discussed in corporate learning programs, many leaders adopt a fixed mindset when it comes to envisioning the learning function's role and capabilities. To quote Dweck, "Our work environments, too, can be full of fixed mindset triggers." Business leaders need to shift their views of what the learning function is and what it can do."

"Between school closures, learning loss, intensified educator burnout, widespread staff shortages and increased stressors at home, it's been hard not to focus on the negatives in education this year. In fact, it's human nature to get caught up in what went wrong-an innate survival mechanism called "negativity bias" vigilantly draws our attention to worries and risks so we can better remember and avoid threats. While I'm appreciative that my ancestors were wary folks, in 2021, I often saw myself and others trapped in this negative mindset, always tallying the losses and waiting for the next bad thing to happen. However, in my work with educators this year, I began to notice that some were able to metabolize this negativity and keep themselves and their classrooms positive and adaptive despite the obvious hindrances. Interviews with elementary classroom teachers spanning a variety of settings and grade levels revealed that these resilient educators utilized a common strategy: they practiced gratitude in their everyday lives."

"Find information to help you support children who are struggling with mental health, behavior or learning challenges."

"Student discussion can be a powerful tool, but many students struggle with academic language. This can be helped by providing them with tools such as sentence starters, sentence stems, examples of simple sentences with the correct academic language, and many other strategies. As a previous teacher, I had many students who didn't like to talk out loud, but if I got them by themselves or provided them with a digital alternative, they were more likely to open up a discussion with other students and me. There are two technology tools that can help your students have academic discussions, and these digital tools in coordination with academic language resources can help students use their voice in your classroom."