How Learning Happens How can schools better align their practices with what the science says about human learning? Our new video series, featuring Linda Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of Learning Policy Institute, and Pamela Cantor, MD, founder and senior science advisor of Turnaround for Children, pairs research insights with a variety of illustrative strategies from schools, all grounded in the science of human learning and development. We think these techniques will resonate with educators everywhere: They are focused on taking advantage of the incredible opportunity to help children reach their full potential by creating positive relationships, experiences, and environments in which every student can thrive. In fact, the science is beginning to hint at even more dramatic outcomes.
The Best Travel Apps to use in 2019 Things can get overwhelming when you travel. Countless articles and hours of television have been devoted to questions like “What to pack?” “When should I buy a flight for the cheapest price?” “How do I get the most affordable hotel rates?” But no worries – we’re here to help. Flights Skiplagged We love any app that brags “Our flights are so cheap, United sued us… but we won.” Jetradar and Skyscanner Looking for cheap local flights? Hopper Hopper If you – like my dad – like to book flights waaaaay in advance, then Hopper is your app. At the Airport Airhelp So your flight gets delayed or canceled… or your flight is overbooked. loungebuddy LoungeBuddy This app is great if you tend to get to an airport early or have a long layover – and you’re in coach. Flio Flio helps with the age-old airport conundrums of what to do and where to eat. Organizing Google Trips This app organizes your itinerary into one easy place. PackPoint PackPoint Never forget your raincoat again! Transportation (other than air) Via
edutopia We’ve seen personalized learning in the news a lot lately. In some cases, communities express concern that students are working independently on screens for hours at a time. Yet it strikes us that personalized learning needn’t—and in fact shouldn’t—come at the cost of social connections and collaborative opportunities. Personalized learning should be both personal and social. Many Vermont schools are demonstrating how learning can be both customized to individual interests and inherently collaborative, particularly when educators know their students well, design flexible pathways for their students to explore, and value and assess learning well beyond the school day and building. Learning Who Students Are Personalizing learning requires teachers to get to know their students well. At Lamoille Union Middle School, we’ve seen learners delve into this kind of identity work, writing “Where I’m From” poems based on George Ella Lyon’s poetry. Designing Flexible Pathways A Statewide Effort
□ The 90 Hottest EdTech Tools According to Education Experts (Updated For 2018) If you work in education, you’ll know there’s a HUGE array of applications, services, products and tools created to serve a multitude of functions in education. Tools for teaching and learning, parent-teacher communication apps, lesson planning software, home-tutoring websites, revision blogs, SEN education information, professional development qualifications and more. There are so many companies creating new products for education, though, that it can be difficult to keep up - especially with the massive volumes of planning and marking teachers have to do, never mind finding the time to actually teach! So how do you know which ones are the best? Well, as a team of people passionate about education and learning, we decided to do a bit of research to help you out. We’ve asked some of the best and brightest in education for their opinions on the hottest EdTech of 2020. Looking for a new learning management system that fits your needs? 1. Twinkl are pioneering EdTech in the classroom. 2. 3.
edutopia Ethical decision-making is a crucial part of comprehensive education, but few schools teach ethics, writes Linda Flanagan, advisory board member for the The Ethics Institute at Kent Place School, in a recent KQED Mindshift piece. Introducing ethical dilemmas in the classroom can open up opportunities not only for debate and critical thinking, but also for personal growth, empathy for other viewpoints, and self-reflection. Effective ethics instruction is about more than distributing a list of moral guidelines; it requires teaching students how to navigate their own moral decision-making. Students learn “to search for and evaluate their assumptions, to excavate the reasons behind those assumptions, to examine without prejudice another’s opinion and to make a thoughtful decision with confidence,” says Jana M. Lone, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Philosophy for Children. ©Kent Place School
Baleia é encontrada morta com 40 quilos de plástico no estômago - ROUTE Brasil Uma baleia da espécie bicuda de Cuvier foi encontrada em Mabini, na costa das Filipinas, morta com 40 quilos de plástico em seu estômago. A informação foi divulgada pelos cientistas do grupo D’Bone Collector Museum, organização que visa educar as pessoas sobre a preservação do meio ambiente. O biólogo marino Darrell Blatchley, fundador da organização, disse em entrevista à rede americana “CNN” que a baleia morreu de desidratação e inanição e vomitou sangue antes de morrer. “Eu não estava preparado para a quantidade de plástico”, disse Blatchley.
