Thursday, December 18, 2014
Monday, December 15, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/16/2014
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This infographic scaffolds the manner in which a teacher can build toward a successful blended learning classroom.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Monday, December 8, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/09/2014
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Make the Most of the Maker Movement | Edutopia
Resources about in this article which emphasizes skills over stuff when it comes to making.
- To realize the opportunity that the maker movement offers education, students need room for self-directed learning and interdisciplinary problem solving.
- While setting up spaces for hands-on tinkering, schools also need to make mental space for creativity, risk taking, and learning from failure. Those qualities are central to maker culture, but still rare in too many school settings.
- More important than gaining access to expensive tools is learning how to turn raw ideas into prototypes that can be tested, refined, and improved through feedback.
- Students who gravitate toward an engineering or STEM approach to problem solving may get fresh ideas from watching artists work out solutions (and visa versa). Collaboration is more likely to happen when thinking and tinkering take place in the open.
- parents team up with their children for monthly Maker Saturdays.
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Encourage students to tell the stories behind their ideas and describe the process that took them from inspiration to finished product.
- If you're interested in seeing a school makerspace in action, check out this curated list from Bob Pearlman
- Maker Education Initiative maintains a resource library, including sample projects.
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The Maker Movement: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants to Own the Future | Edutopia
- Should we worry that making in the classroom is just the new-new thing, soon to be replaced by some other newer new-new thing?
- To prevent this, I like to combine the work of education pioneers and giants with the new work of scholars to show that this is more than just a fad or a chance for a shopping spree.
- "making" shouldn't be just making anything.
- When we talk about making in the classroom, we have to continually raise the bar and challenge ourselves to create an academically worthy process. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to add computational technology to the making
- Interaction between the digital and physical world adds a level of complexity that results in greater understanding of both.
- Although the learning happens inside the learner's head, it happens most reliably when the learner is engaged in a personally meaningful activity that makes the learning real and shareable.
- "meaningful" part of constructionism
- the power of making something comes from the learner's question or impulse and is not imposed from the outside.
- Constructionism
- It seeks to liberate learners from their dependency on being taught.
- "It made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority."
- It's easy to find widespread support for the idea that hands-on experiences are crucial for students to develop deep understanding.
- The modern Maker movement has its roots in timeless craft traditions combined with new materials and a community approach to problem-solving spread globally by the reach of the internet.
- Educational institutions should take notice when a learning revolution is happening outside its doors. School loses relevancy to young people when it fails to connect to the real world, to their world, and the world of the future.
- Agency by Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is investigating the "promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning experiences." They see a new kind of hands-on pedagogy emerging, one that "encourages community and collaboration (a do-it-together mentality), distributed teaching, boundary crossing, and a responsive and flexible pedagogy."
- like being on the same side as Piaget, Papert, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, thousands of museums and libraries, and a global revolution
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Google Drawings - Templates - Apps User Group
These are templates of often used diagrams.
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Creating Badges with Google Sheets | Teacher Tech
A complicated way to create and save a badge, but a quick browse will likely get you what you are looking for.
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/04/2014
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Flubaroo: Multiple Correct Answers
In Flubaroo add-on for Google Forms/Sheets, you can have more than one correct answer by adding %or between correct answers.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Monday, December 1, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/02/2014
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Time to Start Making: Free Design Programs for 3D Printers | MindShift
- One of the big names in the CAD application industry is AutoDesk. While much of AutoDesk’s professional-level products are only available for purchase, the company has created a number of free CAD applications that can be used with 3D printers. AutoDesk offers 123D Design to users as a fast and easy tool for creating 3D objects that can be immediately sent to a connected 3D printer. But don’t ignore the company’s other free apps. 123D Creature and 123D Sculpt are two iPad apps that let users create custom objects on an iPad that can be saved and printed. 123D Catch lets users take a number of photographs of an object (from various angles) and then converts it to a 3D model that can be tweaked and then printed. Finally, 123D Make can take a model and slice it into layers that can be cut out in wood, plastic, or cardboard and then assembled.
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5 Social Media Must Knows for Every Teacher | Getting Smart
Some good suggestions here for how teachers might use social media with their students and parent body.
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The Skills Students Need to Survive and Thrive | Getting Smart
- The Skills All Students Need
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Communication. Demonstrate strong writing, speaking, and listening skills. These skills are game changers for employees with strong technical skills, since their work often impacts members of other teams, technical and non-technical, across the company.
Critical thinking. Assess a situation and determine whether or not to ask for help, seek additional information, or forge ahead. Recognize when to “pull the cord” and stop the bus.
Ownership. When taking on a project, own it from start to finish. Be reliable and know what needs to be done to complete the task, project, or initiative, whether alone or as a member of a team.
Leadership. Act as leader, with or without the title. Recognize that leadership lies in how you behave and how you conduct yourself as much as it does in the title that you hold.
Creative problem solving. Enjoy solving problems and doing so in creative ways, especially when resources may be constrained, time short, and expectations high.
Self-directed learning. Own professional learning and stay up-to-date on new trends in the field. Participate in ongoing learning through online and in-person options, and be willing to share what you’ve learned with colleagues.
Curiosity. Get stumped, but never get overwhelmed. When stuck, turn to personal and professional learning networks to problem solve. Failure is a part of the learning process.
Collaboration. Contribute to larger projects and meet game-changing goals. View collaboration as a key part of the job, especially when it comes to achieving outcomes.
High threshold for uncertainty. Be comfortable with the uncertainty that often accompanies problem solving, innovative and creative work. Uncertainty is what drives leaders to seek answers and solve problems. Recognize that setbacks and dead-ends are part of the process.
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Video: A Simple Animation About Addiction - DesignTAXI.com
Wordless video that visually demonstrates how addiction works.
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BBC News - Finland: Typing takes over as handwriting lessons end
- From autumn 2016, students won't have to learn cursive handwriting or calligraphy, but will instead be taught typing skills, the report says. "Fluent typing skills are an important national competence,
- she points out that handwriting helps children to develop fine motor skills and brain function, and suggests handwriting classes could be replaced by handicrafts and drawing.
- "Handwriting is a totally useless skill. Maybe not as useless as compulsory Swedish, but coming pretty close to it."
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- Love the last line of this article!
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