Group items tagged

"What Do You Have to Lose? was a blog post I wrote 4 years ago… It is a new idea for many classroom teachers/students to move from writing, reading and "doing" work, not only for themselves, supervisors/parents or for a monetary compensation/grade, to share their work openly and freely with others. The idea of putting oneself "out there on the internet" (on a larger scale than the teacher lounge) and publicly "brag" about successes, admit failures, ask for help or document one's learning and teaching process, feels unnatural and even scares many of them. A lot of water has gone under the bridge, a lot has changed in terms of technology… It has been 4 years and my belief in sharing to amplify teaching and learning has grown stronger, even when the work I share gets taken, plagiarized and used for profit by others. I am continuing to make the benefits of documenting (for reflection, metacognition and connection purposes) visible, but the documentation can not be the end all. The next step must be sharing and disseminating that documentation. It is about sharing conversations, resources, model lessons, student work, reflections, innovative ideas, action research, etc. Sharing in service of benefiting the educational community and advancing eduction. Sharing in order to be part of a network that supports each other and and pushes thinking forward. Without individual parts, there is no network. The more parts, the larger and stronger the potential network. In the last few weeks, there have been many examples at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, that show the power of sharing and the ripple effect it created: Teaching others you will never meet Authentic audience Feedback Personal Branding Remix & Added Value Building a Personal Learning Network"

"The Connected Educator Month is around the corner. Norway, Australia, New Zealand and the USA have organized hundreds of events for educators to learn, connect and collaborate. As I am preparing to be part of a panel on October 2, 4 pm (USA EST)/October 3rd, 9am (NZ time) and keynote in Oslo, Norway on October 21st, I am looking at 4 big ideas around the connected educator through the lens of connected professional learning."

"These questions intrigued Ana Paula Cortez, one of our Portuguese teachers at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, and compelled her to explore them with her students. prep--Inspiration: 7billionothers.org--In 2003, after The Earth seen from the Sky, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with Sybille d'Orgeval and Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire, launched the 7 billion Others project. 6,000 interviews were filmed in 84 countries by about twenty directors who went in search of the Others. From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes: What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you? Forty-five questions that help us to find out what separates and what unites us. These portraits of humanity today are accessible on this website. The heart of the project, which is to show everything that unites us, links us and differentiates us, is found in the films which include the topics discussed during these thousands of hours of interviews. Objective: Raise awareness of culture and interconnectedness of common themes/threads that connect humans no matter of their cultural origin. Take advantage of our multilingual students to share and connect speakers of different languages. Students: 7th & 8th grade Portuguese Language Learners Project Idea: Middle School students create a video (testimonies, journal type) responding to pre-set prompts from 7billionothers.org (love, happiness, work).Future extension idea: personalize the prompts by tweaking to address specific middle school topic…. friends, family, what do you want to be when you grow up….) Process: 1. Discuss video filming techniques.. observe the ones recorded on 7billionothers.org: Framing, Angle, Stability, Background"

"Visual literacy is defined by Wikipedia: Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be "read" and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading. I believe that visual literacy cannot only include the ability of "reading" a picture, but needs to also include the ability of "writing"/creating images, that represent a thought, idea and concept."

"I have been facilitating an iPhoneography activity for our Middle Schoolers over the past two quarters. iPhoneography is defined by Wikipedia as: Phoneography is the art of creating photos with an Apple iPhone.This is a style of mobile photography that differs from all other forms of digital photography in that images are both shot and processed on the iOS device. It does not matter whether a photo is edited using different graphics applications or not."

"I can die happy now :) I have seen learning in the 21st Century modern classroom! The learning just oozes through the cracks of the physical classroom walls. Learning is amplified by the amount of people who are collaborating, participating, communicating and creating. The learning is NOT about the technology tools, but what students can DO with them to learn in new ways. The learning is about an authentic tasks, that allows students to contribute in a individualized and personalized manner to make them realize that their work matters in the real world. It all started out with a conversation between Mike Fisher and me. He had written over 40 children poems and was in the process of wondering what to do with them? I was looking for an authentic task for 9-11 year old students. We felt we had a perfect match! How about getting the students Language Arts and Art teacher involved? The initial idea was to make a unit of poetry come alive, study Mike's poems and visualize the poems by creating illustrations."

