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http://www.funbrain.com/ Funbrain offers games on composers, instruments, reading and vocabulary.

www.creatingmusic.com Elementary-age students can enjoy exploring, creating and manipulating music.

pbskids.org/chuck/index.html#/jazz Elementary students can enjoy playing with an interactive Improvisation Station.

The primary purpose of education is to enable students to make a living as adults; without this capability, everything else falls away. Yet we still teach within a basic framework established in the 19th century. In today’s education environment, we seem to be slipping back from the future into the 19th century’s contextual emphasis on reading, writing, and math. The consequences could be dire, even propelling us back to a two-tiered education system: just reading, writing, and math for the disadvantaged in underresourced schools, alongside a richer 21st-century curriculum for the country’s productive employees and future decisionmakers.

• Generative Computation The ability to create a limitless variety of “expressions” from a generative catalyst of modest content. Think Beethoven’s four-note theme, which he spun into the Fifth Symphony. • Promiscuous Combination of Ideas Mingling of different domains of knowledge, thereby creating new products, relationships, techniques, and technologies. Think of a recipe that combines the chemistry of ingredients with knowledge of temperature and time, along with taste, feel, and smell. • Mental Symbols Encoding sensory experiences, both real and imagined, into complex systems of communication. Think metaphor or analogy. • Abstract Thought The ability to imagine what isn’t yet.

The term "21st-century skills" is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today's world.

The research, to date, has provided no evidence that having either computers or whiteboards in schools has any positive effect on students’ reading and writing proficiencies.

Twenty-first-century learning means that students master content while producing, synthesizing, and evaluating information from a wide variety of subjects and sources with an understanding of and respect for diverse cultures. Students demonstrate the three Rs, but also the three Cs: creativity, communication, and collaboration.

Readers and Writers Workshop is an instructional model that focuses on students as learners, as well as readers and writers in practice. As readers and writers, students are mentored, working in a supportive and collaborative environment with their mentor on touchstone texts.

As a middle school ELA teacher, I continue to collaborate with my peers in the building and across the school district. I participate in planning and designing instruction, inquiry-based studies, and collaborative coaching and learning. These activities have provided me with a repertoire of research-based best practices to engage the readers and writers in my ELA classroom.

From the first day of school, we encourage students to choose the books they read. We model how to choose and review a book for reading. We also encourage students to choose books at their independent reading level rather than at their frustration or difficult level. Students read for 30 minutes daily and complete an entry on the reading.

The term 21st century skills refers to a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that are believed—by educators, school reformers, college professors, employers, and others—to be critically important to success in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs and contemporary careers and workplaces. Generally speaking, 21st century skills can be applied in all academic subject areas, and in all educational, career, and civic settings throughout a student’s life.

Leadership, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation, facility in using virtual workspaces

Critical thinking, problem solving, reasoning, analysis, interpretation, synthesizing information

19 Pencils -

ACMI Generator

Boom Writer

12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now Tweet or post status updates as a class. Teacher Karen Lirenman lets students propose nuggets of learning that are posted for parents to read. Write blog posts about what students are learning. Teacher Kevin Jarrett blogs reflections about his Elementary STEM lab for parents to read each week. Let your students write for the world. Linda Yollis' students reflect about learning and classroom happenings. Connect to other classrooms through social media. Joli Barker is fearlessly connecting her classroom through a variety of media. Use Facebook to get feedback for your students' online science fair projects. Teacher Jamie Ewing is doing this now, as he shared recently. Use YouTube for your students to host a show or a podcast. Don Wettrick's students hosted the Focus Show online and now share their work on a podcast. Create Twitter accounts for a special interest projects. My student Morgan spent two years testing and researching the best apps for kids with autism (with the help of three "recruits"), and her work just won her an NCWIT Award for the State of Georgia.

Ask questions to engage your students in authentic learning. Tom Barrett did this when his class studied probability by asking about the weather in various locations. Communicate with other classrooms. The Global Read Aloud, Global Classroom Project and Physics of the Future are three examples of how teachers use social media to connect their students as they collaborate and communicate. Create projects with other teachers. (Full disclosure: I co-created Physics of the Future with Aaron Maurer, a fellow educator I first met on Twitter.) Share your learning with the world. My students are creating an Encyclopedia of Learning Games with Dr. Lee Graham's grad students at the University of Alaska Southeast. The educators are testing the games, and the students are testing them, too. Further a cause that you care about. Mrs. Stadler's classes are working to save the rhinos in South Africa, and Angela Maiers has thousands of kids choosing to matter.

12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now

Flipped Classroom Resources

The Journey to a Flipped Classroom 

The Flipped Classroom Model: A Full Picture « User Generated Education

The Instructional Practice Guide includes coaching and lesson planning tools to help teachers and those who support teachers to make the Key Shifts in instructional practice required by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).   In order for teachers, colleagues, and instructional leaders to have meaningful and productive conversations about instructional goals and outcomes, there must be shared expectations regarding lesson planning and observation. These tools provide common criteria framed around the Key Shifts required by the CCSS that can be used to facilitate conversations between teachers and coaches about aligning content and instruction. By using these tools to reflect on practice, clear connections can be made between Common Core-aligned lesson planning and classroom instruction--conversations which can supplement information from other established observation protocols that focus on planning and preparation,  classroom management and environment, and professional responsibilities. 

appropriate use of technology in the learning environment can serve to motivate some students, significant problems surrounding student motivation and engagem ent remain.

As a result of the gamification, 17% of students com pleted some extension material and two students com pleted significant amounts of extra work to achieve the highest level possible in the gam e.

For example, ‘badges' are an intrinsic component of our classrooms. Teachers award points for completing assignments; over the course of the semester these points add up and get converted into ‘badges' (commonly referred to as grades);