Middle College National Consortium

Students at risk of dropping out have shown great capacity. See a news report about Challenge Early College High School and how it has helped to retain students at risk of dropping out.

MCNC Edgecombe Early College High School students are making boats out of cardboard and learning about business models and investments in the process.

The Alice Project--a 10th grade honors English tour of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with students reading the Annotated Alice and publishing their questions and reflections in real-time online.

excerpt on teaching critical thinking "What are the right kinds of questions to ask? In figuring out what questions to ask, it's really helpful to look at Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's begins with a knowledge-based question such as, "Who was the first president of the United States?" To answer that question simply requires knowledge. That's just a first step. Next you want them to be able to evaluate. So I push teachers to look at the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy that involve the analysis and evaluation type of questions. That's when you're pushing kids' thinking. For instance, if you ask, "To what extent was George Washington successful as the first president of the United States?" that's a much higher-level question. It requires a student to evaluate, to create a set of criteria for what makes someone a great president, to possess knowledge about George Washington, and to evaluate his performance against that set of criteria. I suggest that teachers really think about questions that hit four specific criteria. Questions should be open-ended, with no right or wrong answer, which prompts exploration in different directions require synthesis of information, an understanding of how pieces fit together be "alive in their disciplines," which means perpetually arguable, with themes that will recur throughout a student's lifetime and always be relevant be age-appropriate

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

very interesting article on Forsyth County schools in GA (I just drove through there the other day and had no idea of their innovativeness!) encouraging students to bring their own technology to classrooms to use in project and inquiry based learning. Amazing!

2.45 minute video on global learning using skype and other social media

great blog by Australian teacher on how and why they are helping their students to build digital literacy skills through eportfolios and blogging

Marrying the four Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity) to the three Rs to lead to 21st Century schools, teachers, students, and graduates.

Interesting list of social networks for educators

Flipped Classroom on how students use classroom time to apply their learning in group activities and out of class time to watch videos or other online resources that convey the content.

variety of educational science videos

Great curation tools to find and organize online resources

interesting column and short video explaining the Tubric for building driving questions

Very good infographic on the growth in digital education and need for students, teachers and professors at all levels to be prepared to play on this field. How does or should this trend affect ePD? How does or should this trend affect high school student learning and pedagogy in the classroom whether online, blended, or face to face?

Alexander Russo's This Week in Education, June 22, 2011 chart on College Haves and Have-Nots with great graphics showing the people-side of the data.

home page for Change.mooc.ca

Unbelievable!!!!

resource for MCNC Innovation lab teachers and students?