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Unit One: "Creative What?"show This unit explores the general topics of intellectual property, creative content, and creative rights. Using the backdrop of a high school's Battle of the Bands, the unit will help students define intellectual property and creative content by relating it to a common scenario they might encounter. Students will begin to recognize and internalize the importance of respecting creative rights, conduct their own research to better understand the relevance of creative content to their lives, and help clear up confusion about the rights that apply to them and their peers. Unit Two: "By Rule of Law"show Intellectual property is a valuable commodity, and thus, those who develop creative content are protected by laws in the United States and around the world. In this unit, students explore creative content copyright and learn about the rights they have as creators and the laws that exist to protect the creative process. The unit's activities encourage students to form opinions about what's right, what's wrong, and how the laws affect them as creators, consumers, and good digital citizens. Unit Three: "Calling All Digital Citizens"show Copyright and other creative rights empower the artists, musicians, and writers who produce creative works. But how does the prevalence of online media - and its ease of access - change the conversation about those rights? With social media as the backdrop, this unit explores that very question, as the students learn more with the Digital Citizenship in Schools curriculum. Students analyze the use of creative content on social media Web sites, recognize the responsibilities involved with using these media, and form their own opinions about what makes a good digital citizen. Unit Four: "Protect Your Work, Respect Your Work"show This unit explores the theme of protecting creative content through a series of experiential activities. Students learn how to protect their own creative works and how to use o

Free Technology for Teachers: Good Chrome Extensions for Students with Disabilities - links to Chrome Speak, Announcify, and Readability.

Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about I realize there are people whose impulse is to sneer when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as "soft" or "faddish" anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between feeling and thinking, between a child's comfort level and his or her capacity to learn. Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As one group of researchers put it, "In order to promote students' academic performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and emotional adjustment." And yet, broadly speaking, we don't. Teachers and schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures (which, to make matters worse, mostly consist of standardized test scores). If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a "good school" would sound very different. Likewise, our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside-out, seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about -- or even bullied -- by adults.

At first glance, I like this a lot. It combines existing social spaces and incorporates or provides the opportunity to fracture them into learning spaces as well. I've heard folks ask before if this is even where our students want us to be. good question. I think the tool, whatever it is, will need to allow for layers or (ahem) circles so that we can organize the input and output cleanly and easily. I still lik edmodo in this type of space as THE go-to tool because of the ability to work with kids and teachers P-12.

I like that this article address the obvious gaps of research and lack of control of multiple variables that could eschew results. Nevertheless there are some great data points on why keeping and retaining the best in our profession needs to be a continued focus and conversation. Is it enough to use test scores, of course not. But a balanced system that helps us speed up the process for removing ineffective folks in our profession can't hurt.

100 Awesome Classroom Videos to Learn New Teaching Techniques With so many good teachers out there, it's fortunate they can share their knowledge via video on the Internet. From the funny to the poignant, these glimpses into the lives of teachers and the

Tutorials and Guides * A Wiki Walk-Through, from TeachersFirst. * Welcome to the World of Wikis - Help pages put together to use with primary schools in the UK - Sally. Thanks to wikispaces for the help they have given me! Good Luck! * Using Wik

All those interested in education-we've got you covered. From humor blogs on college life to one stop shops for school athletics to blogs all about education policy and new technologies, if there's a good education blog out there, you can bet it made our list. We've also mixed in a handful of exceptional web tools and sites that we thought deserved a spot in the top 200.

A couple of quick takeaways for me are that it's nice to see professional development called out as something we need, but we really have to get away form the paradigm of thinking it's something we do "to" teachers or is done "to" us.  The other takeaway I have after reading this is around a question I've asked before. If we're truly "blending" our teaching and environment, what does the space look like? How can we professionally develop as teachers to be better prepared to adapt and modify our existing learning spaces to better meet the needs of a flexible, student centric, tech infused learning environment? If shifting the ENTIRE teaching model paradigm upside down is NOT an option, what is? Is this something that needs to be built, modeled, and then iterated? I culled some nuggets from the reading.

nice for use with interactive whiteboard, requires flash