Group items tagged

Guidance Counselor Alert: "The YES Competition was established in 2003 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the College Board to inspire talented high school students to apply epidemiological methods to the investigation of public health issues and, ultimately, encourage the brightest young minds to enter the field of public health. The Young Epidemiology Scholars (YES) Competition, the nation's leading public health competition for high school students, has opened the application process for its 2010-11 Competition. The online registration, guidelines and a new YES project guide are now available online at www.collegeboard.com/yes. The deadline for entries is 9 AM EST, February 1, 2011." I do wish that they would have multimedia as a part of this competition as some of the best competitions out there engage this medium. However, this is something that those going into health should look into.

Doug Johnson is a great read for his blunt, in your face honesty and his point about how technology companies are trying to differentiate is a great one. I think, however, we should extend this to schools as well. If your school is great, say why, but dissing the competition is no way to compete. If you think your school has no competition, think again. So, read this in light of the arriving and coming competition on the edulandscape and have an honest take on how you should "sell" the virtues of your school. If you can't talk about how great your school is and have to resort to how bad the other one is, prepare for a day when you'll shutter the windows and wonder how they're going to keep the bugs out of your empty building. Wake up and smell the wires burning their way into your student's computers and tablets, great teachers are just a click away and we've all got to learn how to blend and trend our courses, teaching, and to bridge our classrooms to add real value as teachers. It isn't hard as you think but if you just sit and teach like you've always taught, you're setting yourself up for some unpleasant days. You can't do everything but you can do something to improve yourself. Next practices are an important part of your best practice. Always innovate and never settle. Standards are only the beginning, you must have purpose if you're going to be a great teacher. Doug says: "But what I do know that when competitors trash each other, I tend to tune out. And I flat out hate it when I know they are lying - and I will NOT buy from a liar. A salesman recently promoted his video storage service by stating "unlike YouTube, we don't own your movies." That's just not true. (YouTube doesn't own your movies, GoogleApps doesn't own your Docs, CIPA, FERPA, etc. do not ban social media.)"

Upload your Charles Dickens lessons and resources in this competition to submit the best resources. This is a UK competition, but perhaps some others may want to enter as well. I also wanted to include this because of the great list of Charles Dickens resources here. If you teach Great Expectations or any other Dickens classic, you'll want to download these free lesson plans and resources. To be eligible for the Charles Dickens / Literary Heritage competition, all lesson plans & teaching resources shared must only cater for texts by authors found in the literary heritage section of the Secondary English National Curriculum, or from current GCSE & A Level awarding body specifications for English. Your can submit resources for poetry, prose or drama texts (or all three!) across the relevant key stage. At GCSE and A Level, resources can be submitted to support teaching and learning of controlled assessment and / or examination units. When you upload resources for entry to the competition, please take care to tag and classify your resources accurately in the relevant key stage, topic and sub topic areas. For example:

Love this response, bonus opportunity by Suzie Nestico. When she emailed and asked for a response and the first would get bonus - 5 replies - listen to what DID get them to respond: "I sent a message to my students via our Google Group around 8:00PM on Sunday night. This message said, "Need any more bonus? Respond to this message for two points. If you tweet it, text it, call your friends, post as you FaceBook status, and another student mentions they got word from you, you get FIVE points." Guess what? By 11:00PM on Sunday night, I gave out bonus points to over THIRTY of the ninety students. By 8:00AM today, I gave out bonus to an additional eighteen students. In just changing one thing I did, I just reached nearly half of my students. I could have said, "the first ten students to respond will get bonus," in order to foster competition. But, I tried a bit of that several weeks ago. In Heidi's words, "Competition 0, Collaboration 1." "

Registration for World Math Day (March 3, 2010) opened today for students ages 5-18 at www.worldmathday.com. The competition is a free, online math competition where students compete against one another in a quest to answer the most math questions in 24 hours. Last year, a new world record was set after a staggering 1,952,879 million students from 38,058 schools in 204 countries answered 452,681,681 math questions correctly during the World Math Day competition. Students are looking to break the record again this year. This is a REALLY cool event.

Great project - this is on March 3 and registration closes March 1st, 2010.

Powerpoint presentation by systems engineer Christopher Bearden for a FIRST robotics competition team.  Describes how industry engineering design process can be used by students preparing for the FIRST Robotics Competition. 

Enter this Writing competition from the BBC for 13 years old and younger. Write a story in less then 500 words. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Competitions+%26+Events

Contest to encourage student to create a vision of the future of technology. This site shows the inventions and the awards. This is a neat competition and you might want to plug in your math and science program, particularly the gifted program. Competitions help your top students reach higher and are a very important part of gifted programs (and others too!)

K-12 student competition for creating the future of technology.

Great reading about the trends to watch.

This is a great read -- I particularly think that Constant Partial Attention (CPA) is something that we should be aware of in our classrooms. Excellent article. Also I find it interesting how he shares that some kids who have gotten constant positive reinforcement in schools are going to have a tough time w/ competition. Competition is part of life.

Welcome to Doodle 4 Google, a competition where we invite K-12 students to play around with our homepage logo and see what new designs they come up with. This year we're inviting U.S. kids to join in the doodling fun, around the intriguing theme "What I Wish for the World." Please visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

"At Google, the only thing we love as much as science is science education. We want to celebrate young scientific talent and engage students who might not yet be engaged with science. So, in partnership with CERN, the LEGO Group, National Geographic, and Scientific American we've created an exciting new global science competition, the Google Science Fair. Students all over the world who are between the ages of 13 and 18 are eligible to enter this competition and compete for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences, internships and scholarships. "

"I loved competitions when I was a kid. Anything involving puzzles, quizzes or games really excited me. In truth: I loved being right and I hated being wrong! School can be quite a competitive environment. Some of our students can really feel the pressure when it comes to scoring highly on tests, exams and extra-curricular tournaments and events."

Badges for lifelong learning competition by Digital media and Learning. Stage 2 applications are now open. this is definitely something you need to review over break if you work in education to understand the implications for your organization.

The Kids' Science Challenge is a nationwide competition for 3rd to 6th graders to submit experiments and problems for REAL scientists and engineers to solve. Play science games, watch videos, and enter to win awesome prizes and trips!

To me it really brought home how artificial speeches about canned subjects in front of a class are little to no preparation about talking to people naturally in a real-world setting. It's like the students are only good at "pretend speaking"

Just went thru public speaking in our school... this rings painfully true!

... and the three steps are: competition, cooperation and collaboration - of course.

The Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition focused on finding solutions to real-world issues. It's the dawn of a new Imagine Cup. Are you ready to change the world?

Photo =gallery from the science fair at the White House. Science teachers should peruse these. I wish every student had to do a science fair project and we'd elevate project based activities to the "status" of doing well on an SAT or other test. I think these require a  lot more higher order thinking and problem solving. "President Obama hosts the White House Science Fair to celebrate the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions from across the country. He met students in the East Garden of the White House, and they explained their science projects and experiments to him. Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post"

You can go to this website and find some cool ideas for science competitions. "The Elementary Science Olympiad offers over 80 challenging and motivational events which are balanced among the various science disciplines of life science, earth science, and physical science. These individual and team events also offer a balance among events requiring knowledge of science facts, concepts, processes, skills, and applications. While a number of the events are in the form of a general quiz, the majority provide an element of "hands-on" participation allowing the "active" study of science. The emphasis is on learning, participation, interaction, and having fun."