UWCSEA Teachers

Many educators are interested in the idea of connecting their classes to other classes or individuals that could have a positive influence on their students. They just aren't sure where to find people to connect with. Thankfully, the Internet is full of resources to help classes get connected. Here are 10 places where you can turn

Good visual arrangement for infographics is putting together graphic and visual elements in a manner that draws your reader's attention. The key to achieving simple, elegant and attractive content are ample whitespace and a well arranged layout. What is whitespace? White space is as its name defined-space that is unmarked in a piece of infographic or visual representation. It could be margins, padding or the space between columns, text and icons and design elements. Whitespace matters to create visually engaging content A page crammed full of text and images will appear busy. This makes the content difficult to read. It makes you unable to focus on the important stuff too. On the other hand, too much of white space can make your page look incomplete. It is always crucial to remember visually engaging content is usually clean and simple.

Piktochart design series - 8 articles to design great infographics

Gaming can help growth of new neurons. 

There is an argument for creating videos as a means of engagement, as an approach involving doing something a little different; something that will hopefully result in a higher likelihood of it being committed to long term memory. These are additional benefits. The real value in these tasks is their requirement for genuine higher order thinking skills, and the resulting assessment of student understanding that can be used in a meaningful way.

I love Instagram because it prompts me to take and share pictures of things that I might otherwise glance at then forget about. Before cell phones entered my life I rarely took pictures. Last week I took the picture that you see below. Almost as soon as it appeared in my Facebook feed via Instagram, my friend Kelly commented with, "shouldn't they be more concerned about weight than the number of people?" Kelly is a middle school math teacher so this picture was right in her wheelhouse of math prompts.

A group of Canadian scientists who specialize in learning, memory, and language in children think so. They've found evidence that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after only 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive musical cartoons.

Digital Citizenship isn't an expression often heard outside of school. The ways in which it's discussed in main stream media are quite different from how it's discussed in schools. Most often the popular press shares sensational negative stories how kids use the internet and their phones to hurt each other. We have to have open and honest conversations about how things can and have gone wrong and what we can do to make things better in the aftermath of things like cyber bullying, online harassment, or sexting. That said, it's a far more powerful message to talk to kids and parents about how engendering empathy helps us understand each other so we choose not to hurt each other. It's also important to share stories and ideas how our modern mobile technologies empower us to effect positive change in the world around us in ways that weren't possible 10 or 15 years ago. We have to move beyond stranger danger and scare tactics. Sharing frightening stories (often overstated) does nothing to model positive outcomes or move the conversation to discussions of how to deal with something gone wrong. Kids need more models of empathy and empowerment. Parents do too.

Audionautix is a good one...

Former Red Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling is striking back at Internet trolls who attacked his daughter online with real-world consequences. Last week, Schilling tweeted a congratulations to his daughter Gabby for being accepted into a college softball program at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island.

The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children-the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Try using the next 20 websites and apps to make your life as a digital nomad easier, less stressful and even more exciting!

"Google Maps has been out for 10 years now. Digital maps…starting with Mapquest has been out since 1996 (technically 1993 but mapquest was the first main stream map most people remember). For those of you keeping track that puts us almost 20 years into the digital mapping word. 20 years we have been using digital maps and yet for some reason digital maps have not replaced (there's that word again) mapping in our schools. In 2007…8 years ago now….Apple put a map in our pocket. Fast forward to 2015 and almost everyone has a digital map in their pocket. Pilots now fly with iPads, ship captains now navigate with GPS and digital maps. Truck drivers now drive via digital maps and GPS location. So basically every professional that needs to use maps is using digital maps. I'm not saying we need to stop teaching how to read a paper map…but really…that should be 10% of the mapping work a student does not 99%. With that in mind here are 10 ways you could use Google Maps in the classroom."

"Take risks. Experiment. Use your intuition. Combining fonts is as much an art as it is a science."

Creative Commons search engine for kids with Attribution AND safe search built in.

"From an early age, we need to give digital literacy as much importance as numeracy and literacy. "While we welcome the introduction of the computing curriculum, we are concerned about the ability of teachers to deliver it - with more than half of our IT teachers not having a post-A-level qualification relevant to IT.