Group items tagged

from Free Technology for Teachers: "Fresh Brain, a non-profit funded in part by Sun Microsystems, provides teachers and students with ideas for technology projects. On Fresh Brain students and teachers can find projects in which they build games, build iPhone and Facebook apps, make web pages, and mash-up videos. Fresh Brain provides space and a forum for students to connect and collaborate. To complete each project, Fresh Brain provides a list of suggested tools and getting started guides for completing each task. Some of the popular projects on Fresh Brain right now are a project in which students create a webpage about cultures and a graphic design competition. Applications for Education There is no shortage of project and activity ideas on Fresh Brain. Teachers looking for creative ways to bring digital content creation into the classroom should explore Fresh Brain. The projects and tools suggested on Fresh Brain are intended for middle school and high school use."

"Project-Based Learning Professional Development Guide An overview of the Edutopia professional development guide for teaching how to use project-based learning in the classroom. By Edutopia Staff This guide is organized into six sections: Introduction Why Is PBL Important? What Is PBL About? How Does PBL Work? Workshop Activities Resources for PBL"

"Project Essentials Checklist The Project Essentials Checklist could be used for a quick evaluation of a project's design, to see if it includes all the essential elements of rigorous, effective PBL."

"Often we forget to teach thinking skills to students. Project-based learning (PBL) by design demands that these skills be taught and assessed. Every PBL project has 21st century skills that are taught, assessed, and transferable across various disciplines."

"Here's an article by BIE that appeared in the September 2010 issue of Educational Leadership magazine from ASCD. Good for general audiences as well as educators, it explains the essential elements that make rigorous PBL different from "doing projects.""

"For many teachers transitioning from a traditional teaching focus to one that is committed to PBL, contemplating the creation of an interdisciplinary PBL unit might seem ambitious. However, the next step in growing as a PBL practitioner is to integrate a variety of content areas into your project design. Here are some tips to get you started:"

"Welcome to this first in a series of PBL Mania Posts. For the next few weeks I am celebrating Project Based Learning by hosting a webinar at Edtech Leaders Online, and by presenting a PBL session at the NICE Conference in Chicago. In this post I will introduce you to some awesome places on the web containing some of the very best PBL resources. Before reading, please take a moment to subscribe to this 21centuryedtech Blog by email or RSS and also give me a follow on Twitter at mjgormans. "

from the website: The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. The Zinn Education Project is coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

"Curriculum Overview This free curriculum is designed for middle school and high school classrooms. Goals Provide you with tools for standards-aligned education of historical thinking. Introduce you and your students to exciting technologies and demonstrate how they can be used even if your school has limited infrastructure Empower you with non-digital tools and techniques to encourage your students to collaborate and practice higher-order communication Project background The ChronoZoom project started in 2009 when Walter Alvarez, a Professor of Geology at University of California Berkeley, asked his students for ideas about how to explain the profound differences in scale between human and geologic history."

"Though it may not get the attention that, say, the pyramids of Egypt or the Empire State Building get, the Hoover Dam is one of the unheralded wonders of the modern world, a massive edifice of over 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete and 582 miles of cooling pipes that provides the West with 4.2 billion kilowatts of energy a year. The monetary cost was nearly 50 million in Depression-era dollars for a project of unprecedented size in the U.S., but the human cost was more dear -- at least 112 people died building the dam. July 7, 2010 marked the 79th anniversary of the start of the project, a huge chapter in the taming of the American West"

The Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University Washington College of Law, and the Media Education Lab of Temple University are conducting a project 2007-2009 to clarify fair use in media education, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This project will help media literacy educators understand their rights under the doctrine of fair use in order to help them more effectively use media as an essential part of their teaching.

Checklists to support Project Based Learning and evaluation "

MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. MAKE is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.

The Web Use Project is Eszter Hargittai's research group at Northwestern University. The goal of the research conducted in this group is to learn about how people use the Web in their everyday lives and in particular, how differences in Internet use may contribute to social inequality.

The future of interactive exhibits and technology, and relics.

"Smarter Balanced, which awarded a contract in April to a design and development group led by CTB/McGraw Hill, plans on a January 2013 pilot of its test items/tasks. The curious can view recently released annotated examples of the Smarter Balanced performance tasks. "