"Our second grade teacher, Ms.S., was ready to "upgrade" a traditionally taught unit on reptiles. We met to discuss how she could incorporate the 5 C's of 21st century skills as well as support new emerging literacies. The basic idea was to upgrade a typical report, using books from the library to research and fill out a "research" template on a piece of paper."

"There is a lot of thoughts and ideas about what learning in the 21st century is supposed to look like. Most likely you are constantly bombarded with books, workshops, keynote presentations, webinars and good old lectures (yes, even on the topic of modern learning…) that remind you that it is time to upgrade traditional teaching and learning."

"Guest post by Silvana Meneghini, Academic Technology Coordinator, Graded- American School of São Paulo. Originally posted on her blog On the Edge. Pedagogical ideas like student centered learning, collaboration, and critical thinking have been around for a long time and are slowly making the way into the classroom. When technology came into play in schools, there was a big focus on technology tools and acquiring tech skills. Nowadays, there is a perception that technology has to be seamless and the main focus is on pedagogy. "

"Experimenting with sketchnoting as note taking and as visual summaries and slide design has been an area of intense interest for me over the past six months. Completely inapt, as an analog "artist" on paper, the use of a stylus and the iPad Paper app by FiftyThree, have allowed me to experiment with color, form, design, and typography. The process of sketchnoting … has made jotting down ideas, connecting them, visually representing the brainstorming, thoughts and visions as I am creating visuals for blog posts or designing presentation slides, a more metacognitive process … has allowed me to think through a concept, as I am drawing it out ….made me consider options, perspectives of interpretation and points of view more intensely"

"Another glimpse into the classroom! Previous video clips: Socratic Seminar & Backchanneling, Visible Thinking Routine: Chalk Talk, Mystery Skype Call, Collaborate & Curate In the spirit of opening up classroom walls and creating a ripple effect of teaching and learning by sharing ideas, methods, action research and modern literacy upgrades, here is another video clip. You are watching a 7th grade Humanities classroom, led by their teacher David Jorgensen at Graded-The American School of São Paulo. The students are reading The Giver, by Lois Lowry and have been annotating their thoughts as they are reading individual chapters in a Google Doc chart/table, labeled: Observations Inferences Rituals Questions/ Predictions"

"I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Greenberg, the mind behind The Brainwaves Channel at BLC14 in Boston. Bob has been traveling the US and the world to film and connect educators who share their own thoughts, perspectives, experiences and ideas on education."

"I have been enthralled watching the following TED Talk (Ideas worth Spreading) How to Listen to Global Voices by Ethan Zuckerman: Sure, the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing mainly from people just like ourselves. Blogger and technologist Ethan Zuckerman wants to help share the stories of the whole wide world. He talks about clever strategies to open up your Twitter world and read the news in languages you don't even know."

"Steven Kimmi, on his blog Experiments in Technology posted Taught Versus Learn, A Distinguishing Factor Again, it was a small sentence that caught my eye and I was not able to let it go. Just as Kim Cofino's quote about " Using Technology Integration in the classroom is a Mindset, not a skill set", I am mulling over the meaning of Steven's idea of waiting to be taught versus being willing to learn."

"I had the incredible opportunity to attend TEDxNYED at the beginning of this month. The day was full of incredible presenters sharing their stories. Stories that I had heard before, but came alive with the passion of the presenters and the energy of the room filled with attendees ready to absorb, remix and disseminate in their own areas of influence."

"Recently I had created a "Read-Along" book for our first graders to accompany their Magic Tree House podcast and am continuing to have fun creating e-books for my iPad from Word Documents, pdfs and thematic blog posts from Langwitches. Next year, we will have an iPad cart to use with our students and I am looking forward to brainstorming more ideas and opportunities to allow students to create and organize their own e-books on the iPad."

"Via Kim Cofino on Google Buzz, I found the Google SearchStories Video Creator. I see some great possibilities in the classroom for it. * Pre-reading activities * Book summaries * Introduction /background knowledge * Discussion starters"

"Images like the following ones, visualize for me the urgency for all of us to become information literate to wade through the incredible, ever increasing, amount of information being created and shared with the world."