sbisd early adopters

"In the digital age, kids need to have an understanding of what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. They need to learn the technical how-to's, as well as a more global comprehension of how to navigate the online world. To that end, Melbourne educator Jenny Luca made a commitment to help her students start blogging and to create ePortfolios. Here are five reasons why, at her school, these skills are now a high priority."

student created "how-to" video

Sara, Just saw this. Thanks for sharing. I've just linked it to my class blog since we "suffer" from the "Hi. How are you?" comment syndrome. Hopefully my students will apply it and start writing some quality comments in the very near future. See you tomorrow! Nancy

"As teachers, we all know that we should create time to reflect on our professional practices… we need to experience the process of reflecting, in order to be able to guide our students… ….but what get's cut the easiest from our schedule if there is little time available? How can we see reflection as a high priority item on our never ending list of things to do? How can we get into the habit of making reflection time?"

"Evaluate websites with variations and extensions of skills you use to evaluate print materials."

How do we measure the efficacy of change? What are the benchmarks to prove that we are on the right track? Bascially, a change in the education process boils down to funding and to get funding you have to prove(through control groups) that the concept or innovation is better than the current method of teaching.

"It is a different time for teaching and learning. The unfortunate reality is that much of what we do in schools and in our own teaching practice is still grounded in thinking that has ruled the day for more than a century. " So what can we be sure of? Well, we can be sure that abundance brings a host of opportunities for learning, and we can be sure that if we are going to make sense of those opportunities in ways that benefit our students, we're going to have to unlearn and relearn much of our own practice. In short, it has to start with a willingness to reflect on what the larger changes mean in our own learning.

"small setbacks that encourage learning. What does that mean and how can you, as a student "fail" and still be successful in your educational goals?"

"The essence of character is not mere backbone. As Dewey said, it is good judgment borne of having learned to really think and to be held accountable for one's judgments by the demands of schooling:"

"Many of the tools above also publish feed related to the search queries. The only effective way to keep up with all of them, in my opinion, is through an RSS reader. While you can still receive Google Alerts via email, I find it more convenient to use an RSS reader because of the amount of information I track on a daily basis."

"This discussion comes up all the time in my physics for education majors. I have previously described the course and the curriculum that I use (Physics and Everyday Thinking) - oh, which is awesome. Let me set the scene. This is near the beginning of the semester."

"Reflective practice is an important sub-component of teacher research. It includes journaling and talking about one's instructional practice. However, doing reflective practice is not the same as doing teacher research. Teacher researchers hypothesize and systematically test their ideas. They look to triangulate their ideas with multiple forms of evidence multiple perspectives (inside and outside of their research group) the research literature on this topic Teacher researchers also write about their projects. Writing is an important part of the process because it requires organization of ideas within a framework."

Tips for creating and assigning collaborative writing opportunities

"By engaging teachers and the technology integrationist in conversations about the curriculum, specific class dynamics and capabilities of the technology, we are now able to talk about what we would like to do, the tools best suited for that purpose, ways to tweak units or lessons, and what is not working. This collaborative, co-teaching model has allowed for us to find connections across content areas, classes and our district. We all recognize how much is gained when we are allowed to really talk about our curriculum and our students, and this model allows for that creative, collaborative time to work through complex and interesting questions and ideas about integrating technology effectively. "