Group items tagged

Brendon Burchard talks on how "SMART" Goals are limiting. Instead, why not work on D.U.M.B. goals? A different way to view how to grow and work with an abundance vs. a deficit mentality. Question: How do SMART goals in education limit our work, vision, and enthusiasm?

Sharing and collecting student work in Google Drive takes some work when manually creating folders. gClassFolders makes that process easier for both students & teachers. View the demo video to get a sense of the process. This is a free way to get the job done. You may also want to look at Hapara, which has bells and whistles that'll surprise you!

A really well written post on some things we should consider about blogging. She based her post on her own experience with blogging and the work of Sue Waters, a professional educ. blogger and trainer for Edublogs. Here are some questions she asks: Who should be writing for? What is the benefit? Is it important to read others work and comment? I think if you read this post, you will be encouraged. 

Krista Moroder, Director of Learning & Instructional Tech. (former teacher) provides some insight into these two tech. integration frameworks and their strengths & difficulties. "I'm going to preface this post by saying that I think both TPACK and SAMR are incredibly useful frameworks- and I use them a lot in my work with education technology. While I don't want to completely discount either framework in this post, I do want to start a discussion- and explain why I am currently not finding them completely effective in my work with teachers. Worth the read....

Award-winning educational futurist David Thornburg discusses classroom design and four learning models he has written about extensively in his book, "From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments" Is your classroom designed primarily for the traditional lecture? For using technology to do the same old things better than differently? Give out too much information vs. using more open-ended approaches? Transform the way information is learned and used? This article helped me to reflect on the way I encourage the use of technology and how to make its use an experience more reflective of what is presented in the CCSS and 21st century learning. What is your response to the article? Agree, disagree? What model(s) do you see yourself using? What movement would you like to make in your approach?

Create online polls/assessments using Qzzr - with analytics. Can embed multimedia and embed your quiz. Visually very appealing and works on all devices. The free version would work well in classrooms.

"It seems like just yesterday that I was a disconnected nomad working hard to maintain the status quo and conform to a rigid system commonly known as education. You see, prior to 2009 I was adamantly opposed to even the thought of using social media for both personal and professional reasons. As a building level leader burdened by endless responsibilities, I could not fathom wasting even a precious minute in what I saw as a perpetual time sap. " Read the rest of this post to see how Eric discovered being connected on social media and engaging in conversations with passionate educators has transformed his work in education.

Here are some good tips on how to streamline the information you face on the Internet, email, etc. Like Jodie, I'm working to implement the GTD organizational system using Evernote & Web Clipper, Diigo, Google Mail, Google Reader, Twitter, Google Drive, etc. 

The next generation of the graphing calculator. Using a powerful and blazingly-fast math engine, the calculator can instantly plot any equation, from lines and parabolas up through derivatives and Fourier series. Data tables open up a world of curve-fitting and modeling. Sliders make it a breeze to demonstrate function transformations. As browser-based html5 technology, the graphing calculator works on any computer or tablet without requiring any downloads.

"OpenMedia.ca is a grassroots organization that safeguards the possibilities of the open and affordable Internet. We work towards informed & participatory digital policy."

Easy to read chart on how to cite social media sources in academic work.

"NY Times writers collaborated with the Common Sense Media writer Kelly Schryver to focus on the increasingly important and nuanced question "Who Are You Online?" Times and Learning Network content as well as offerings from Common Sense Media's K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum for teaching and learning about this complex issue." Lots of avenues to take this material in working with students.

Innovative use of blended learning, using a  rotating centers approach: Teacher instruction, Group work, Technology group. They are able to do more differentiated instruction within this model and looks like they're using some digital curriculum or an LMS. 

"At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags. Semiconductor firm Qualcomm's revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly's wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called "peripheral" knowledge -- that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task -- can influence breakthrough innovation. "The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates," says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can't think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? By bringing peripheral knowledge to core tasks, it is well known that work groups can recombine ideas in novel and useful ways. But the problem, Haas notes, is primarily one of attention: How do you get workers focused on a particular task to notice -- and make use of -- seemingly irrelevant information?"