Group items tagged

Nice IWB or Smart board activities for both theory and application of maths concepts.

Ok, as of Thursday at 8:30 (Australian Time) this site is back up!

A great general maths site with lots of tutorials, activities and games which will help your students at school and at home. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Have students to create visual works of art online. Silk is an interactive site where students can drag their mouse around on the page to create beautiful weaving & whirling designs. Drawing lines on the screen will add color to the moving art, & by speeding up or slowing down their movements the effect will change. Students can choose between 6 different colors, & 3 different modes of symmetry. Students can share their creation with a simple link. Have students describe their unique artwork as a description & creative writing exercise. Also available as an app for the iPad.

Scribble is a great tool for preparing web-based readings for engaging students more attentively in their inquiry. Great tool to support close reading and CCSS. Scrible is a free online tool for saving, organizing, annotating, and sharing websites for online research projects and web quests. It saves a copy of each page you annotate in your personal Scrible library, so that even if the original web pages you've made notes on go down, your saved pages and your notes still exist. You can post your work on Facebook or Twitter, and you can also share your Scrible pages with short links that you generate with the click of a button. Check it out for yourself at www.scrible.com.

Great science base PBL projects broken down by science areas.

"Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world."

Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...

Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.

You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.

Impacts and adaptations of climate change across the major regions of the US. Also broken down across 10 sectors-agriculture, coasts, ecosystems, energy, human ,health, etc. 

Back to School demonstrates what education can  do, even though it was often earlier schooling that  let people down. . . . When we are at our best as a  society, our citizens are not trapped by their  histories. Sadly this possibility is shrinking, partly  because of a damaged an unstable economy but  more so because of our political response to the  economy. There are better ways to respond and to  foster the growth of a wider sweep of our  population. I hope Back to School points us in that  direction (p. xiii).

Loved "Unbroken." Hard to put down. Glad to see it headed for the big screen w/Angelina Jolie as director.

"IT'S been over a year now since I removed an interactive whiteboard (IWB) from a classroom wall for the first time. Yes, you read that right: removed. And not to put another one up. In fact, what went in its place was a good old-fashioned non-interactive whiteboard - the same sort we tore down just two years earlier."

How can education stem the rising tide of teacher dissatisfaction? Recent MetLife survey states it is down 23% since 2008. This post has some ideas. 

The ICAC Task Force program, in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the NetSmartz program, has developed a down-loadable training presentation on Internet safety for children and families.

At first glance, teachers may point to the fact that today's curriculum is not about content knowledge any more. It's about skill development, creativity, collaboration and communication. At a simplistic level, that may be partly true. We can't escape the fact, though, that accuracy and understanding is still paramount. While an 8 year old will survive making the odd misinterpretation or copying the wrong information down, a 20 year old medical student can't be confusing a pharynx with a larynx or thinking a 3:4 ratio means 3/4 and 1/4. So the question needs to be asked - How well are we dealing with Quality Control and Fact Checking in the Differentiated, Personalised Classroom? This one question brings up a whole lot more questions that every teacher needs t0 consider.

Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law last week to encourage the state's K-12 and higher education systems to use massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The bill Scott signed allows MOOCs, under certain conditions, to be used to help teach K-12 students in four subjects and also orders Florida education officials to study and set rules that would allow students who have yet to enroll in college to earn transfer credits by taking MOOCs.

A beautifully made geography and science flash resource from Oxfam about the Earth. Look at the land and seas on the surface and travel down into the core of our planet. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/PSHE,+RE,+Citizenship,+Geography+&+Environmental

We are past the age of email in a collaborative world. Note the AOL attempt to conflate Twitter. Pinterest, Gmail...

"During one of the standard visits to see family and friends recently, I came across a childhood game that had captured the imaginations of many a youngster in my generation…Scalextrics! A friend of mine had bought the classic car racing game for his five-year old son and I could not turn down the opportunity of a race…with the reasoning of showing my 11-month old daughter how it works ***cough, cough***."