Group items tagged

I plan on taking August off from blogging, facebook, and the 24/7 news cycle. Got to get stuff done!

The tool itself (Rapid Cycle Evaluation (RCE) Coach)

It consumed every evening and at least one day of the weekend. I had no life and the cycle repeated itself every week until the summer holidays. I hated marking. Oh, and by the way, it made no difference! I was ticking and flicking, leaving comments that were far too generic and the marking often went unnoticed or unacknowledged by the students. So, I've stopped. Or at least, I've stopped doing what I was doing. Now, my marking is less frequent but makes a much greater difference to the progress of my students.

"How do we know it's not a natural cycle?" 

Pinterest has launched what may be the first of several official "hubs" featuring content targeting a particular segment of its user base, with today's debut of a new "Pinterest for Teachers" site at pinterest.com/teachers. Obviously timed to coincide with the back-to-school rush and news cycle, the company tells us that the new hub will also serve as something of a test to see if it makes more sense to continue down this path in the future, with more hubs devoted to other interests or groups.

Digital Media Literacy is the title of a Short Course being developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) in the Republic of Ireland. These are some of my thoughts! I draw particularly on the ideas of Howard Rheingold.

"A four-week lockout of teachers from schools in Denmark has come to an end. In central Copenhagen, where I live, my daughter and her classmates gleefully cycled to school on their first day back. The month-long closure has led to schools being valued even more highly by the more than 556,000 pupils and about 50,000 teachers who were affected. "

This is a fun and interactive website that takes students through different parts of the water cycle and how it is affected by humans. It is in the form of a water festival and they click on the tents to view different topics pertaining to the earth's water.

Science 2.4a: Frog life cycle, minimal text and great images

Word Generation is a novel approach to vocabulary teaching and academic language development that comprises 15-minute daily activities organized in a five-day cycle.

HCZ continues to offer innovative, efficiently run programs that are aimed at doing nothing less than breaking the cycle of generational poverty for the thousands of children and families it serves.

See where clouds form as part of a lesson on the water cycle or desertification with this 3D globe. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

from Scholastic's Study Jams (includes video, quiz, and vocab)

In-depth interactive walkthrough of cellular respiration. Easy to use. Suggested level on the website says high school, but it is very detailed--more appropriate for AP Biology or college level biology (or even biochemistry) courses.

Author and activist Michael Pollan is a passionate advocate for sustainable food. In his compelling talk at PopTech, he explores how our industrial food system is keeping us overly dependent on fossil fuels, destroying our environment, and making us sick. Breaking this cycle requires fundamentally changing our relationship to food - and eating more meals together. - awesome!

Drag the correct phase of the moon into the the lunar cycle.

Despite this being a 'thinking' conference, despite us all being advocates for structured and scaffolded models of thinking, not one group had applied any thinking routines, utilised a collaborative planning protocol or talked about applying an inquiry model or design thinking cycle. It wasn't that we didn't know about them. It wasn't that we don't know how to use them. It wasn't that we don't value them. We had all the knowledge we could desire on the how to and the why of a broad set of thinking tools and anyone of these would have enhanced the process, but we did not use any of them. Why was this the case and what does this reveal about our teaching of these methods to our students?