10 More Resources For Getting the Most Out of Cell Phones and Smart Phones in School In Sunday’s article “Embracing the Cell Phone in the Classroom With Text Messaging Assignments”, we read about one instructor’s perspective on the importance of embracing the cell phone as a communications tool to engage and connect with today’s students. Wanting to learn a little more about the cell/smart phone phenomenon as it relates to education, I hit the ‘net again and examined dozens of websites and articles to find more worthwhile resources to share. Here’s 10 good ones I found (if you know of some other related resources worth sharing, please comment and tell us about them – thanks!). “10 Schools Encouraging Smartphones in the Classroom”, this December 2011 article offers 10 examples of schools that are doing this and discusses their approaches. I hope these resources provide some good ideas, insights, and tips for constructive instructional uses for those mobile communications devices that many of your students often can’t seem to ignore for more than a few minutes.
A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Projects Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, is a 100 percent project-based learning school. They are part of the New Tech Network of schools and their approach has yielded remarkable results, including a 98 percent graduation rate, with all of their graduates accepted to college. The success of their PBL approach is largely attributable to the fact that their process is designed to stimulate student inquiry. Additionally, their process can be applied to any project in any subject, which means there is a consistent approach across grades and subjects at Manor. We followed a sophomore world studies class through a three-week project called Controlling Factors, created by teaching partners Mary Mobley (English) and Michael Chambers (world history). Here is a breakdown of key steps, with some examples from Mobley and Chambers's project: What do you think about this Schools That Work story?
The 21st Century Principal L'histoire d'internet sur une timeline Facebook ! Comment raconter l’histoire d’Internet chronologiquement et de manière ludique? C’est ce qu’a fait Grovo, une plateforme d’éducation à l’internet, en créant une timeline Facebook pointant chaque date importante de l’histoire du web. De la première utilisation connue du symbole @ en 1536, à l’entrée en bourse de Facebook, la Chronologie de Grovo éclaire le passé du Web et son ascension fulgurante dans tout le siècle dernier. Découvrez les nombreux événements répertoriés : la création du « .com », l’invention de l’e-mail en 1972, le premier spam 6 ans plus tard, et bien d’autres…D’autres dates importantes seront progressivement intégrées à la timeline, et les internautes peuvent participer en suggérant à Grovo les dates et événements qui les ont marqués dans l’histoire d’internet.
15 Free Tools for Storing and Sharing Files Six months ago I shared a list of good file sharing tools for teachers and students. Since then, I've come across some more tools to add to that list. Here is my new list of file sharing tools for students and teachers. Using these tools can help you avoid having an email inbox that is overflowing with file attachments. The tools that I frequently use: I use Google Documents and Google Drive for nearly all of my document storage needs. The other tool that I frequently use for collecting, storing, and sharing files is Dropbox. DROPitTOme is a free service that works with Dropbox to allow people to upload files to your Dropbox account without giving them access to the contents of your Dropbox account. File Dropper is the file sharing tool that I have used longer than any of the tool on this list. Other file sharing tools that I have tried. File Stork is a tool that works with Dropbox and allows you to collect files in two ways. Go Pileus is a simple free service for quickly sharing files.
What Makes Project-Based Learning a Success? At one high school in Texas, where every class in every grade is project based, the answer is devotion to a consistent process, belief in relationships, and commitment to relevance and rigor. Results? Hard to beat. Thanks to an effective PBL model and a school culture that values relationships and autonomy, Manor New Tech students, teachers, and its principal, Steven Zipkes (right), are achieving impressive results. Credit: Zachary Fink There is a small town, about 12 miles east of Austin, Texas, where a high school devoted to teaching every subject to every student through project-based learning (PBL) opened five years ago. See more Schools That Work Watch the video: PBL Success Start to Finish Duration: 08:01 min. Manor New Tech was started with a $4 million grant from the Texas High School Project as part of an initiative to develop schools dedicated to science, technology, engineering, and math in Texas. No less important, though, is the school culture that supports it.
