The Concord Consortium | Realizing the Promise of Educational Technology Stand Again It’s hard to describe to people all of the magic that happens at Anastasis on a daily basis. It really does feel like something special, a magical quality of falling down the rabbit hole into another world where school is fun and challenging and wonderful. The learning that happens here is very organic, it lacks a formulaic approach. Anastasis learners are in a continual state of growth, discovery, and creativity. The nice thing about having ALL students in the same big guided inquiry during a block, is the incredible overlaps in learning that occur between classes. For each inquiry block I give teachers an inquiry guide with the driving inquiry question, the key concept, and the individual lines of inquiry that could be explored. This is the point that the magic I mentioned above starts to happen. The students in Team Weissman began this block with a field trip to a local observatory. There was a lot of research that happened in this unit. Inside the planetarium: Planets The Jr.
What Is an Essential Question? What is an essential question? An essential question is – well, essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter – the essence of the issue. Think of questions in your life that fit this definition – but don’t just yet think about it like a teacher; consider the question as a thoughtful adult. What kinds of questions come to mind? In Understanding by Design we remind readers that “essential” has a few different connotations: One meaning of “essential” involves important questions that recur throughout one’s life. A question is essential when it: Here is a variety of subject-area examples of such questions: How well can fiction reveal truth? Why did that particular species/culture/person thrive and that other one barely survive or die? Note that an essential question is different from many of the questions teachers typically ask students in class. Such questions are clearly not “essential” in the sense discussed above. Is such a leading question bad?
The Long Tail How to implement studio teaching? Philosophy Studio teaching is not just another kind of classroom activity. It is not a lab session, nor is it just a series of class projects. It is an approach to teaching and learning that gets students actively engaged in directing their own learning. The goal of studio teaching is to get students to be active learners -- to let them "invent" their own knowledge. Instructors serve as guides or mentors, helping when needed and avoiding whenever possible taking the lead role. Strategy A key to studio teaching is to develop a collection of exercises/projects that will provide the focus for learning throughout the semester. In studio classrooms, just as in all classrooms that emphasize active learning, the amount of material delivered by lecture is less than in a traditional lecture class. As much as possible, the goal is to distribute assignments and then stand aside while students do their learning. Group activities lead to individual learning/development
Waiter Rant 2010 Horizon Report Download the 2010 Horizon ReportPDF • ePub (also available in other languages) The 2010 Horizon Report is a collaboration betweenThe New Media Consortium and theEDUCAUSE Learning Initiative An EDUCAUSE Program © 2010, The New Media Consortium. Permission is granted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license to replicate and distribute this report freely for noncommercial purposes provided that it is distributed only in its entirety. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Citation Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010).
The Physics Book: An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe by Maria Popova Making knowledge digestible in the age of information overload, or what a cat has to do with quasicrystals. Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. In The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics, acclaimed science author Clifford Pickover offers a sweeping, lavishly illustrated chronology of comprehension by way of physics, from the Big Bang (13.7 billion BC) to Quantum Resurrection (> 100 trillion), through such watershed moments as Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and gravity (1687), the invention of fiber optics (1841), Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915), the first speculation about parallel universes (1956), the discovery of buckyballs (1985), Stephen Hawking’s Star Trek cameo (1993), and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (2009). Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. Share on Tumblr
WALC2011 The active learning model is currently utilized in many undergraduate programs throughout the United States and continues to expand at the university level. Research shows that implementation of the active learning model results in a significant increase in students’ knowledge retention and improvements in student performance. Particularly impressive gains have been documented among groups of students that traditionally have been under-represented in science. The 2011 Windward School Active Learning Colloquium aims to develop the skills and knowledge necessary for school leaders to guide reform of the learning, assessment, and teaching of science at the secondary school level. The colloquium is designed for science educators at the secondary level. See the Flickr feed for photos from the Colloquium! See the Mar Vista Patch feature article on the Colloquium: "Science Colloquia for Teachers Emphasizes Active Learning"
John T. Spencer Skyline CPI A Complete How-To for Creating Curriculum Sites and Student Portfolios using Google's Tools! Note: at this time Google is currently switching from Google Docs to Google Drive. We will update this site as soon as the switch is complete. The WhatA methodology for creating and organizing online student portfolios and curriculum sharing sites throughout an entire school. Additionally, the new paradigm for technology is that it is not relevant unless it seamlessly integrates with many other forms of technology; Calendars need to automatically sync with computers, phones, websites; Televisions need to work with the Internet, Blue Ray players, Netflix, iTunes, AppleTV, Roku, and computers; Cameras need to automatically upload pictures to Flickr, Facebook, Picassa. To do so, Skyline High School utilizes a variety of the Google Tool set to plow the landscape and plant the necessary seeds for a garden bed of technology integration school-wide.
Cute Overload :D Position Statement - Quality Science Education and 21st-Century Skills Introduction Rapid changes in the world—including technological advancement, scientific innovation, increased globalization, shifting workforce demands, and pressures of economic competitiveness—are redefining the broad skill sets that students need to be adequately prepared to participate in and contribute to today's society (Levy and Murnane 2005; Stewart 2010; Wilmarth 2010). NSTA acknowledges the need for and importance of 21st-century skills within the context of science education and advocates for the science education community to support 21st-century skills consistent with best practices across a preK–16 science education system. National organizations, including the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) and the National Research Council (NRC), have sought to identify and define 21st-century skills, explore their integration within the education system, and address the intersection of 21st-century skills and the teaching of core disciplines (P21 December 2009; NRC 2010).