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"As an educator who is addicted to Twitter I have always read about students getting introduced to Twitter and wondered how it would work. After reading and reading I have finally decided to give it a go. Here is my introduction to Twitter in my classroom. Last Tuesday, the day started like any other. Roll call, discussion, introduction to an activity and a bit of a laugh with my Year 7 and 8 Technology class. We had been discussing the importance of being an active online user and being a positive digital citizen (the students are preparing some presentations for Year 2-3 children later in the term). The conversation moved into learning environments and we discussed the small and "un-student friendly" (their words) environment that they were currently sitting in. "Take the teachable moment and run with it" my inner, energetic teacher yelled from my shoulder. So there we were talking about the "Ultimate Learning Environment", when one of my students asked me "Why is social media so big?". Good question I thought, why is it 'so big'. So we unpacked that question and broke it down. We talked about Social Media and what it was and how it worked, they gave me excellent examples and we tied it back into our discussion about digital citizenship. From this point, as a class, we decided we would use social media to help us with our learning. The students had no idea how it could work. I suggested twitter and how I use it. We pulled up my profile and saw how it worked (discussion only). The decision was then made -> Let's ask the twitterverse to help us!! On rolled Monday 5th May and in our first class (I see this group twice a week) we decided that tomorrow would be the day, we would ask twitter for their advice on "What makes a GREAT learningenvironment?". The students already have some fantastic ideas and a plan of where they want to see their environment heading but they needed some depth to their plan and some other opinions outside of

Ver At School "France in the Year 2000 (XXI century) - a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the Year 2000. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris."

These 'warming stripe' graphics are visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country over the past 100+ years. Each stripe represents the temperature in that country averaged over a year. For most countries, the stripes start in the year 1901 and finish in 2018. For the UK, USA, Switzerland & Germany, the data starts in the late 19th century.

"Back in the 1980s, a group of social workers in Jamaica visited low-income homes one hour a week for two years, bearing age-appropriate toys for the kids and advice on child rearing for the parents. Researchers tracked the outcomes, and a generation later, the results are in. The children whose homes were visited by social workers became adults who earn wages that are 25 percent higher than those earned by peers who had not been visited. Their I.Q.s are an average seven points higher, and they are less likely to resort to crime or suffer from depression. Other studies, including several recent ones in the United States, have shown similar results, contributing to a consensus on the importance of early childhood development that has led governments around the world to increase spending on the first five years of life. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of longstanding social and economic inequality, several countries have been especially ambitious. Brazil and Chile doubled the coverage of day care services over the past decade, while in Ecuador they grew sixfold. These investments build on historic gains in child nutrition and health. But while Latin American children are now healthier and more likely to attend preschool, they still lag far behind in learning, particularly in the areas of language and cognition, when compared with their counterparts in wealthy countries. What are we doing wrong? ..."

"there is no live teacher engagement... Currently, just 10 percent of MOOC registrants complete their courses. Where Will MOOCs Be Just Two Years From Now? Within the next two Years, MOOCs will quickly evolve from lacking teacher engagement to having a lot of teacher engagement. Right now, it's essentially a model where computers are teaching students. This model is simply not sustainable in the long run without live student-teacher engagement. Teachers are the key that unlocks learning in these courses. They help students resolve issues and problems. Will the biggest change in online education moving forward be putting live teachers at the center of the MOOC (not just on video)? We will know the answer very soon."

1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, makin

"Since 1995, four years after India opened its doors to free markets, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau, NCRB, nearly 270,000 Indian cotton farmers have killed themselves. The 'Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India,' has placed the death toll for a cumulative 16-year at 256,913 deaths, the worst-ever recorded wave of suicides of this kind in human history. "

"The cryptocurrency uses as much CO2 a year as 1m transatlantic flights. We need to take it seriously as a climate threat Bitcoin's electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It's now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That's commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes - or roughly 1m transatlantic flights."

"It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion-and only 200 years to reach 7 billion. But growth has begun slowing, as women have fewer babies on average. When will our global population peak? And how can we minimize our impact on Earth's resources, even as we approach 11 billion?"

"This comic is a timeline on how the temperature has changed from 20,000 BCE (Before Common Era) to the present day (2016), with three predictions for the rest of the 21st century depending on what actions are taken (or not taken) to stop CO₂ emission. This comic is a direct, but much more thorough, follow up on the previous global warming comic: 1379: 4.5 Degrees. By having readers scroll through millennia of slow-paced natural changes, Randall uses the comic to confront the the rapid temperature rise in the recent years. Over the past 100 years, human action has produced a large amount of CO₂ emissions, which have caused a rise in average global temperature through the greenhouse effect. This is called global warming and is part of a climate change, a subject that has become a recurrent subject on xkcd. There are still many people who claim that this is not happening, or at least that it is not caused by any human actions, called climate change deniers. One argument of theirs is that global warming is happening for natural causes, summarized with the phrase "temperature has changed before". "

"Tal vez, una lectura clasista sea posible. "Black Mirror" y "Years and Years" son apocalipsis imaginados por y para las clases medias y para los países centrales, que poseen recursos económicos y simbólicos para ver el apocalipsis desde sus esferas de confort. Las clases bajas y los países periféricos, en cambio, posiblemente no miren el apocalipsis con esos ojos, lo más probable es que lo vivan, lo sientan, lo experimenten de lleno en una atmósfera cyberpunk. Quizá, las dos formas de imaginar el apocalipsis no sean excluyentes sino simultáneas y sectorizadas. Es solo una idea, el lector sacará sus propias conclusiones cuando vea las dos series que recomiendo, y si no las ve, no hay problema, después de todo tampoco es el fin del mundo."

