Group items tagged

"Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought."

"While preparing for the upcoming school year, Twisted Sister's epic protest song began playing as I read the Declaration of Independence. Obviously my mind drifted to imagined Thomas Jefferson and John Adams letting their hair down and dancing around the streets of Philadelphia during a break from drafting the epic document. I realized then that I serendipitously uncovered something that I could use in the classroom - pairing music to primary documents to demonstrate understanding!" Taylor - I read this and immediately thought of you. Assignment for student - Remix the text of a primary document or famous historical speech with a song or multiple songs that add to the theme of the document/speech. Example included in the post.

Push for Journal Writing: James Britton Transactional Writing (80% of writing and how students are evaluated). Doing more does not make it better. If you don't know your topic, you won't be good at writing about it. Poetic Writing (10%) Expressive Writing (5%) Writing about thoughts, metacognitive. Increasing students doing this type of writing helps them write better.

For math people, this guy is very solid on how you develop the patterns of thought and understanding.

""What's the sine of π/2?" I asked my first-ever trigonometry class. "One!" they replied in unison. "We learned that last year." So I skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn't really know what "sine" even meant. They'd simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn't a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game. Trigonometry was just a collection of non-rhyming lyrics to the lamest sing-along ever. Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding."

"Mark talked about the idea of using Evidence-Based Arguments as a starting point. Every historical investigation needs to begin with a great question. Then they asked kids to do research and create videos. But what they got was disappointing. What they got was basically text with pictures, a script with a background. It wasn't a story, it wasn't engaging, and it often didn't really answer the question.  They begin to realize that they needed to learn more about how to create high-quality documentaries, how to use images and video to actually tell a story. And eventually they came up with a Four Step Process that students work through to create high-quality documentaries:" 4 Step Process for creating HST videos. I don't necessarily agree with the author's thought that tech should not be introduced until step #4, as tech can enhance 1-3 just as well. The teacher just needs to model good behavior and help students develop structures for the work in these phases for it to be successful.

"If teachers don't have enough time to ask, answer, reflect on, and revise their thoughts about the questions above, then we shouldn't be filling their time with things other people get paid to do, like writing curriculum, writing fancy-schmancy benchmark tests, looking at data that's not useful on the individual student level, or discussing which minutes of the day the bathrooms will be open to students." So many things going on in this article...Personally, I found this statement to be the main standout. I agree with this completely - instruction comes first and all the rest is secondary. If you do a great job with instruction, many of the other time eaters/wasters should fall into place and take care of themselves naturally.

"Technology, the Law and Education October 19, 2013. Chickahominy MIddle School, Mechanicsville 9 am- noon ​Join Jon Becker and friends for a thought-provoking presentation and small-group discussion. This event is free of charge, but space is limited and registration is required.  ​More and more educators are finding creative ways to integrate technology into the teaching and learning process.  Sometimes, though, those teachers are stymied by legal or regulatory roadblocks.  In some cases, the laws and regulations are applied properly.  However, in many instances, laws and regulations are misinterpreted and/or misapplied.  At this workshop, attendees will have an opportunity to explore, discuss and bust some myths around issues at the evolving intersection of educational technology and the law."

"I was seeking a replacement for "unfathomable." I thought of "depthless," but, feeling a bit iffy about it, I consulted my old Webster's Second. Yes, it was a synonym for "unfathomable" ("Of measureless depth … unsoundable") but also for "fathomable" ("Having no depth; shallow"). The word was what I think of as an auto-antonym (a term that doesn't appear in Webster's Second): it's its own opposite. Which is to say, it's a mostly unusable word. "

A dictionary, thesaurus, and valuable tool for matching thoughts to words like never before.

"Since demolishing 78 traffic signals and installing 80 roundabouts, the northern Indiana city of Carmel has reduced the number of accidents by 40 percent and the number of accidents with injuries by 78 percent." There's a great lesson in here somewhere. I'm not sure of the exact structure for it, but here are some of my random thoughts. Let me know if you have others: Use Googlemaps and GoogleEarth in order to determine how many traffic lights are in a specific location in a county/city. Using the calculations in this article/video, how much could the county/city that you researched in Google maps have saved if they installed traffic circles rather than traffic lights. Extension - Research the number of accidents and injury/fatality stats for the area that you've researched. Using the calculations in this video/article, how many lives would traffic circles save in this area?

"The following Problem Based Learning (PrBL) curriculum maps are based on the Math Common Core State Standards and the associated scope and sequences. The problems and tasks have been scoured from thoughtful math bloggers who have advanced our practice by posting their materials online." This is an incredible accumulation of lessons, tasks, and assessments that address the mathematical standards for the common core. Although it might take some time to align our specific SOL strands and content with the appropriate common core tags, these curriculum maps are still worth scouring and using, as there is a TON of good stuff here. This also might be a decent bookmark in case Virgina ever goes to the Common Core…

"This could be an interesting tool for creative writing prompts and/or vocabulary work. Here are a couple thoughts on how you could use Endless Interestingness in the classroom: Challenge the students to find a "string" of 5-10 photos in a row and connect those images by writing a creative story that incorporates the subjects, themes, moods, etc. of those photos. Provide the students with a vocabulary word. Have the students go to the website and choose one photo that best represents that word. Students could explain and justify their choice to the rest of the class. A Padlet wall would be a great tool for this assignment, so that all students could quickly share their work and view their classmates' ideas."

"The GIF below runs through the plates in sequence, from 2348 B.C., "The Deluge" (Quin, not unusually for his time period, was a Biblical literalist) through A.D. 1828, "End of the General Peace."" So my initial thought upon seeing this GIF was that it is eerily similar to the "fog of war" effect from Warcraft, Starcraft, and other similar games from my childhood. Based on this idea, you might be able to do something with these maps related to the essential question, "How has expansion changed our perception of the world?" (This is probably not phrased perfectly, but gets to the general idea...) Additionally, this could be an interesting item to analyze when discussing the essential question, "Have we made progress?" Students could make similar Gifs for shorter time periods to show their understanding of change over time.

""That's why the goal of school has to be automaticity," my dad concluded. The Sunday morning roads were empty, and we'd nearly made it home. "Take learning your times tables. You've got to know them cold so that you can go on to finding common denominators, or reasoning about algebraic functions, or whatever. You need each task to become automatic before you can move onto the next intellectual step."" Humorous, yet enlightening take on math class, which can be applied to school in general. What is more important for us to teach students so that it becomes more automatic? Should we make facts automatic? Or should we instead focus on skills and thought processes that can be quickly applied to many scenarios in a variety of contexts?

"Can we use primary sources and technology to promote civic engagement? Richard Hartshorne and Scott Waring of University of Central Florida say yes. They shared a great set of resources to help you structure your use of technology in the classroom.  They didn't really share specific examples about civic engagement activities with these tools - mostly a review of the different tools - but they do have one lesson idea online." Various thoughts on how to use technology in a history classroom.