Group items tagged

an idea for an early years classroom 

A introductory film for the new digital edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a classic book that has played a key role in the world's understanding of the Holocaust. The app takes the original text, published 65 years ago, and adds video interviews and other background material. The Diary of a Young Girl app, made by Beyond the Story, is available on iPad via Apple's AppStore

One year ago, I began blogging. It was my first attempt to try something new in quite a while; to share some ideas with the world and to learn for the sake of the students who learn from me.

BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog's entries and comments. Archives can be generated from any blog running on WordPress, LiveJournal (and derivatives) or Blogger. May be useful for student / classroom blogs as a snapshot at the end of the year? 

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:

"Do NOT allow the iPads to live in mobile carts - when I see an iPad in a cart, I see money being burned. The carts should be where the iPads sleep when school is closed. This is where they re-charge. But there should be a school-wide routine that as soon as kids enter a room with an iPad cart, they each walk up to the cart and get their assigned iPad. They should keep that iPad on their desk until the end of the day and return it to the cart as they walk out of the classroom. iPads should be as essential to a student desk as pencils were 20 years ago. Teachers (and kids) will be much more likely to pick up and use the devices if they're right there, as opposed to having to plan to take them out and use them for "tech time" and then put them away. Think about how you use mobile tech in your everyday life - you pull your phone out of your pocket to look up information when it's relevant, rather than waiting until your "computer time" later in the week. Students should be able to do the same."

Great little reminder about some real world math examples that people often overlook. Good for early years especially.

Pana's website with links to support coding and computational thinking in the Early Years

"Perhaps, instead of proving that handwriting is superior to typing, it proves we need better note-taking pedagogy."

By the end of the school year, those 206 books had been accessed more than 101,000 times by K12 students all over the district. One Title I elementary school had accessed the books 58,000 times.

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.

Phat Poetry - an energetic program of performance poetry designed to introduce Years 5 - 8 students to the world of language and ideas. Storytelling, the investigation of rhyme, rhythm and the devices of poetry underpins the central theme of the performance. In 2012 we explore themes of identity, love, friendship, war, community laced with a healthy dose of nonsense using everything from ballads, sonnets and haikus to free verse, odes and raps.In this show we introduce a new component that takes a look at how Australian poetry has developed an increasing engagement with the cultures and poetic traditions of Asia.

Welcome to the 20th Century History Series Website! The podcasts below are meant to be used as revision for the International Baccalaureate (IB), Advanced Placement Programs (AP), as well as AS and A2, AQA, OCR, Edexcel. They can also be used as support for College Foundation Year, or for general entertainment, if you just enjoy history!   The podcasts are free, and are intended as a supplement to regular learning and for general entertainment. They are heavy on historical evidence; numbers, names, dates, events and keywords, which is the basis for writing a solid paper or project. Created by Kim Sønderborg  Head of Humanities, IB examiner, Franconian International School, Germany.

interesting website that compares different empires throughout history -- via data such as size in km, year at peak size, capital, founder, time period, etc.

good suggestions of blogs to follow - one from Jeff Utecht who is coming to us in the next school year for the COTAIL course

Jane Hart of the United Kingdom's Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has been assembling a list of the best resources for the past five years. But these resources aren't just randomly organized by popularity or something, the order is decided by a crowdsourced vote. What could be better than that?

I am designing a class that I am going to teach next year. It is going to have elements of being flipped or simply blended. In any case, I am looking into different ways in which I can assess student learning that goes on during semester, whether in the classroom or out.

Do you suffer from information overload? Do you find it difficult to organise and process the things you find online so that you can apply them productively in your day-to-day working life? If so then curation tools could transform your experience of the digital world. Increasingly seen as the 'next big thing' of social media, the last year has seen an explosion of different tools which can be used to manage, sort and catalogue material. However the novelty, as well as the choices available, render them confusing - what tool should you use and how should you use it? Furthermore what are the specific uses to which academics can put these tools?