Group items tagged

Beth Sanders' students participating in a collaborative exchange with Marialice Curran's student about what it means to be a citizen in the 21st Century.

Love what Beth Sanders and Marialice Curran are doing with the iCitizen project. They are connecting their students to talk about authentic aspects of our world that matter.

have your students help build a dictionary

Collaborative writing and editing continues to move into the classroom. If the pundits didn't like wikipedia, what about a dictionary that students build for themselves? "The purpose of this project is to create a free, open simple dictionary for students to use. This dictionary will ultimately be published in a variety of formats and for multiple platforms.  To add to this project, find a word you'd like to write a definition for or click "Instant Karma" for a random word. Please consult the style guidelines for editorial information."

Science and gaming

Science and gaming

Students reflecting on PBL and social networks.

Dean Groom interviews his ninght grade students about how social networks affected their learning. This is a reflection of their project and a great listen if you want to hear what STUDENTS say. We need more reflective student voices like this.

Free creative commons licensed music for download!

Digital storytelling music site - just be careful, you may want to prescreen and download some yourself as there may be some profanity.

a source of free and legal music downloads. The music on Jamendo comes from the artists who upload it themselves. While not all of the music is licensed for re-use, there is a substantial collection of music labeled with a Creative Commons license. As always, before re-using any of the music you download make sure it is labeled for re-use.Applications for EducationJamendo could be a good source of music downloads for students to use in video and podcast projects. Some of the music does come with an "explicit" label so you probably don't want to send young students searching on Jamendo on their own. In that case it would be better for you to build a collection from which students choose.

What happens if you really begin to rethink what your school looks like? No, I'm not talking about rethink from a wildly radical viewpoint - like mine or say, Neil Postman's - but just if a dedicated set of educators stops "tinkering" with little changes and wonders what school might be like...

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.

An excellent project for 4th - 6th grade sudents from Jennifer Wagner called the Prince Caspian project which will allow teachers to collaborate with other teachers around the world about the book and the upcoming movie "Prince caspian."

This project from Jennifer Wagner will allow literature teachers of grades 4-6 to collaborate to talk about the Prince Caspian move and the book. From April - June.

I recently assigned a new project to my 11th grade English students: The 20% Project. Although it's called a "project", that term is merely for student understanding and lack of a better word. This project is based on the "20 percent time" Google employees have to work on something other than their job description.

Suzie Nestico is our project manager for this semester's Flat Classroom project and is doing an incredible job. She is a history teacher and is doing work at her Pennsylvania school to align everything with common core.Here,you can see her transparency with her students about each aspect of the FlatClassroom project, what they are doing, and how those things are aligned with what they need to know. While she very humbly pointed out to me that her blog is just beginning and still a work in process with some things to iron out - it is a great example of how global collaboration, common core, and core courses can go hand in hand.

Excellent article from ASCD about meaningful work and students. I particularly appreciate the section on having a driving question. "A project without a driving question is like an essay without a thesis." Absolutely. Does your project or activity have a driving question? Great article worth a read.

This from my email: "This is Natasha Dantzig for the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference. I'm writing to let you know that organizers of the TED Prize have announced an open challenge in support of author and philanthropist Dave Eggers and his 2008 TED Prize wish to collect 1,000 stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools. Each year, three individuals are granted the TED Prize, which provides winners with a wish to change the world, $100,000 in seed money, and the support of the TED community in making the wish come true. As an extension of Eggers initial wish, the open challenge asks individuals to design and implement new projects for local public school students. The three winning entries will receive a pass to the sold out TED2009 Conference to be held in Long Beach, California on February 4-7, 2009. " Good luck with sharing. I find it interesting that the projects that are emerging between public and private schools and crossing the lines and boundaries between us (which is what we should be doing) could only be submitted by a public school person and then, may not be considered because it can only be for public school students. In some ways, the writing of the proposal itself is limiting because it doesn't see the vision of what is truly happening in education.

Online project-based learning experience that helps students learn about human right's abuse around the world and then ACT on it. Focus on student activism, in addition to raising general awareness.

one might question, what do you want the students to get out of this project? How will it help them? Are the benefits academic and or social? Listed below are the goals and benefits of student blogs.

Navigating the Digital Rapids written by Julie Lindsay and I about 21st Century Skills and @netgened and @digiteen. One of the points in this article, I'd like to repeat on this bookmark and my blog: "Teachers who avoid customization often claim they cannot customize and meet standards at the same time. But meeting standardized learning outcomes does not mean you have to standardize the process. In fact, if you involve students in student-centered, globally connected projects, each student's learning experience becomes markedly different, and each classroom becomes as unique as the students and teachers who learn there. A customized classroom and national standards can coexist and lead to rich learning." Read and let me know if you have questions!

A variety of Google templates for classroom use including a student newspaper, timeline, calendar ideas for students, classroom job application, story mapping graphic organizer, venn diagrams.  Many are elementary level but easily adaptable for higher grade levels.

Much of what is called virtual education is really just bad teaching done on the cheap. Most of what I have seen offered as online courses for students doesn't rise to the level of a mail-order correspondence course. There may be no lectures, but there is no deep learning to be found either. Teachers don't know their students and the pedagogical emphasis is on product over process.

ePals and th Smithsonian are sponsoring their third Invent It challenge where students address real world problems with inventions. The projects are due on April 11. Sign up now and plan this authentic project into your classroom this spring.