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Students everywhere reacted powerfully to this call to action, completing jaw-dropping quests to address problems in our world. These range from:

Building a library in a rural village in Ghana;
Raising money to build wells for communities without water;
Starting and scaling non-profit organizations to support issues in education, environment and other social causes; and
Creating innovative support mechanisms to help others in crisis.
Choose2Matter was created in response to this breathtaking reaction. It invites the world to make "mattering" a new way of life. This is not mere talk. This is the new standard where apathy and complacency are not tolerated and inaction is NOT an option.

DoSomething.org is the country's largest not-for-profit for young people and social change. We have 2.5 million members (and counting!) who kick ass on causes they care about. Bullying. Animal cruelty. Homelessness. Cancer. The list goes on. DoSomething.org spearheads national campaigns so 13- to 25-year-olds can make an impact - without ever needing money, an adult, or a car. Over 2.4 million people took action through DoSomething.org in 2012. Why? Because apathy sucks.

As Tony Wagner says in Creating Innovators, it's not a choice between structure and no structure to allow for more authentic learning. It's a choice to build a different structure for School 3.0 - one that allows for student-learners to explore their passions and real-world purposes while engaged in challenges that exist in the world and yearn to be defined and solved. Structures that empower learners to engage in more authentic learning flows.

When snow days piled up this winter, seventh-grader Emily Born was upset. It wasn't that she always loved school, or that she had a big test coming up and needed her teacher's help. No, the student from Thomas Middle School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, was sad to miss out on her "genius hour."
That's an 80-minute period every Monday during which Emily and her classmates work on projects entirely of their choosing. Over months of study, Emily and her friends have spent their time researching running shoes -- what people prefer and why.

A great overview of Garfield Gini-Newman's thinking about critical thinking. Might be useful in shaping how I teach critical thinking in the classroom.

Welcome to The Critical Thinking Consortium

TC² is a non-profit organization of Partner groups and Individual Members.

Each year we support many thousands of educators through a range of face-to-face, online and print resources and services developed around a classroom-proven approach to embedding critical thinking. Our aim is to help students learn to think and think to learn.

I loved how my classroom was now a place of curiosity and connection.  Something was still missing though.  I had yet to find something that was truly my passion.  Bill spoke about authentic learning tasks and how from reading a single tweet about KIVA on Christmas morning, he had used the KIVA lending platform to engage his social studies students in real life learning about other cultures, poverty and social change through microfinance.  My jaw dropped.   This was truly where my heart lay.  I remember looking across the table at my Principal, Carrie Burton who shared a similarly stunned expression and blurted out to her, "we are so going to do this!"  And just like that, the next thing Bill said, "if any of y'all want to Skype with my KIVA club, we would be happy to."

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.