Friends School: Upper School » Community Service Community Service at Sidwell Friends School opens the hearts and minds of our students to the reality of other members of their community. This program often allows our students to become acquainted with people dealing with a variety of challenges and obstacles in their daily lives—people that most of them do not usually associate with on a regular basis. The relationships that our students form with these people allow them to understand the challenges and hopes of these people on a deeper, more personal level. As a result, it is our hope that they will develop empathy and compassion for these individuals, which will inform the personal and professional decisions that they make throughout their lives. Our program is designed to meet a wide range of pressing needs in our community. Through a strong reflection component, the program also teaches a real world understanding of issues of social justice, and challenges stereotypes and prejudices existing within our students.
Using E-Portfolios in the Classroom For decades, students have been completing assignments in school. Often, these were seen only by the teacher, graded and returned to the student. Sometimes, the work was posted on a classroom wall or in a school hallway. Many teachers kept portfolios of student work for report card conferences, and the rare teacher taught students how to build their own portfolios from their work. With more and more schools going paperless or migrating to the "cloud" (storing files on the Internet), student work has become more easily shareable, accessible by many, and more easily organized. However, with so many options for collecting and sharing student work, it's hard to know which method or tool to use. Defining Your Needs Here are some guiding questions to consider before you commit to a tool or platform: Can student work be made public or is it housed inside a "walled garden?" Some Options Below is a list of tools that can be used to collect, organize and share student work. Project Foundry Dropbox*
ED. Magazine All Along 1 Comment When Lecturer David Rose, Ed.D.’76, and his colleagues came up with a new idea called Universal Design for Learning to help all learners, he had no idea just how big it would one day become. (From "Ed." magazine.)... Brennan by Design 1 Comment Assistant Professor Karen Brennan doesn’t want everyone to become a computer programmer, but she believes that it’s important for everyone, especially students, to be creators of technology and their learning, not just consumers.
Black Mountain College Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina (near Asheville, North Carolina), was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role. Many of the school's students and faculty were influential in the arts or other fields, or went on to become influential. Although notable even during its short life, the school closed in 1957 after only 24 years.[2] History[edit] From 1933 to 1941, Black Mountain College was located at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly. Its Lake Eden campus, used from 1941 to 1957, is now part of Camp Rockmont, a summer camp for boys. Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain College inculcated an informal and collaborative spirit and over its lifetime attracted a venerable roster of instructors. The college suspended classes by court order in 1957.
Dylan Wiliam Professional development Finally! The revised Embedding formative assessment pack for schools and colleges to run their own two-year professional development programme on formative assessment is now available worldwide. In Europe, this can be ordered through SSAT, in Australasia through Hawker-Brownlow, and in North America from Learning Sciences International. Further details of the pack are here. Also, a series of high-quality video presentations by Dylan Wiliam, with a total running time of over two and a half hours, is now available world-wide.
launches online learning initiative MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will: organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pacefeature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communicationallow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITxoperate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions. MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT will couple online learning with research on learning MITx online learning tools to be freely available
In East Jerusalem, A School Where Kids Can Be Kids Mindset | What is Mindset Every so often a truly groundbreaking idea comes along. This is one. Mindset explains: Why brains and talent don’t bring success How they can stand in the way of it Why praising brains and talent doesn’t foster self-esteem and accomplishment, but jeopardizes them How teaching a simple idea about the brain raises grades and productivity What all great CEOs, parents, teachers, athletes know Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.
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