Innovation Institute: Sustainable China

Thanks for sharing, Tom. I found this upcoming virtual PD: Managing Projects in Middle and High Schools March 26th 8pm ET in a live Google + Hangout Who's up for it?

Shared by Tom.

Jesse is a good friend of mine. He is now teaching Sustainability at the College of Charleston, but in the past has founded an NGO www.ecofficiency.org He did this TEDx talk while he was at UC Irvine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGLENEuNGM He starts by saying, "Sustainability ... is a vague concept ... that has been manipulated by a wide variety of people and organizations in order to push projects and ideas... that aren't what I would call sustainable." He's done a lot of work with US and international schools over the years and would, no doubt, be willing to skype in to talk to our students.

Since we have been talking about PD, I thought I'd share this. If you don't know of Steve Hargadon, he's a good person to follow on twitter.  He works with this group and others to put on lots of virtual conferences. Best of all, they archive many of the keynotes and presentations so they are freely available later. Hargadon puts out a weekly newsletter that I subscribed to at learningrevolution.com  He and his collaborators are sifting through so much stuff and synthesizing it for us.

"she had assigned her sophomores a project in which they were to create molecular models. And one of them had asked if he could create his in Minecraft. "

I just joined this Google Group, Minecraft Teachers: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/minecraft-teachers A sampling of their resources and ongoing discussions: Lessons and Activities Looking for ideas? Want to share your curriculum? World Building Are you making your own maps? Have ideas for a lesson world? Mods Extend your game. Talk about the thousands of fun and useful mods to extend your game. Feature Requests What's on your wishlist for MinecraftEdu? What mods would you like to see to help you teach?

I saved this youtube video to our SAS video server: In "Creating is Learning: Building skills and knowledge through Minecraft", David Smeaton (as part of his M.Ed program in Australia) provides an overview of beyond-game knowledge and skills that players/authors are developing in Minecraft communities. http://videonew.saschina.org/watch_video.php?v=NUA5R6GG5N2Y

Shared by David.

In the second half of this interview, McKibben addresses the need to make urgent modifications to our systems of energy production. Video and written transcript are accessible: "We've been given the warning by our scientists who have done a terrific job at reaching consensus on a different problem in physics and chemistry. They've told us that we're in deep trouble. They've told us what we need to do, get off fossil fuel. The question now is whether we're actually going to respond to that. And it's like a sort of, well, it's like a kind of final exam for the question, was the big brain a good adaptation or not, you know? We're going find out in short order."

http://billmoyers.com/spotlight/climate-change/ Moyers has gathered a whole bunch of journalism on climate change.

Sample Math project. They have a very thorough template for their unit plan.

Use this search tool to see other projects shared by the Buck Institute: http://bie.org/project_search/results/search&channel=project_search/

"In a study of sustainable architecture, students work in pairs to create a scale site plan, scale floor plans, scale exterior elevations, a scale architectural model of the home, and a pamphlet explaining the design."

Great math and science activities, many related to sustainability and environment