Kansas Learning First Alliance

Jenny goes beyond the books to help you excel in class. Tips on reading, writing, and more.

"A Career Cluster is a grouping of occupations and broad industries based on commonalities. The 16 Career Clusters organize academic and occupational knowledge and skills into a coherent course sequence and identify pathways from secondary schools to two- and four-year colleges, graduate schools, and the workplace. Students learn in school about what they can do in the future. This connection to future goals motivates students to work harder and enroll in more rigorous courses."

"With so many career options available, where do you start?"

Numerous art lessons are posted on this website by teachers & students.

ArtSnacks is a positive learning community. Be sure the words, music and pictures you post are ALWAYS appropriate for our littlest artists. Kevin Honeycutt's site for art projects.

"From role-playing games for students to parent seminars, teaching social and emotional learning requires a lot of moving parts, but when all the pieces come together such instruction can rival the effectiveness of purely academic interventions to boost student achievement, according to the largest analysis of such programs to date."

"I thought I'd bring together a few resources that I've found helpful in gaining an understanding of what Common Core might mean. Please feel free to share additional suggestions."

"Google Apps has been a boon to schools all over the world. This was a packaged deal from Google where many tools are made available to the schools and school districts to create a controlled system for communication and collaboration."

"What can we do to change things? For starters, we need to overhaul the way we teach copyright and other intellectual property issues in our schools. Library media specialists also need to quit being copyright cops. And it's time to stop thinking that if we don't know for sure if something's 100-percent legal, we shouldn't do it-that mindset just doesn't work. Below are four changes our profession must seriously consider if we're going to meet the needs of our students and teachers."

But we can still be civil. It's easy. We can trade ideas instead of insults. We can vow to not say things online we wouldn't say to someone's face. We can put away our phones and pay attention. We can think before we speak or hit send. Join us and spread the word.

"In Intelligence Reframed Howard Gardner contends that "literacies, skills, and disciplines ought to be pursued as tools that allow us to enhance our understanding of important questions, topics, and themes." Today's readers become literate by learning to read the words and symbols in today's world and its antecedents. They analyze, compare, evaluate and interpret multiple representations from a variety of disciplines and subjects, including texts, photographs, artwork, and data. They learn to choose and modify their own communication based on the rhetorical situation. Point of view is created by the reader, the audience and the medium."

The draft of PD standards, coming from NSDC/Learning Forward.

"Have you ever used the internet to comment on what you see online, share information about yourself or others, communicate with friends, play games, get material for an assignment or buy stuff online? If you answered YES to any of these then you are a digital citizen. Why is digital citizenship important to you? Do you want to get the best out of using the internet and keep yourself and others safe and healthy in an online world? Use these materials to learn what it takes to become a positive digital citizen."

"Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day. Do they understand the rules that dictate the ethical use of these digital files, and do they understand why these issues are relevant? The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program is a free, turnkey instructional program. The goal is to create an awareness of the rights connected with creative content. Because only through education can students gain an understanding of the relevance of and a personal respect for creative rights and grow to become good digital citizens."

"This wiki was created as a companion resource for the book Digital Community, Digital Citizenship by Jason Ohler (Corwin Press, 2010), as well as a general resource for anyone interested in the issues of digital citizenship."

"I'm an educator and there is so much out there? Where do I begin? All areas of this wiki reflect K-12 interests. However, I discerned a need for a starting point for teachers and educators who are overwhelmed with resources to begin looking for digital citizenship resources of immediate use. What I present here is my favorite short list. You will find lesson plans, videos and other resources, often broken down by grade level."

" The social bookmarking web site Diigo has many features, other than simply collecting and tagging web addressess. Diigo offers a wide variety of tools for teachers and students in the K-12 classroom. Diigo is a powerful Web 2.0 application and social networking web site, as it empowers users to save, categorize and annotate information all over the Internet and share it with others Diigo users and on other social networks."

"I spend a lot of time visiting innovative classrooms in New York City. As I do, there is something that I've noticed in many classes I've visited - there are still some educators that don't seem to know the no nos for teaching with a projector or interactive whiteboard (IWB). Perhaps it's easier to notice when you're sitting as an audience member or an observer which is not often the case for teachers. If you're an innovative educator teaching with a projector or IWB, you too might be engaging in a no no or two. "

"We are complementing Salman's ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World. "

"Blended high schools incorporate multiple modes of learning to prepare students for college and careers. Blended learning is a shift of instructional responsibility for at least a portion of the day to an online environment to boost learning, staffing, and or facilities productivity."

"At King Middle School and Casco Bay High School, in Portland, Maine, every student works in a widely hailed project-learning method called expeditionary learning. Discover what your school can learn."