Educational Resources & Tech Tools 07/26/2016

• A Virtual Start Can Mean Real Sleep For Students | EdSurge News

  • Significant research has shown that early school start times negatively impact teenagers’ performance and health.
  • Early start times create problems for students for a simple reason: Teenagers need sleep.
  • Teenagers have evolving sleep patterns that can keep them up into the wee hours, forcing them to tap the snooze button repeatedly the next morning. Not getting the recommended 8.5-9.5 hours a night means, as a researcher from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put it, many students enter the classroom as “essentially brain dead” and “walking zombies.”
  • a lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk of obesity, depression and unhealthy behavior (drug, alcohol and tobacco use) among teens. The CDC also notes that adolescents who don’t get enough sleep tend to perform worse academically than their well-rested peers.

  • Factors like transportation needs, parents’ work schedules, students’ work schedules, collective bargaining agreements and afterschool programs all need to be addressed. And all of these factors are politically thorny on some level.

    Scholastic athletics, with its regular travel and daylight requirements, are especially tricky, both logistically and politically.

• Using Design Thinking to Embed Learning in Our Jobs

  I used this article to help me think about how to create more targeted PD for our faculty.

  tags: pd design thinking professional development

  • The telecomm company used design thinking to come up with a different approach: Rather than inject “training” into employees, it studied the job of a retail sales agent over the first nine months and developed a “journey map” showing what people need to know the first day, the first week, the first month, and then over the first few quarters.
  • What this process revealed is that there are some urgent learning needs that must be addressed immediately, and then there are people to meet, systems to learn, products to understand, and many other processes to master over the first year. And of course, much of this involves getting to know customers, product experts, and fundamentals of sales and customer service.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Educational Resources & Tech Tools 07/12/2016

• Exit Celebrating: 8 Epic Ideas for Ending the School Year | Edutopia

  • 1. Make a Top 10 List

      

    Dave Burgess suggested having kids make their Top 10 list of what they had learned during the school year.

  • 2. Host a "Celebration of Learning" Final Exam

      

    Todd Finley told me about a college professor whose students took their final exam in a room filled with food, decorations, and the promise of a celebration. In classic professorial style, he conducted an experiment. The students in the celebratory class had higher test scores on their final exam.

  • Turn taking everything down into a fun event done as close to the last day as possible. (Think slam-dunk basketball.)

• Executive Functioning Issues in Children | Working Memory Problems

  tags: executivefunctioning executive functioning learning differences

• How to Use the New Version of Padlet

  Richard Byrne offers five ideas on how to use Padlet for sharing student work and ideas.

  tags: padlet blogging student work KWL tech tools bookmarking

  • Padlet as a simple blogging platform:
    
  • Padlet Mini as a bookmarking tool:
    
  • Padlet as a KWL chart:
    
  • Padlet for group research and discussion:
    
  • Padlet as a showcase of your students’ work:
    

• Digital Formative Assessments!

  Tech tools for formative assessments and differentiation.

  tags: formative assessment polls formative_assessment formativeassessment assessment feedback differentiation

• 15 Good Tools for Quickly Gathering Feedback from Students

  tags: feedback formativeassessment assessment formative assessment polls formative_assessment chat differentiation

  • Polls, chat tools, and interactive quizzes provide good ways to hear from all of the students in a classroom. These kind of tools allow shy students to ask questions and share comments. For your more outspoken students who want to comment on everything, a feedback mechanism provides a good outlet for them too. Here's a run-down of some of the best tools for gathering feedback from students in real-time.

• Best of Education Padlets

  Ideas about here, from STEM resources to safe search sites and everything in between.

  tags: teaching resources

• Uses for Seesaw in the 1st Grade Classroom

  tags: seesaw first grade 1st grade

• SMART Exchange - USA - Search lessons by keyword

  SMART technologies lesson and game plans.

  tags: Smartboard lessons

• Recent Books I’ve Read and Recommend – Reading By Example

  Book ideas for admin prof dev.

  tags: pd professional development books

• Beyond Borders - National Geographic Society

  The overall theme of this teacher-tested unit is using maps to understand borders and their impacts in Europe. The materials will help your middle school students to use maps to think about how borders intersect physical and human geographical features, and how those intersections can lead to cooperation and/or conflict.

  tags: geography socialstudies social studies history maps world history

  • The overall theme of this teacher-tested unit is using maps to understand borders and their impacts in Europe. The materials will help your middle school students to use maps to think about how borders intersect physical and human geographical features, and how those intersections can lead to cooperation and/or conflict.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.