Teacher Tips & Tools

Learn more:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Education+3.0

This is a great guide for planning! Thank you

Wonderful way to put it in perspective. Thank you for sharing the visual.

A short (~4 minutes) is embedded in this post that looks at how the Internet affects our brain. The video is based on the book "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain" and this video presents an overview of the topics in the book. This is a video you may choose to share with students.

the good and the bad....

There are many taxonomies that one may use in education, and this post from TeachThought provides a look at six alternatives. Read the post to learn more about the following taxonomies:

* TeachThought Simple Taxonomy

* Six Facets of Understanding by Wiggins and McTighe

* Marzano and Kendall's New Taxonomy

* A Taxonomy of Significant Learning by Dr. L. Dee Fink

* Depth of Knowledge by Norman L. Webb

Based on publications from CRESTT that discuss the testing being designed by PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two consortiums designing tests for Common Core) it is worth checking out the Depth of Knowledge since the tests are based on the four levels in this taxonomy.

Very interesting! I use some of the tools highlighted but must expand my application to include consistent student usage.

Tecnologie per la didattica della scrittura

So much more fun than just word processing.

If you are looking for a great guide on using videos in our classroom check out this post and download this Teachers' Guide to Using Videos. The guide is split into the following sections:

* 5 Awesome Sites for Instructional Videos

* 6 Excellent Sites that Supplement your Lessons

* What’s Good? Curating and Evaluating Video Content

* Blending Videos into your Curriculum – This section looks at:

     Ignite Conversations

     Pique Interest, Create Perplexity and Inspire Inquiry!

     Flip Your Classroom: Extend and Engage!

     Exercises for Flipped Classrooms

     Demonstrate Labs, Experiments and Abstract Concepts

     Opportunities for Publishing

     Ten Great Examples of Educational Videos

The post ends with this statement: "You’ll find a slew of valuable resources, including video links for all kinds of subjects — history, math, science, language arts, and more — and ideas on how to inspire students to use videos as a conduit to dig in, ask questions, and learn." Take the time to download the pdf (available at the site).

Video's should enhance instruction, not supplant it.  However, some videos do a better job than teachers do.  Interesting guide and be sure to follow the links.  We like to suggest that videos "activate thinking"  and compel students to come up with further questions.  This is very common core, as the students then would have to "research and investigate" to build knowledge and have an evidence-based discussion!

Are you interested in learning more about US copyright law for educators (and also for those in Australia) or how to find and adapt Creative Common materials for you class? These two classes (and others) are being offered at the School of Open through P2PU. There are also courses that you may take any time. For the courses mentioned above you must register by Sunday, March 17th and they begin next week. The others are available at any time.

Many schools are beginning to look at using open source materials, and if you search this Scoop.it you will find quite a few resources about open source materials, but these are the first classes I have seen that are geared to educators around issues that we should educate ourselves if we are going to be going in the direction of open source. If you have the time consider signing up for one of the classes.

How did this come to be? The Landsat program. “Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.”

Google has taken these “choppy images” and upgraded them into stunning videos with incredible details (more information on this is at the website). TIME has also created a story that utilizes the videos and text to help understand the story they tell.
* Chapter 1 – Satellite Story

* Chapter 2 – Extreme Resources

* Chapter 3 – Climate Change

* Chapter 4 – Urban Explosion

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and these moving images tell a story that is often hard to understand. If we are interested in learning more about how we have impacted our planet this is a great resource.

Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.

Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.

Wow!

Why choose to use Padlet? Aside from the fact that is free, it does not require that register. Gleeson recommends that as a teacher you create an account so that all the "walls" you create are in one place.

This post provides detailed instructions on how to create a wall and includes two projects that he has done with his students.

If you have not checked out Padlet I suspect you will after you read this post!

I like this tool. Very useful and it works with iPhones in the classroom!

I'm using Padlet in a variety of ways, including gathering teacher and student ideas and for feedback about any shifts in practise related to the work I do as a Facilitator of Professional Learning for teachers.

Are you wondering how you can stimulate curiousity with your students? This post suggests that you use information gaps and that you:

* Start with a question

* Prime the pump

* Bring in communication

For more information click through to the post (which also provides links to the studies referenced).

If you work with students in high school (or even college) you might want to have them check out this digital footprint quiz. Students answer 8 questions and score their quiz. There are six possible outcomes:

* Negative Score: Clean up time
* No Score: You’re off the radar 
* 1 - 10 points: You’re a New “Foot” on the Block

* 11 - 15 points: You’re Making Strides
* 16 - 20 points: You’re a Rising star! (or “Digital Weaver”)
* More than 20 points: You’re Web Wise!

More details are available for each description.

Important tool and topic. Kids just don't "get it"

Tru dat... and, admittedly, infuriating to a large category of educators. 
(But I soooo long for a test that is easily gradeable!)

Which category do you fall? How can we transition teachers who are not willing to update their skills?

Do you have teachers in your building at all levels of technology? This post may help you come up with some ideas for professional development. The first suggestions on the list of thirty-six is:

* Select the right platform to communicate.

Several others include:

* Explain how and why to use technology to those who don’t use it.

* Model digital citizenship.

* Highlight the limits of technology.

* Record, process, mash, publish, and distribute digital media.

For many other suggetions (and additional resources) continue on to the post.