Group items tagged

Want to keep your brain young, exercise your body! This is a great story of a basketball team of older grandmothers who don't know how to lose. The women love it and they don't look like grandmothers. Why do we just have athletic leagues for the young? Perhaps athletic leagues are the fountain of youth...and the liquid of longer life is sweat. "But when Wright studied very active seniors, she found exercise seemed to be protective.' These MRI images show how fat can infiltrate the muscles of a sedentary senior. Compare that a MRI from a 74-year-old tri-athelete, which looks very similar to one from a 40-year-old. "We are not destined to go from lean flank steak in our 40s," said Wright. "if you think visually of what our muscles look like, to flabby rump roast. We do not have to become that way if we interject exercise throughout a lifetime. It's an important 'if.' Regular, consistent and challenging exercise is key. The Tigerettes work out strenuously, four to five times a week.

LIstening to Lauren Ferro talk about Gamer Types and how it relates to designing games for education in the OOC Hangout now. #gamifi-ed - Great article to read about this. They are relating player types to personality types as they design games. The four main types are :killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This is fascinating.

If you have one ipad, what can you do to powerfully link your students and teach -- here are four great apps and a way to get started.

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art is a show to overturn such expectations. It leads the visitor - a bit like some erstwhile explorer - on a creative adventure around the back of that flat piece of paper we think of as the world. Drawing on the finest collection of maps on this planet - the British Library has more than four million to choose from, the vast majority of which are only very rarely, if ever, put on public display - the exhibition sets out to make clear that these pictures are about far more than mere physical description. They are a series of subjective images, each shaped by the beliefs and desires, the ambitions and prejudices, the passions and anxieties of its period.

The 2009-2010 school year ended for me early today and I'm just wrapping up a few loose ends before I head into vacation mode for the summer. I did want to release the Free PDF of the Web-Based Portfolio series I've been working on for the past couple of months. I've taken the four blog posts and pu

Two-year programs offered by junior and community colleges are quicker and less expensive than four-year programs. Contrary to popular belief, the path to advancement does not always travel through a bachelor or master's degree program. Two-year associate degrees are more convenient because most offer part-time, evening, weekend, and online classes. This convenience provides advantages for those who have full-time jobs, especially adults with families.

The five steps are: * Step One: Teacher Use of Cell Phones for Professional Purposes * Step Two: Teacher Models Appropriate Use for Learning * Step Three: Strengthen the Home-School Connection with Cell Phones * Step Four: Students Use Cell Phones for Homework * Step Five: Students Use Cell Phones for Classwork

Viktor explains why it is important to search for meaning in our lives and overestimate what we can achieve, and be idealistic in a humorous four minute clip on Tel A Vision.

Adaptive innovation and experimentation, experts say, is the rule in a period of rapid change that can be seen as the digital-age equivalent of the ferment after the introduction of the printing press. "We're experiencing the biggest media petri dish in four centuries," observes Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford University who specializes in technology's effect on society.

Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The paper was co-authored by a group of distinguished education scholars and policy makers, including four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association, a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein, and others. The authors find that the accuracy of these analyses of student test scores is highly problematic. They argue that the practice of holding teachers accountable for their student's test score results should be reconsidered.

I'm sorry, but if this is news to anyone, you've been asleep at your desk. I'm sick of people being all professional about this issue, it is well past time to rebel against it. It's bad for the teachers, it's bad for the students, it's bad for society, and it's bad for the economics of education too! Get active, join a group against NCLB & high-stakes testing, and END IT. I would post the group(s) I work with, but I don't want to be dismissed as promoting them - find one(s) that are right for you and get behind them.

A good system of teacher evaluation must answer four questions: How good is good enough? Good enough at what? How do we know? and Who should decide?

Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day-but many don't fully understand the rules surrounding the appropriate use of these materials, or why this should even matter. To help teach students about intellectual property rights and encourage them to become good "digital citizens," software giant Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a free curriculum that offers cross-curricular classroom activities aligned with national standards. The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program was designed for students in grades 8-10 but can be adapted for use in grades 6-12, Microsoft says. In one unit, students are given a scenario in which a high school sponsors a school-wide Battle of the Bands. A student not involved in the production decides to videotape and sell copies of the show to students and family members. Later, one of the performers ("Johnny") learns his image has been co-opted by the maker of a video game without his permission. Students research intellectual property laws to see who owns the "rights" to the Battle of the Bands as a whole, as well as the rights of individual performers, to determine three or four steps that Johnny can take. http://digitalcitizenshiped.com

A virtual drum roll please… We are thrilled to officially open the application process for the Discovery Student Adventures Pilot Program. Join us as we discover more of our incredible planet earth together with adventure trips to Australia, South Africa, and China. In order to participate in this pilot trip, you must be a STAR Discovery Educator. Not only are you able to take part in this once in a lifetime opportunity, each STAR selected will be able to choose four of their students to join them on the adventure! This is at no cost to you or your students! So with no further ado… here's the official wording and post importantly the link to apply.

Estie Cuellar from Texas has a dream to take nine of her students to the conference. While many of us have raised our money from private donors, Estie is located at a school with many underserved children from families in poverty. I have pledged to do what I can to help her spread the word about her situation. She has scholarships for four of her students to pay their conference fees, however, all schools must raise money for their own airfare. This is a great cause and I hope that there are some people out there who believe in the vision of representing ALL of our society here in America at a conference which plans to turn conferences upside down -- working hard to give students a meaningful place alongside the educators who will be attending the leadership strand of the conference. Julie and I dream of writing a book to fund this conference in the future, but for now, we have to do it all the hard way ( a lot of pavement pounding and hard work.)

The impact of schools on student achievement has been of great interest in school effects research the last four decades. This study examines trends of school effects on student achievement, employing three national probability samples of high school seniors: NLS:72, HSB:82, and NELS:92.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

Information from librarian association on their standards 4 learning

Learning Standards 4 Learning from the AASL - I like these four standards. Wonder about connection though - guess that fits in #3.