Group items tagged

instructions for all sorts of games, active games, board games, card games, classroom games, ice breakers etc

As an instructor of undergraduate and graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, I created a syllabus for the benefit of other college/university level instructors. I created a copy of the original syllabus for modification to use with high school students (probably juniors or seniors). I will rely on actual high school teachers to help me modify this source document. Please feel free to use, modify, and share this syllabus in your own way. Reorder the modules, add or subtract required or recommended texts and learning activities. Use your own assessment methods. If you wish to help improve this seed document, contact howard@rheingold.com and I will add you as a commenter and/or editor. 

this could be useful for any class story writing activities, student create individual books / chapters that are then joined into a class book

This past week, my first-born became legal. Not to drive, vote or drink, though; that comes later. My son turned 13 years old, making him eligible under terms of service to have his own social media account. That isn't to say he hasn't been on those sites for years, though. His social media cred is older than our daughter, who turns four in a couple months. He has had moments where he used Facebook too much, only to self-censor like a boss when he found it was cutting into his reading time. These days, his activity is largely limited to liking Doctor Who content on my geeky Pinterest board and collaborating with peers on Google (despite his original account there being deleted due to age restrictions). He has never had much interest in tweeting, but he got a video camera yesterday that may signal the beginning of a new vlog.

Ideas for using QR codes in the classroom, plus some pre made QR code activities (such as a QR code treasure hunt) 

Ready to Print, by Essare LLC, was created by Diane Reid, an Occupational Therapist with over twenty years of experience. Her extensive experience has been brought to this app and is demonstrated in every feature and activity throughout. It is a tool for parents, therapists and educators to help teach pre-writing skills to children, in order to build a strong foundation for this necessary skill.

I have written several posts before on the importance of making presentation meaningful and interesting. Not just creating a PowerPoint because it's the easiest tool for you to create a visual representation of your content. Comic books are what I consider to be attention grabbers. After bringing out several samples, you now have the student's attention. It's what you do with that attention that really matters. For this post I thought I would share some great web 2.0 tools that allow you and your students to make comic books. I urge you to make these assignments interesting, and relevant. Make sure that they are strongly tied to important curriculum standards and benchmarks. Just because the form of presentation and activity creation is "fun" does not mean that the substance in the curriculum is not important.

Somewhere between kids' intuitive social savvy and their online behavior lies an opportunity for both parents and educators to teach responsible digital citizenship, and there are plenty of organizations dedicated to this task alone. Define the Line, a project of McGill University in Canada, was recently awarded a digital citizenship grant by Facebook to help further its work in creating materials to open dialogue about finding the line where joking crosses into negative or criminal behavior. The site includes videos and scenarios designed to enhance discussion of real-world digital topics. Common Sense Media recently launched a free digital citizenship curriculum categorized by age. The curriculum includes both paper-based and digital activities and teaches online safety and Internet research skills in combination with ethics.

interesting info graphic on the increase in multi-tasking in teenagers over the years and effects on brain activity http://t.co/kyAaq7Nb

Teaching Activity PDF. By Naomi Shihab Nye and Linda Christensen. 4 pages. A teaching idea utilizing famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's work to inspire students.

"In recent weeks I have playing with the exciting combination of Easy Portfolio and Coaches Eye inside of the PE classroom. This has enabled the easy recording and storing of video analysis activities. Check out the apps working in concert together below."

this is an old post, but I like how it looks at changing questioning style i order to get the most out of our students No more trivial pursuit. No more topical research. No more hunts for simple facts - deadly, tiresome and lacking in value, mind-numbing activities without import. This article offers something like a cider press - but one that easily produces intriguing questions from the mass of curriculum content that usually inspires mere collection or varieties of trivial pursuit.

Discover rock secrets through these activities. Create a rock collection as you learn about the three main types of rock, find out how to tell the different rock types apart, and see how rocks change from one type into another!

For all your stop watch needs! Timing class activities, 30 sec discussions, think-pair-share ...

Word Walls are an effective strategy for building vocabulary with students, especially for subject-specific terms. These lists are usually posted on classroom walls and sometimes have a definition attached to them. A more interactive word wall that includes images requires students to be more active learners as they attach meaning to each of the words in the list. Teachers may post these in the classroom after first using them as teaching tools when introducing a concept.

Wiki providing tools for teams. "Teampedia is a collaborative encyclopedia of free team building activities, free icebreakers, teamwork resources, and tools for teams that anyone can edit.

"The JiTT strategy is based on the notion of a feedback loop between the out-of-class assignments and the subsequent classroom activities. Based on the student responses, the instructor selects an appropriate set of items that will make up the lesson. The classroom experience then informs the choice of the next set of web assignments. Over the past seven years faculty across the country have developed a rich set of JiTT resources. To look at some examples please visit A JiTT Sampler. "

"Peer Instruction actively engages the students in their own learning. Carefully chosen questions (ConcepTests give students the opportunity to discover and correct their misunderstandings of the material, and, in the process, learn the key ideas of physics from one another. "