Differentiation Meets Digital Technology « literacy beat By Thomas DeVere Wolsey Differentiating instruction is a time-tested way of thinking about meeting students’ needs as they make progress toward achievement or learning targets. Differentiation is an elegant mindset that suggests to teachers a framework that permits them to engage students while focusing on learning results, and digital technologies offer many opportunities to differentiate instruction in meaningful ways. However, differentiating instruction takes a concerted planning effort on our parts as teachers and teacher educators. Where do we start planning for differentiated instruction with technology, What are considerations for who we teach, what we teach, and how we plan? Throughout this post, you will notice a pattern of threes based on where, what and who, and finally how. Where Do We Start the Planning Process? Curriculum: What standards and lesson objectives are appropriate? Right now, you might be wondering, “Hey, where’s the technology?” Figure 1: Differentiation Matrix
Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains Bloom's Taxonomy was created in 1956 under the leadership of educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Bloom in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education, such as analyzing and evaluating, rather than just remembering facts (rote learning). The Three Types of Learning The committee identified three domains of educational activities or learning (Bloom, 1956): Cognitive: mental skills (Knowledge) Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude or self) Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (Skills) Since the work was produced by higher education, the words tend to be a little bigger than we normally use. Domains can be thought of as categories. While the committee produced an elaborate compilation for the cognitive and affective domains, they omitted the psychomotor domain. This compilation divides the three domains into subdivisions, starting from the simplest behavior to the most complex. Cognitive Domain Table of The Cognitive Domain Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Next Steps
Ten education blogs worth following Education blogs, on any and every topic, abound online. Unfortunately, educators are probably the last people who have the time to go out and search for them. Which blogs review good free resources? Which can offer information about school reform trends? Which highlight short, how-to videos for those who aren’t very tech-savvy? In this time-saving list, you’ll find 10 of the best education blogs that readers have recommended, that have won multiple awards, or that other educators just can’t stop talking about. The blogs are listed in alphabetical order. 1. What is the best way to improve education using social media? 2. Flipped Learning was created by Jon Bergmann, a teacher, educational coach, and writer who has helped educators around the world reconsider what education can look like. See also:Panelists: Blogs are changing education 3. The purpose of this site is to share information about free resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. 4. 5.
Apple Will Now Let Any Teacher Publish Content to iTunes U - Liz Gannes - Mobile Apple is upping its bid for its hot-selling iPad to be a teaching device, with an update today to its iTunes U app that allows any teacher to create a private course. The new features, aimed at K-12 teachers who use iPads in the classroom, allow teachers to create up to 12 private courses. Within each course, teachers can point students to curriculum across lots of different (mostly Apple-powered) media such as iBooks, textbooks, apps, videos and Pages and Keynote documents. The new iTunes U also includes a tool for students to take timestamped notes inside a video. Previously, teachers had to go through a verification process to add their lectures to Apple’s repository — which over the past six years has accumulated 500,000 audio and video files from 1,000 universities, with 700 million total downloads. The dedicated iTunes U app is just six months old; it has been downloaded 14 million times.
The Chat Slang Dictionary 5 Great Sources For Free-To-Use Audio Clips & Sound Effects When I was 14 years old, I bought a CD full of sound effects. I paid good money for it, too. The CD included around 20-30 sound effects of everything from a baby crying to ocean waves, and I would pop it in my CD player and listen to the sound effects. That’s about all I could do with them, except for recording them onto a tape, maybe. So why did I buy it? Because sound effects are awesome, and you never know when you might need them. If you like or need to use sound effects, things look quite different now. Below you will find 5 great resources where you’ll be able to find almost any sound effect you can think of, available for immediate listening and download. FindSounds FindSounds is a great source of free audio clips, and offers pretty much anything you can think of in terms of sound effects. If you’re looking for sound effects on your mobile device, you can try the mobile version of FindSounds, or the FindSounds Android app. FreeSound Sound Jay AudioMicro FreeSFX