Professional Learning for Busy Educators

STOP A BULLY : Canada's Anti-Bullying Reporting Program, CyberBullying, Statistics and more.

"If orange is the new black, podcasting is the new oral report. And now that teachers have easy access to tools like Garage Band and iPods that make recording a breeze, podcasting is quickly becoming the latest creative mode of learning and presenting in schools.  Here are ten ideas to try in your classroom today."

"Common sense tells us that students are more likely to learn if they are motivated by and engaged with the curriculum or project at hand. Now, hard science is telling us the same thing.

When students are passionately engaged in their learning - when they are mesmerized by their learning environment or activities – there are myriad responses in their brains making connections and building schema that simply would not occur without that passion or emotion."

"As we approach the end of the school year, I have been looking back at some of the topics I have written about this year. One of the most popular topics (which I wrote about back in September) was homework.
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"Children are quick to ask “why?” and “how?” when it comes to new things, but research suggests elementary and preschool students learn more when teachers (and, presumably, parents) turn the questions back on them, writes Sarah Sparks in Education Week.

Sparks reports on a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science research meeting held late last month, where panelists discussed how and when asking students for explanations can best enhance their learning:"

There are a lot of little-known Twitter tools that don't see the light of day on sites like Edudemic. So I thought this would be a good time to start fixing that.

"I’ve separated my “The Best…” lists here by topics. A number of the lists, though, can fit into multiple categories, so it still might be useful to scan all of them."

The Star talks to musicians and their teachers, as the Toronto District School Board tables a plan to cut its music instructors.

"Most classrooms have bulletin boards. It’s where teachers put up exemplary work – often ten or twenty versions of the same project. And many teachers hang up projects in the hallways. We do that too, but does it go far enough? What if students and teachers treated their school as a living gallery and made more deliberate attempts to curate the school?"

You can actually use Twitter in the classroom with Bloom's Taxonomy thanks to this awesome table that details nearly two dozen different ways to integrate the pair!

"art of rethinking learning means rethinking the –which is what makes the following chart we spotted over at connectedprincipals compelling.

Rather than simply a list of alternatives to homework, it instead contextualizes the need for work at home (or, “homework”). It does this by taking typical classroom situations–the introduction of new material, demonstrating a procedure, etc.), and offering alternatives to traditional homework assignments. In fact, most of them are alternatives to homework altogether, including group brainstorming, modeling/think-alouds, or even the iconic pop-quiz.

Nothing ground-breaking, but food for thought, yes?"

A startup charity is hoping to create a mobile learning library in the cloud that can help turn access to tablets, smartphones, and legacy phones into useful content at resource-starved schools in developing countries.

"f you are running short of ideas on how to spend your summer after a busy school year, We Are Teachers http://weareteachers.com/ have plenty of ideas for you. They have designed this beautiful infographic featuring 15 things you can do to have a perfect summer. The one I like the best is number 7: field trip to African Savanah. Well, in fact I am heading to Africa very soon but not to the Savanah."

Despite their ubiquity among students, mobile phones are still viewed as contraband in most classrooms. Students are told to turn their phones off, leave th

Jean-Louis Gassée: The tech giant is due to 'retire' its RSS app, but there are replacements out there – and Facebook or Apple could jump in

"The Natural History Museum hosts a directory of names, facts, and figures for more than 300 dinosaurs. One of the ways that you can search through the database is by country. Select the "in your country" option to find the dinosaurs that may have roamed the land in what is now your country. The search results will display a grid of drawings the types of dinosaurs in your country. Click on the images to learn more the dinosaurs."

"The role of technology in learning isn’t entirely clear–or rather, is subjective.

While it clearly is able to provide access to peers, audiences, resources, and data, it also can be awkward, problematic, distracting, performing more strongly as a barrier to understand than anything else.

Why this happens also isn’t clear, but there are some common patterns and missteps to look for while designing or evaluating a learning process."

How does the ability to 'go viral' apply to education? Simple, the lessons that are remembered by students happen because of three reasons in particular.

"I heard this story on a motivational mix that I was listening to recently and thought I would share it (paraphrased)."

"We are in the process of finalizing the migration from the Google Reader back end to the new feedly cloud backend. This is an important post to help you prepare for the final step."

"By definition, Creative Commons is " a nonprofit organization that works to  increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and  scientific content) available in “the commons” — the body of  work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use,  repurposing, and remixing.""