Teaching the iGeneration

A picture is worth a thousand words and I had a good laugh at the picture below:

A fantastic image from @venspired on copyright in a creative commons world.

Later this week, we're going to have a more in-depth look at the characteristics of digital citizenship, but the infographic below I ran across on educatorstechnology.com last week takes a more student-friendly approach by defining digital citizenship in terms of its actions and habits: using, sifting, mastering, creating-the literal actions that ultimately define the tone of a student's interactions with their digital environments.

This makes it useful not just as a visual for teacher understanding, but for students to discuss, internalize, and apply themselves. In fact, hanging it in the classroom, computer labs, media centers, and other highly-visible places might make sense as well: the rules of the world of digital networks and social media

Viintage is a neat site that developed by a husband and wife graphic design and photography team. Viintage features collections of vintage posters, postcards, and various printed advertisements that have been released into the public domain

A digital tool that allows you to show videos to kids and embed questions in the video that students need to answer before moving on in the video. Answers can be tracked at the student level and videos can be assigned by class.

TED-Ed Clubs is a flexible, school-based program that supports students in discussing, pursuing and presenting their big ideas in the form of short TED-style talks. Watch the video or explore the stories below to learn more.

An iPad app that makes it possible for teachers to create Khan Academy-esque videos.

A teenage boy surprises his family with a thoughtful holiday gift.

A great spoken word poem that points out that there are gaps between what we can do with technology and what we are doing with technology. We can make powerful changes in the world using digital tools, but we aren't. Share this in the cause driven learning sessions I do.

We need to understand that this space is different, that this medium breaks down the requirements and allows for much quicker and primarily more conversations to take place means we can't still think about publishing in the same way. I'm not suggested spelling and revision isn't important but THIS SPACE IS A CONVERSATION, not a monologue. In this space, I have no intention of writing and ending an idea or conversation.

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.

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.

Several teachers at my new school are taking the leap of creating a classroom blog as their central hub for classroom communication. There are using blogger (integrated with our Google Apps for Education account) as the platform.

Their blogs are becoming a space to give students the opportunity to create the "perfect notes"to share with the classroom, parent and global community. How can we support students in documenting learning and to add value by adding extra research, resources or experiences that contribute to deepening of the topics discussed in class?

Justin Prophet, our school's 7th Grade Science teacher has developed the following

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."

Many educators use Twitter to as a way to build their Professional Learning Network (PLN) and share what they are doing in the classroom. Twitter is a social media platform that allows you to share small bits of information in 140 characters or less. Robert Marzano shares the importance of summarization, stating "effective learners are able to sift through a great deal of information, identify what is important and then synthesize and restate the information". (Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement) Using the Twitter format, this strategy engages students in the videos they are watching as they create "tweets" to summarize and share what they are learning.

Canva gives you everything you need to easily turn ideas into stunning designs. Create designs for Web or print; website banners, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more.

"If the recent iPad debacle in Los Angeles teaches us anything it's that no amount of money and technology will change anything without a modern vision of what teaching and learning looks like when every student and every teacher has access to the Internet. As many of us have been saying for far too long, our strategy to deal with the continuing explosion of technology and connections can't be to simply layer devices on top of the traditional curriculum and engage in digital delivery. Unfortunately, far too few develop a vision that sees that differently."

This is the Mindshift resource guide on blended learning spaces.

""If we are not teaching the kids to use the web as a vehicle for enhancing learning and teaching them to be the filter, that's a dereliction of duty," Luhtala said. One good way to put students through a meaningful, rigorous experience of analyzing source validity is with an annotated bibliography. Students have to not only summarize the source's importance, but also evaluate its validity. Here are some data points Luhtala teaches students to identify."