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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

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.

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.

This is a pretty sweet collection of resources for teachers to cruise through and glean nuggets of cool for their students. All kinds of sites to support each stage of the writing process, as well as content from MI, OWL, and the like. As well as ways for students to get published, watch videos, and get creative. I'm not a huge fan of lists, but this is a nice collection.

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.

The ISTE Classroom Observation Tool (ICOT®) is a FREE online tool that provides a set of questions to guide classroom observations of a number of key components of technology integration.

Google Apps for Education overview I receive lots of questions and see lots of posts about the effective use of Google Apps for Education in the K-12 environment. Following are some of my thoughts.

Since the release of the iPhone App Store, numerous sources have commented on the potential of educational apps. While these apps can't compete with the general popularity of gaming and leisure apps, there are a number of educational apps that mobile learners will find handy.

The purpose of WikiEducator The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative: * planning of education projects linked with the development of free content; * development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;

Welcome! This is a collection of short articles designed to provide an introduction to the areas of modern mathematics and pointers to further information, as well as answers to some common (or not!) questions. The material is arranged in a hierarchy of d

To avoid such scenarios happening again (at least to me!), I have created a 'Master List' below of all the juiciest resource lists compiled on ZaidLearn. Trust me; some of these resource lists are really yummy. Interestingly, some of these resource lists

Getting Started with Spreadsheets Gadgets Spreadsheet Gadget Video screenshot Watch a video of Justin explaining the basics of Spreadsheets Gadgets. A spreadsheet gadget is a small program that interacts with the content of a spreadsheet. It is visual

Google Forms take the pain out of fitness testing... well at least for the teachers! Ok, so we all know that PE teachers hate paperwork (well most of them), but there is one thing that seems to frustrate us all... when paper work takes away from activity

Using Twitter is a brilliant way for teachers to connect to their students, classroom parents, and the global community. If you are a teacher, you can use Twitter in a variety of ways, from staying updated on new trends in education to encouraging idea sharing in the classroom. The following list of tips can help you get the most out of your Twitter experience.

10 best celebrity computer ads of the 1980s Most celebrity-backed tech commercials of the 1980s were pretty terrible. These 10 were pretty awesome. Or at least, in some cases, awesomely terrible. -Posted by David Griner

To make sense of it all, we have compiled key information, definitions, and links related to the launch of Google Wave. This in-depth guide provides an overview of Google Wave, discusses the terminology associated with it, details information on Google Wave applications, (i.e. the Twitter Wave app Twave), and goes over ways to keep yourself informed. We know you're excited about Google Wave, so here's what we think you should know:

The purpose of this course is to provide "Just in Time" training through an online interface for K-12 educators based on the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). These standards are the basic technology skills every educator should possess. In the process, educators will develop their own skills and discover what students need in order to meet the NETS for Students, as well as the new MMC Online Experience requirement. Participants who fulfill all of the requirements have the opportunity to earn SBCEU's. To learn more about the session, look under the tab "The 21 Things". We hope you take advantage of this unique opportunity.

Many of the underlying standards that define modern e-mail technology were originally developed in the 1980s. Almost 30 years after the birth of SMTP, e-mail is still the dominant Internet communication medium despite its significant limitations and increasingly anachronistic design. Supplementary services like instant messaging and microblogging have emerged to fill in some of the gaps, but virtually no attempts have been made to build a holistic replacement for e-mail. Our most important day-to-day messaging infrastructure remains intractably mired in antiquity

The purpose of this site is to take an extensive list of websites that are considered high quality, reliable, and valuable and organize them in a way that even "non-techy" teachers can utilize them. It took around 10 years to collect these resources, but new ones are found every day. All of these websites have been recommended by other teachers and educational organizations and qualify as "the best". You'll find support for all core curriculum areas. In addition, you will find lesson plans, multimedia, and primary sources to enhance your students' learning environment.

For the last couple of years, we've uploaded some holiday-themed SketchUp models to the Google 3D Warehouse. I thought it might be handy (for those of you who've found this blog only recently) to provide a recap of what's available - you never know when you're going to need some component-sized holiday cheer.