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​Each day of the school year I present my students with an estimation challenge. I love helping students improve both their number sense and problem solving skills. I'd like to share the estimation challenges with you and your students. Happy Estimating! Enjoy, Andrew Stadel

Teachers often face the question, "When are we going to use this?" This project is great because it gets students answering that question themselves. Students take a picture of something they see in the world and write their own math problem relating to the picture. This gets students thinking about why math is useful and pushes their problem-solving ability by making them formulate a good question. Once the student okays the project with the teacher, they are free to post with the class Instagram tag where other students can engage in a conversation about the problem. This is a great way to get students to engage in practical mathematics and it is easy to organize because it is almost entirely student-driven. This is a cool project that could be running year round. I could see myself setting this up and building a real-world problem bank with my classes.

Interesting article discussing the integration of technology in science instruction. The importance of using TPACK, professional development for teachers in both science content and pedagogical methods for inquiry based instruction.

Currently my favorite website is Prodigy because my students are SO ENGAGED in solving math problems because of the FREE wizarding games provided within the site. If you work with kiddos in grades 1-8, check it out!

This is a good video showing how setting up a community of practice saves time and resources in a mining company. The highlight for me was that one problem took a company close to a year to solve and they freely shared it with another group so that they wouldn't have to go through the same struggles.

This is a video discussion as part of a online course on connectivism.  Taken by itself, it is a little obscure, but taken in the context of EDTECH543 and in an attempt to understand connectivism, it was immensely helpful to me.  The video centers around the nine dots puzzle and the how the solution to it is a perfect example of connectivism.

Thanks for sharing this video. It made me understand that even if we think that at the beginning we are not going to need to get connected to a certain "point", you never know if in the future you are going to need information/knowledge from that source.

I really like this 'outside the lines' way of looking at connectivism. There is so much information out there that we really might not need at a certain point in time but it is still there and can be accessed. It's interesting to think that we might be that point for others, we are still there but they don't need what we have right now.

This article by Wenger and Snyder in the Harvard Business Review is a great reflection of a community of practice (CoP) by the creators themselves in a well-known publication. While the article is in-depth and covers every aspect of a CoP, the included chart may have been the most helpful part of this article to really break down a CoP and the difference between that and other groups.

In this article the author provides an introduction to the concept of communities of practice, describes benefits and utility for business, and strategies for implementation in that context.

The highlight of this article for me is that CoPs have to be organic in their organization and management.

In this article the author makes the argument that a hybridization of PLCs and PLNs would benefit students and teachers. It provides an introduction to both concepts before it offers ideas on hybridization and why they would benefit stakeholders.

I like the argument. Hybridization of these two vital elements will provide teachers and learners with an all around better experience in a school day. I know that in my building PLC is often frowned upon by the staff, because they find it a waste of time. I think that the integration of PLNs in the process could provide far more than simply meeting and discussing policy/educational tools.

I really liked this article because I feel at my school there is many PLC, but no one is really connected to PLN (including myself). As a member of the technology commitment, we have a small group looking to create goals and share knowledge, but sometimes its doesn't go beyond our meeting walls. If the communities could be connected to PLN then the walls are broken down and the collaboration and problem-solving input increased.

One of the articles in the resources for Module 2 mentioned collaborative learning vs. cooperative learning, so I wanted to read this article about the differences. This article details cooperative, collaborative and problem based learning in these areas: origins of the approach, definitions, essential features, goals, specific strategies and techniques and research that supports it. While there are multiple definitions, the authors say that "cooperative learning combines active and social learning via peer interaction in small groups," but that this also applies to collaborative learning. In contrast, cooperative learning emphasizes interdependence, where collaborative learning focuses more on discovery, understanding and producing knowledge. Collaborative learning also involves the teacher as well, working together with students to learn. In problem based learning, students work in small groups to solve a problem, often a real world problem. This type of learning does also involve cooperation and collaboration. There is a table on page 33 that summarizes the 3 approaches.

With budget cuts and changing expectations of what students need to learn, teachers need to be life-long learners to keep up with the changes. The Internet is a resource that allows teachers to collaborate with others, share resources, and solve challenges in the classroom.

The author creates a great case in favor of digital PLNs. She explains why they are so important and relevant today. The emphasis of the article is on the need to work together, not on best practices, but rather on emerging practices. The author takes the stance that best practices require training with known knowledge for known outcomes. While we should be collaborating and innovating together to tackle the emerging practices.

In this article, the author explains why you should build a PLN, why PLNs are important, how to build a PLN, characteristics of a PLN, and skills needed to build a PLN. We need to stay relevant and connected with our personal development and can do that through PLNs. In the 21st Century, it is essential and key to success to stay informed, updated, and connected. PLNs make it easy to learn at the pace of change.

This article discusses why building personal learning networks is important when information changes constantly. The key to survival is learning how to learn continuously through building Personal Learning Networks. Creating networks where people can collaborate and learn from each other in order to remain on the cutting edge. PLNs allow for continuous learning, exchange of thoughts and ideas, and validate and challenge one's thoughts among a diverse group of individuals. PLNs have to be a sharing process of ideas.