Group items tagged

"Gone are the days when you can dump out a backpack or flip through a folder to see your kids' work. The answers to "What did you do today?" are locked inside a password-protected device. Often kids have the upper hand in understanding how the device works -- and those 10-inch screens make it difficult to look over kids' shoulders. That's why the Common Sense Media Education team created the 1-to-1 Essentials Program. It's a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive, and free offering that covers everything that administrators, teachers, and parents need to know to maximize the benefits of schools' technology programs. "

One of the biggest things you can do for kids/teachers is help them to understand how to make sense of online text. Excellent article.

Adolescent readers vary tremendously in their ability to locate, understand, and use information online. 

If your child has a special need or learning difference, you've come to the right place. Common Sense Media gets lots of requests for product recommendations from parents whose kids struggle with traditional learning. Some of their kids have a hard time with schoolwork; others have trouble staying on task or find it difficult to express their feelings.

On any given day, parents of American tweens and teens average more than nine hours with screen media each day. Eighty-two percent of that time (almost eight hours) is devoted to personal screen media activities such as watching TV, social networking, and video gaming, with the rest used for work

Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.

If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.

You don't have to become an expert to help your kids make good decisions. Just get involved in their media lives. By engaging with them, you can help them use these tools responsibly, respectfully, and safely. Here are some ways to be a media-savvy parent this year:

Common Sense Media tool for teachers to bookmark good apps, games, and websites for teaching and learning -- searchable by subject and grade and price

"A learning environment expert and education advocate, Elyse is dedicated to improving the teaching of writing by helping educators understand the changing nature of the discipline in a digital age."

According to Common Sense Media, The Hunger Games is good for students 12 and above to read

Movie Review of the Hunger Games- According to Common Sense Media, students 10 and under shouldn't see this.

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.

An interesting read about what may become important to us in the future 3D printers may become very important to us. The true potential is when we can design our own remotes, with our our own sense of flair, using design software, and then print in our own homes.  Cottage industries might emerge, contests, DIY markets - and all fueled by creativity and inventiveness.

some good videos and ideas that would go along with our common sense media lesson plans

"That said, even if further evidence backs it up, the idea that the inner core is in a continuous cycle of self recreation probably won't matter that much to the landscapes and ecosystems doing similar things 5,000 kilometres further out. The effect is more one of underlining an aesthetic, or even an ideology, of the planet as an engine of ceaseless self-stabilising change. Such an ideology may serve as a useful guide to dealing with the unavoidable impacts that a large technological civilisation must have on the planet it inhabits: while caution counsels minimising such impacts, a sense of how the planet works suggests that making sure its natural systems can deal with them, that they can become part of the flow, could matter just as much."

Canadian teacher, turned American tutor, Laurie Laurendeau, found herself being asked by parents about various ways in which they can help their children at home with Math concepts.  So she started a blog to address many of these questions.  Laurie targets parents of students in Kindergarten to Grade 3, and writes a new blog each week and covers all the strands of Math (Number Sense, Measurement, Computation, Geometry, Problem-Solving).

"MUSIC & EAR TRAINING GAMES Train your ear with fun music games Sharpen your sense of pitch and tone Unlock the hidden patterns in music Strengthen your music theory skills

Nice article on balancing being a fun parent while maintaining control.

Reading images - lots of good strategies here

Reading photos