Serious Play

MUVE empowers people of all shapes and sizes, abilities and ages to become confident about freely dancing to music. MUVE Dancing Games (MDGs) give us the opportunity to come together and playfully exercise, explore creatively, and build community.

In a MUVE Dancing Game (MDG) players take turns inspiring each other with dance movement-ideas. Players follow each other “loosely,” and they are free to interpret movements in their own style/shape/speed/size.

Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows.

Narrable is a neat service for creating short narrated slideshows.

UtellStory is a service for creating and sharing audio slideshows.

Present.me is a handy service for recording video and or audio to accompany your slides.

Hello Slide is a tool that you can use to add voice narration to slides that you display online.Hello Slide is different from services like Slideshare's Zipcast because instead of recording your voice you type what you want the narrator to say.

This is a round-up of the ways that you can add interactive elements to your videos. The first four tools could be used by students to create a series of choose your own adventure videos. These tools could be used by teachers to enhance the short videos that they create for flipped lessons.

Alternatives To Homework: A Chart For Teachers

Stories are an effective teaching tool for nonfiction content because they help make new concepts more personal, more memorable, more meaningful.

Research shows that we learn best by doing.  Author Daniel Pink in his book, A Whole New Mind, argues that we are better prepared for the future if we embrace these concepts: design, story, empathy, sympathy, play, and meaning.

So, I set about creating challenges that would invite children to learn by doing and incorporate the concepts articulated by Daniel Pink on Think! Using household materials makes these challenges affordable but also more challenging. Innovation requires the creative use of resources.  If you want your child to be an innovator, there is no better preparation than these types of challenges.

The goal of the Artful Thinking program is to help students develop thinking dispositions that support thoughtful learning – in the arts, and across school subjects.The program is one of several programs at Project Zero linked by the theme “Visible Thinking."

Artful Thinking has 6 interrelated components: The Artful thinking Palette (6 thinking dispositions at the heart of the program); thinking routines,works of art, curricular connections, visible thinking, and teacher study groups.

Click here for a complete overview of the program.

Resources and Training for community music making, group drumming, drum circles, flute circles, song circles, music education, music therapy, and recreational music making.

Edmodo is one of the promising web technologies that is making a strong foothold in the field of education. It has been embraced by several school districts and  is being widely used to host online classes and connect students with their teachers. I personally see edmodo as a very robust alternative to the traditional Moodle.

 A short list of things to consider when planning a video project:

1. The first consideration is what you want your students to demonstrate through their videos. This will help to determine which video production tools your students will use.

2. Your students' skill level with video editing tools.

3. Be concise. Last year Wistia published some interesting data that revealed that people are more likely to watch multiple short videos all the way through than one longer video of equivalent length.

Doodlecast for Kids is an iPad app that allows kids to draw on a whiteboard and record their voice while drawing; a kid's version for creating animated videos. Doodlecast for Kids has also a gallery of more than 20 story prompts to help struggling students. Students can either pick out one from the prompts or start from scratch.

Last year I tried a new idea with my fourth graders – Studio Day and it was a hit!  Please, let me share!

Concept – Students are given a long amount of time to start and complete a project.  This time (1-3 hours) is more time than normally given so that students are forced to work their way through the creative process.  (Instead of starting something only to put it into their “To Do” folder to work on when they can.)  It also allows students to work on a project that can be quite involved and include some real artistic creation in the visual arts, music, theater, and/or poetry making, etc.

Time – Carve out an amount of time that is more then what you would expect.  This will allow for ample clean up time and for “Pushing Time.”   Pushing time, for me begins when the first student says they are done and I follow up with, “No you’re not.  What else can you do with this?”

Place – Using an area outside of the normal classroom (art room, outside, big open space) can be a great idea.  It gives a special feel to the time you have and it takes away a lot of distractions.  (Kind of like when you bring your work to the kitchen table, away from your office desk.)

I'm an evangelist.

A book evangelist, that is. I want my students to read widely and read often, to pick up a book instead of browsing Tumblr every time they are bored. But I have no desire to assess my students for each book they read during the year. I do want my students to think about some of the books that have affected them and influenced them, though. And I want them to plan ahead and think about the books they want to read in the future. In other words, I want them to be readers.

Recently, I've also been fascinated by the way the human mind interprets visual symbols. From doodling to reading and writing text, the brain is wired with a proclivity for visual sensory ability. In order to help students harness this power, we have been trying our hand at visual notes and sketchnoting in class. Then I decided to try some lessons with infographics.

When I found this lesson about reading histories, I was inspired. What if I could combine my students' fresh knowledge of visual notetaking and infographics with an analysis of their reading lives? What would they learn about themselves as readers? What would they learn about each other?

You can tell your child a story by remembering the basic story elements. Character, Setting, Plot. Lots of ideas to get you started telling bedtime stories, even if you don't think you can.