Integrating Science, Math and Technology Reference Curriculum

Integrating Science, Math and Technology Reference Curriculum: You will be able to use the lesson plans on this site all year long, whether you teach kindergarten or high school. The elementary topics deal with cycles--water cycle, life cycle, plate tectonic cycl..

Want to connect your students this school year? Here are 5 ideas.

Want to connect your students this school year? Here are 5 ideas.: This piece was originally posted in SmartBlog on Education in Ideas that Work, Social Media in Education

Editor's note:  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has named August as Connected Educator Month. The U.S. Department of Education’s Connected Educators initiative seeks to celebrate and encourage educators at all levels to collaborate and participate in online learning resources and communities. This piece was written to support this initiative.

Unlike their parents, today’s students can communicate, collaborate, cooperate, and connect with the world in meaningful ways that were never before possible. It is incumbent upon educators to support students in doing this effectively in order to empower them to do work that will not only lead them to personal success, but is also worthy of the world.

So, how can educators do this? Here are five ways to help your students get connected:

1. Uncover student interests. Start by supporting young people in discovering, then developing their interests, which may turn into passions. One way to do this is by giving them a student interest inventory.
2. Connect at the local level. Once a class or school has supported students in identifying interests, share the results so those who care about the same things can connect. Schools using a service like ePals might want to share their interests with students in partner schools to widen the circle with which they are connecting.
3. Connect via your school’s online platform. Once you have identified student interests in your school, help them set up groups online via places like Edmondo and in person with school-based groups and clubs where students and teachers who share interests can connect, discuss, learn, grow, and create.
4. Connect via social media. Support students in finding those who share their interests via social media using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. If a group or hashtag doesn’t exist, support and empower students in starting their own.
5. Comment on blogs and publications. Help students find out who’s writing about what they care about. When they do, support them in joining the conversation by commenting on those topics and even proposing a guest post or article.

Congratulations! Once you’ve supported students in these five ways, you’ve put them on the road to becoming a connected student with a learning network that will assist them in achieving success in areas that are of deep personal interest.

Today's Newsletter: Guest Author Salvador Contes Jr. on CTE

Today's Newsletter: Guest Author Salvador Contes Jr. on CTE: On July 31, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle praised colleges and career academies, stating, “We have to design education models that fit the needs of individual students, with pathways to lead them to success." As a matter of fact, Wisconsin has taken the charge of moving the agenda.

Stars, Sparkles and Praise: Motivation in Kids' Apps?

Stars, Sparkles and Praise: Motivation in Kids' Apps?:

Teacher and education director Carolina Nugent looks at the assumptions and realities about educational apps and software for children.

These last few weeks I have read some enlightening blogs and articles about game design, motivation and praise in children's apps. As the education director at KinderTown, I have looked at a tremendous number of apps that use stars, stickers and praise as the method of keeping kids engaged and active on the app. In contrast, as a teacher, I see more value in educational apps modeling lesson design, content and activities that are engaging with leveling for decreased frustration. The challenge for me has been to find apps and games which develop any kind of intrinsic (internal) motivation.
read more

Retire the "21st Century" in "21st Century Learning"

Retire the "21st Century" in "21st Century Learning": At the start of ISTE12 I tossed out a concept through twitter that was discussed in the School CIO conference preceding ISTE. I proposed that we should retire "21st Century Learning" and start calling it "Learning". It has caused quite a discussion in twitter and I have had some great intellectual exchanges over it. I wanted to take this venue as a place to put my thoughts on the concept together.

Differentiated Instruction in Science Class

Differentiated Instruction in Science Class:
“What it means to differentiate activities is to give students a variety of ways, or alternate paths, to making sense out of [and] manipulating the ideas they worked with in the content,” says Carol Ann Tomlinson. In this clip, watch how a science teacher differentiates instruction in response to students’ readiness levels.
This clip is an excerpt from the ASCD PD Online® course Differentiated Instruction: An Introduction.

Collaborative Writing & Thinking With Google Docs

Collaborative Writing & Thinking With Google Docs:
Technology specialist Jason Bedell uses Google Docs for writing assignments because it enables seamless collaboration and coaching. Bedell says Google Docs stands out for its collaborative features:

• You can privately share documents with specific people. Everyone you share with can see the changes in real time and no one has to worry about losing the file or not having the most up-to-date version.
  When you share a document with someone, you can give them only the permissions they need, whether to edit or only to read.
• You can make a document public so that many people can edit or view it anonymously.
• You can publish the document as a website that can be shared as is or embedded on a class website.

Watch this brief tutorial on how to use Google Docs in your classroom: