This video started small, and the target audience was about 150 teaching staff. It has now reached over five million downloads. What is this video saying to us? Why should we not only watch it, but take it’s messages as something bigger … than … well, you decide. Enjoy (or not)!
Great site to support teachers in getting started around 21st Century Skills and pedagogical approaches to support 21st Century Learners
21st Cenury Learning Resources and Repository |
Effectively meet the individualized needs of students.
In addition, the strategies shared will enrich the following areas in your classroom.
Motivation • Social Skills • Classroom Management • Critical Thinking • Positive Environment
Explore, Plan, Evaluate, and Implement Curriculum that works.
Systemic Change • Classroom Curriculum• Collaborative Planning • Organization
I would like to send a message of support to all those in the Bowcroft community: I have had the pleasure to meet, and begin working and collaborating with people whom are willing to discuss thorny issues, and try new ideas. Here are some recent ways that I have worked with teachers and supporters of learning:
September 12, 2007
I interrupted a conversation between the teaching assistants involved in literacy. They were wondering why the reading diagnostic tools used by teachers to assess student reading levels were difficult to align with one another. I claimed that I rarely looked a diagnostic test for reading until much closer to the first report card. I tried to learn how the kids read, how they found relevance and significance in the literature they were reading, and if they were not making sense, why they were not engaged. I suggested that they look at differentiating the reading process into the most significant aspects, and grouping kids around those main concepts: predicting, discussion and debate, analysis and synthesizing the main ideas and important aspects, building vocabulary with concept mapping, taking notes to support memory, fluency and confidence in reading aloud and silently, choice in reading material, and reading from different genres, which means becoming familiar with differing perspectives. So, I challenged them to think about moving beyond an isolated measure of reading ability to understand their kids as readers.
Here are some best practice ideas around reading that may be of some support:
Building A Powerful Reading Program: From Research to Practice
As in my previous post, the new year has started, and in this seventh year of this new century, we are faced with increasing change, speed of everyday live, and the questions of what school still needs to look and sound like. School 2.0 is getting a lot of press these days. I get new updates through Google Alerts nearly everyday about teaching and learning in the 21st Century. Is this a new band-wagon, or is there going to be systemic change as a consequence of this read/write, Web 2.0, digital environment.
Back to School 2.0 by Rachael King
Education projects such as the Aspirnaut Initiative aim to harness technology to better prepare U.S. students to compete in the global economy
Children in Grapevine, Ark., often board the school bus in the dark, some even packing pillows and blankets. For students in Arkansas’ rural Sheridan School District, the ride can last as long as an hour and a half, and probably seems longer thanks to rules against behavior that could distract the driver. But lately the 15-hour weekly commute is looking up. Thanks to a pilot program called the Aspirnaut Initiative, the bus has been outfitted with an Internet router and the children have been given either video iPods or laptops. The machines have been loaded with educational videos such as National Geographic Society’s Wild Chronicles to teach concepts such as the relationship between predator and prey.
Read the rest of the article here Back to School 2.0
Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006
There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”
Accessed from Time.com, September 03, 2007
Tomorrow is my daughter’s first day of ECS (Kindergarten), and the start of another new year of school. I thought that this would be a good place to start my blog; it is a new beginning for a new student (and hopefully continuing as a stellar learner), and a new year for a good number of other students (hopefully as learners, as well). I wonder what kind of learning career she will have in school, and I hope it is not the one portrayed in Rip Van Winkle’s awakening.
I make this point to reveal the fact that I am excited to see my daughter reach a new mile-stone in her life, and I am excited for her because she is so excited to be “doing” school. I am, however, scared, as a dad, to see my daughter growing up faster than I could ever imagine. Likewise, I, too, am scared for all those other young people in school where they are “doing” school, an institution that may not be serving them as best it should. This blog is intended to support teachers in their quest to support learners to live a full life in school and not the one witnessed by Rip Van Winkle.
