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Our goal is to transform school systems by developing professional communities of teachers and school leaders with interactive online courses and on-site support programs that enable schools to cultivate the critical learning students need for the 21st century world. Research-Based. WIDE World professional development programs are based on Teaching for Understanding, a classroom-tested framework developed through research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Online. WIDE World courses are conducted online and are asynchronous. This allows for flexible, adaptive, and convenient learning for all participants, regardless of location or schedule. Job-embedded. Through our courses, WIDE World learners integrate research-based strategies in their own workplace. Online coaches support cycles of learning, applying, and reflecting as teams of educators improve lesson plans, instruction, and data-driven action projects. Team-Based with Coaching. Systemic change requires coordinated effort from all stakeholders. Expert coaches help teachers, leaders, and specialists work in teams to develop a common language for defining and achieving shared goals. Tailored for Local Impact. WIDE World works with you to design professional development programs adapted precisely to address the needs of your school, program, district, or system and build local capacity for continuous improvement. Global Learning. In the online environment, participants collaborate with innovative educators from across the US and around the globe.

The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning honors websites, tools, and resources of exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning as embodied in the American Association of School Librarians' Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.

What do you think? How do we envision the future and teach for it?

Behind the rhetoric and politics, education is about the outcomes it achieves for its learners. More than being about the nuances of technology, learning space design, curriculum structures and pedagogical practices schools should have effective answers to questions that focus on what they hope to achieve for their learners. How we answer this question should then dictate the measures we utilise to achieve these goals and it is to these ends that we must apply our efforts.

Happy mothers day 2016 quotes

Some statements stand out in your memory for the power with which they resonate through you mind. I recall the first time I encountered the question posed by Alan November "Who owns the learning?" on the cover of his book of the same name. In four words, Alan poses a question that strikes at the heart of education and encourages us to re-think our approach. If we believe that the learner should own the learning, what are the implications of this for our teaching? Like a stone dropped on the surface of a calm pond, the ripples from a powerful idea spread, expand and gain strength. 

Life in the 21st century provides a whole new world of opportunities for self-directed, passion-driven, personalized learning. Educators who are ready to move on from teaching the way they were taught, and administrators who will let them, can begin supporting students using tools and strategies available to the 21st century learner.

The term open educational resources (OER) encapsulates the simple but powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good. The internet offers unprecedented opportunities to share, use and reuse knowledge. Sadly, most of the planet is underserved when it comes to post-secondary education.

Learning should always be an active process and a two-way partnership between teaching and learning. In essence, learning and its counterpart exist as a vibrant dialogue between individuals whose role in the relationship is continually transformative. I'd like to explore this thinking further.

The Elluminate Teacher Certification Program is designed to help teachers acquire the skills and knowledge needed to teach and learn online. Participants will learn how to use Elluminate Live! to deliver interactive, engaging online learning experiences for K-12 students. The program requires participants to demonstrate a superior command of the use of the Elluminate Live! moderator tools and feature set. Additionally, participants will learn to apply those tools and techniques to create learner centric online classrooms that will increase student achievement and satisfaction. The Elluminate Teacher Certification Program is for anyone, not just Elluminate customers, who wants to excel in the virtual classroom. No prior Elluminate product purchase is necessary. UCSD Extension Education is offering 2 units of credit for completion of the certification.

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

Teacher and tech enthusiast Jon Schwartz espouses the benefits of blogging for teaching elementary  English language learners and boosting student engagement. 

A collection of 400 + online tools for learners.

A collection of 400 + online tools for learners.

Teachers should be master learners not master teachers!

With good reason, much is made of learner agency but the concept of teacher agency is important too. If we hope to build a profession in which we are all self-navigating life-long learners, we must acknowledge the role that teacher agency plays. 

"Number Talks" is an approach to the teaching and learning of Number Sense. Rather than relying on the rote-memorisation of isolated number facts achieved through drills of "table-facts", Number Talks aim to build confident, number fluency, where learners recognise patterns within and between numbers and understand the properties of numbers and operations. Number Talks are a "mind on" learning task that engages students in an active learning process as they search for patterns, decompose and recompose numbers and develop a flexible understanding.

"as we contemplate 2020, I'm certain that there won't be one model, one benchmark, one standard, one curriculum, or one teacher training program that ultimately helps us reach our educational goals. But I strongly believe that a decade from now we'll be able to look back and know that we made learning more interesting for each and every child in our country"

How to make learning interesting for everybody.

Making, Maker Centred Learning and STEAM fit neatly alongside Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) for many schools. Commonly this approach includes a constructivist view of knowledge and teachers seek to establish conditions which allow students to explore questions and ideas with greater independence than may occur in the traditional classroom.  Learning becomes a collaborative partnership between teachers and students with a clear focus on a learner centric approach.

"This is the first article of a four-part series on teaching the four C's effectively to English learners: Critical thinking | Communication | Collaboration | Creativity" (deck, 2015.03.16).

The book 'Non Obvious' by Rohit Bhargava present an intriguing exploration of how careful observation and thought can reveal emerging trends and as the subtitle suggest 'predict the future'. For educators the ability to identify the trends which will deliver the best outcomes for our students from the noise of fads is alluring. While the talk of new technologies, of learner centric pedagogies and teaching for lifelong learning play the part of the obvious trends in education identifying the non-obvious trend is a more challenging endeavour.