"Teaching climate science & action can seem daunting: for university-level lecturers, teaching to younger children can be quite intimidating. For primary-level teachers, the science and scope can seem too vast and fast changing to cover. For everyone, the content can be overwhelming. As adults, how do we present this topic to children: give them the information they need without crushing them? I decided to face the challenge, and over the course of one rather sleepless night, put together some materials for my 6 year-old son's class. This post summarizes and communicates that experience, in the hope that others can take ideas and inspiration, and will be encouraged to volunteer to teach about climate in primary schools. Teaching and engagement in schools is now part of all of our work, as researchers, academics, parents, activists, advocates, so I hope this idea spreads. The 4-part lesson plan worked quite well: the topics & materials held the children's attention, gave them varied aspects to think about and interact with, and they seemed to come away with deeper understanding. The whole thing took roughly 1 hour. This is doable!"

"Tal vez, una lectura clasista sea posible. "Black Mirror" y "Years and Years" son apocalipsis imaginados por y para las clases medias y para los países centrales, que poseen recursos económicos y simbólicos para ver el apocalipsis desde sus esferas de confort. Las clases bajas y los países periféricos, en cambio, posiblemente no miren el apocalipsis con esos ojos, lo más probable es que lo vivan, lo sientan, lo experimenten de lleno en una atmósfera cyberpunk."

"France plans to outlaw the destruction of unsold consumer products, a practice that currently results in the disposal of new goods worth 800 million euros, or more than $900 million, in the country each year. By 2023, manufacturers and retailers will have to donate, reuse or recycle the goods, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said on Tuesday of the measure, which the government billed as the first of its kind. "It is waste that defies reason," Mr. Philippe said at a discount store in Paris, according to Agence France-Presse, and he called the practice "scandalous." Under a new measure that will be part of a bill set to be debated by the government in July, destroying unsold goods could result in financial penalties or prison time. The practice - widespread across the retail and consumer industry as a way to free up warehouse space or prevent unwanted items from being sold at a significant discount - has received bad press in France recently. ..."

"Striking evidence has emerged that an ancient virus previously known only from fossil evidence has persistently infected some humans at very low levels for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. This ancient retrovirus is a kind of living fossil, and the discovery of an intact copy of it within the human genome poses questions as to how it has survived, and suggests others from the distant evolutionary past may lie dormant in the DNA of many species. ..."

Artículo en inglés... "Mobile devices as teaching tools are becoming a more and more common part of the American education experience in classrooms, from preschool through graduate school. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 58% of U.S. teachers own smartphones - 10 percentage points higher than the national average for adults. Those teachers are building that tech-savviness into their lesson plans, too, by embracing bring-your-own-device policies and leading the push for an iPad for every student. In 2013, an estimated 25% of U.S. schools had BYOD policies in place and it's reasonable to assume those numbers have risen in the past two years. ..."

Las 3 reglas de @ramusallam: 1 la curiosidad va primero 2 aceptar el desastre 3 practicar la reflexión "It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of "pseudo-teaching" to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works. "

The Atlantic covers consequential news and ideas in politics, business, entertainment, technology, health, education, and global affairs.

"It seems only fitting to explore the role of questions in education by asking questions about the process of doing so. I propose that we start with the customary way of framing this topic and then proceed to questions that are deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling. 1. WHICH QUESTIONS? To begin, let's consider what we might ask our students. The least interesting questions are those with straightforward factual answers. That's why a number of writers have encouraged the use of questions described variously as "true" (Wolf, 1987), "essential" (Simon, 2002), "generative" (Perkins, 1992; Perrone, 1998), "guiding" (Traver, 1998), or "fertile" (Harpaz & Lefstein, 2000). What the best of these share is that they're open-ended. Sometimes, in fact, no definitive right answer can be found at all. And even when there is one - or at least when there is reason to prefer some responses to others - the answer isn't obvious and can't be summarized in a sentence. Why is it so hard to find a cure for cancer? Do numbers ever end? Why do people lie? Why did we invade Vietnam? Grappling with meaty questions like these (which were among those generated by a class in Plainview, NY) is a real project . . . literally. A question-based approach to teaching tends to shade into learning that is problem- (Delisle, 1997) and project-based (Kilpatrick, 1918; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Wolk, 1998). Intellectual proficiency is strengthened as students figure out how to do justice to a rich question. As they investigate and come to understand important ideas more fully, new questions arise along with better ways of asking them, and the learning spirals upwards. Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What's required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures, or simpl