You won't find Willyn Webb telling her high school students to put away their cell phones, even though they are technically banned in her Colorado district. She's been using cell phones to augment her lessons at Delta County Opportunity School for years.
"curiosity is both intrinsic to children's development and unfolds through social interactions. Thus, it should be cultivated in schools, even though it is often almost completely absent from classrooms."
This website is full of resources for clipart, backgrounds for Keynote/PowerPoint presentations, maps, technology in the classroom, and more. It is sponsored by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology and the Educational Technology Clearinghouse, which "provide(s) digital content, professional development, and technical services supporting the appropriate integration of technology into K-12 and preservice education."
A quiet, sub-rosa fear is brewing among supporters of the Common Core State Standards Initiative: that the standards will die the slow death of poor implementation in K-12 classrooms.
By any accounting, the challenge of getting the nation's 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers ready to teach to the standards is enormous.
I started doing this because often people would miss the links when they're just on a slide at the beginning and end of the presentation. This way people can scan the QR codes with their phones and tablets and have instant access to the resources for the day.
When I asked a classroom of thirty 17 and 18 year-olds how many of them read for pleasure, only four students raised their hands. I shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. I love reading. It is one of the reasons I got into teaching: to share my love of reading with others.
Differences in classroom instruction and curriculum may be partly to blame. But cultural differences in computational ability may have their roots in the words that different cultures use to represent numbers.
There are some tricks that adults can use to increase digit memory span. These tricks can also be taught to young students at the appropriate age.
An interesting 'blog from Stanford's Keith Devlin (NPR's Math Guy) who is documenting his thinking as he prepares to offer a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) on Mathematical Thinking. This is an incredibly compelling read if you are interested in transition issues from secondary to college, the future potential of online courses, and/or mathematics education.
This relatively new site from Discovery has some great resources for integrating STEM into the curriculum. It also gives students a look into future career paths.
Props to Adrian D. He supposedly has it on either his office or classroom door. I found the link in his response to a student's query about it on his blog.
I've honestly never considered this before. Whether you agree with the chart's conclusions is obviously open for discussion, but the chart left me thinking about specifically WHY we assign HW and what we should be doing about it.
Given technology, can homework be used as a means to (a) differentiate assessment, (b) have students demonstrate understanding via a different modality, (c) scaffold learning to further enhance the classroom experience. For a while, Howard Gardner experimented at Harvard with assigning his lectures as homework. Students watched videos and then came to class prepared to engage in discussion. Could a similar approach be taken at the high school level?
Chris:
I think this flow chart is very interesting and worthy of considerable discussion. I like it. I would tweak it a bit. For example, I think you could (and should) give application homework that is formative as well as summative. I think all types of homework that fit with all six levels of Bloom's taxonomy could be given both formatively and summatively. The only homework that should be "graded" is homework that leads to end-of-learning assessment. If the homework is given in the process of learning, then it should not be graded but should receive feedback, both from the instructor as well as from the student(s).
These 5th graders in a suburban elementary school in southeast Georgia have been engaged in a yearlong blogging project whose purpose was to create a space for the students to converse about what they were learning in class and beyond.
We chose to leave our blogs open, giving students a worldwide audience.
Because students' blogs were available for outsiders to view, we carefully reviewed guidelines for safe and responsible blogging
n our classroom discussion on safe and responsible blogging, we advised students not to reveal personal identifying information. If they received anything online that made them feel uncomfortable, they were to minimize their screens and immediately report concerns to the teacher.
MEC asks science educators who teach grades 7-12 to develop inspiring ways to fit Mars science and exploration into their “every day” classroom lessons – such as biology, chemistry, physics, geology, etc. MEC empowers teachers to create lessons that will enable educators to teach these topics in new and interesting ways by using Mars as an example.
If you'd like to see assessment amount to more than a meaningless exercise in classroom control, if you'd like to see cheating drop and confidence rise, if you'd like to see a higher correlation between the grade you feel a student deserves and the grade on that student's transcript …
… take something from this page.
Chris, I definitely think this process for assessment could be utilized in other disciplines quite easily. The idea of student ownership is a huge factor for motivating students. The parent involvement seems to be a positive aspect, too. Thank you so much for keeping us all aware of innovative practices happening in education.
Karen Anderson
Adam Bellow (@adambellow on Twitter) works as the Director of Educational Technology for the College Board Schools where he works with educational leaders, teachers, and students to infuse technology successfully in the classroom. In 2011, he was recognized as Outstanding Young Educator of the Year by ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education).