Discovery Education is a great resource for educators, with assessment tools, streaming videos, TechBooks (online, interactive "textbooks") and much more..
Inquiry is a dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlement and coming to know and understand the world. As such, it is a stance that pervades all aspects of life and is essential to the way in which knowledge is created. Inquiry is based on the belief that understanding is constructed in the process of people working and conversing together as they pose and solve the problems, make discoveries and rigorously testing the discoveries that arise in the course of shared activity.
Powered by the number 1 non-fiction media brand in the world, Discovery Education transforms classrooms and inspires teachers with engaging content and services that measure and improve student achievement.
Ask any teacher what they wish they had more of and the most common answer is likely to be time. Schools are inherently busy places and there is always much to be done. We all want to meet the needs of every student, add value to their education with breadth and depth, ensure adequate coverage of the curriculum and include aspects of play and discovery. Add up all that is done in a day over and above face-to-face teaching and you can only wonder at how we manage to fit it all into the time we have. So is there an answer to this dilemma, is there a secret method to finding more time in our schedules to achieve all that we want to?
The teachers understood that learning doesn’t have to be measured in order to be
assessed.
It focused on teachers’ personal “connection[s] with our subject area” as the
basis for helping students to think “like mathematicians or historians or
writers or scientists, instead of drilling them in the vocabulary of those
subject areas or breaking down the skills.” In a word, the teachers put
kids before data.
All that does is corrupt the measure (unless it’s a test score, in which case
it’s already misleading), undermine collaboration among teachers, and make
teaching less joyful and therefore less effective by meaningful criteria.
"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring,
others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be
remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought
to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a
consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the
business world or involves digital technology.
Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity,
and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless
officials to raise test scores at any cost).
With a good dose of critical
thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't
have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin
to take back our schools."
The Creativity Post is a non-profit web platform committed to sharing the very best content on creativity, in all of its forms: from scientific discovery to philosophical debate, from entrepreneurial ventures to educational reform, from artistic expression to technological innovation - in short, to all the varieties of the human experience that creativity brings to life.
"Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn! Narrated by Damian Lewis"
Possibly the most dangerous place to spend too much time is inside your comfort zone. Only when we take a risk and step away from the safety of the familiar and the ways we have always done things do we expose ourselves to new ideas and become open to the possibility of learning and discovery. The trouble is having the confidence to take that first step, to embrace discomfort and become open to the risks that come with trying something new.
Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists. You can't save the puzzles and link to them - but you could screenshot them (or save the png file it creates) and insert as an image. Alternatively print them out as worksheets.
CREST is a programme for schools run by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation that aims to promote Creativity. By adding creativity to our science lessons we can move past boiling water and encourage students towards serious scientific and technological discovery.