Welcoming Students With a Smile A widely cited 2007 study claimed that teachers greeting students at the classroom door led to a 27 percentage point increase in academic engagement. The problem? It included just three students. Now a new, much larger and more credible study—comprising 203 students in 10 classrooms—validates that claim: Greeting students at the door sets a positive tone and can increase engagement and reduce disruptive behavior. The first few minutes of class are often the most chaotic, as students transition from busy areas such as the hallway or playground. In the study, when teachers started class by welcoming students at the door, academic engagement increased by 20 percentage points and disruptive behavior decreased by 9 percentage points—potentially adding “an additional hour of engagement over the course of a five-hour instructional day,” according to the researchers. Ten middle school teachers were randomly assigned by the researchers to one of two groups. Building Community
20 of the best pubs in Ireland: readers’ tips | Travel Winning tip: Tin Pub, Ahakista, Co Cork On a good night, the Tin Pub on the Sheep’s Head peninsula is a dangerous place. The name comes from the sheets of corrugated iron holding it together around a concrete floor and a small wooden bar that serves Murphy’s and a cocktail called Cormac on the Beach, named after the red-headed barman. Beach Bar, Aughris, Co Sligo A picture postcard thatched Irish cottage perched on a lovely Atlantic beach with stunning views of the distant mountain ranges might sound like the stuff of fantasy. JJ Hough’s Singing Pub, Banagher, Co Offaly I took five friends on a week’s boat trip on the River Shannon, and this was our most memorable stop. Bridge St bar, Castlebar, Co Mayo My cousin brought us straight to her “locals’ local” in Castlebar shortly after we flew into Knock. Powers Thatch, Oughterard, Co Galway This is a wonderful pub in delightful Oughterard, a town right on Lough Corrib, the largest lake in the Republic and not far from Galway.
A Simple but Powerful Class Opening Activity At the start of a recent class, my students gathered a bouquet of good news: a trip to Ireland, an end to recent car troubles, an upcoming visit with a friend. These were highlights they shared during our start-of-class routine, the rose and thorn check-in. In this quick activity, students participate by sharing roses—something positive going on for a student that day—and thorns, which are negative, or at least less than positive. Students can choose their level of vulnerability: A rose can simply be “the weather is nice today.” Going around the classroom, each student states one rose and one thorn. Benefits of the Check-In Students know that every voice matters: The rose and thorn check-in gets every student’s voice into the room at the start of each class. Students develop awareness of others’ emotions—and how to respond to them: When students share their roses and thorns, they give their classmates a snapshot of their emotional state. Facilitation Tips Tending to Challenges
Playing Games Can Build 21st-Century Skills. Research Explains How. As anyone who’s ever spent hours hunched over Candy Crush can attest, there’s something special about games. Sure they’re fun, but they can also be absorbing, frustrating, challenging and complex. Research has shown our brains are “wired for pleasure,” and that games are an effective way to learn because they simulate adventure and keep our brains engaged and happy. But what exactly do we learn from them? “What you'll find from the research is that it's very much dependent on, ‘under certain types of conditions, certain types of skills seem to be developed,’” explains game designer and theorist Katie Salen, a former executive director at the nonprofit Institute of Play. On a Quest A decade ago, Salen helped design and open a Manhattan middle school with a unique proposition. Digital games were included from the start, of course, but the school also decided to include elements of game design in nearly everything kids did during the day. The Balanced Game Play, Explore, Study, Build
10 Ways to Improve Transfer of Learning Whether you’re a student or working professional looking to keep your skills current, the importance of being able to transfer what you learn in one context to an entirely new one cannot be overstated. Of course, the goal of any learning or training is to eventually be able to apply it in real-world situations, but a PayScale survey released last year found that 60 percent of employers don’t believe recent graduates are well-prepared for their jobs. One possible reason for this is that memory is context dependent, so transferring or recalling something that was learned in a classroom setting to a fast-paced work environment isn’t always easy. Once you understand how to go about transferring your knowledge to new contexts, however, you could change jobs or even careers and still find ways to apply your prior knowledge to the situations and problems you might face in a new role. 1. Focus on the relevance of what you’re learning 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. About Marianne Stenger
6 new ways to play a Quizlet Live game Vocabulary is important for every subject and even more so in the age of high stakes testing. Early on in my teaching career, I moved rather quickly towards using Quizlet to create and manage the vocabulary that my students would need to learn. Quizlet is by no means limited to just vocabulary though; as study questions, diagrams, pronunciation, and pictures make it a powerful tool. I remember the first time that I played Quizlet Live and it was glorious. As I surveyed the room, all I could do was stand back and smile, knowing that this was a game changer. “Quizlet Live is a free in-class game where students work in teams to learn study sets on Quizlet. Though the students always enjoyed the original gameplay, I began to experiment with different ways of playing. Need to know how to set up and run a Quizlet Live game? Eleven I found that during the game, some teams might struggle and fall behind others. Cacophony After finding success with Eleven, I moved onto some other experiments.
3 Ways to Boost Students’ Conceptual Thinking We want our students’ learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future. For this to occur, we need to nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover concepts—transferable ideas that transcend time, place, and situation. Learning knowledge and skills is like standing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees: It’s easy to spot details but hard to see patterns. By intentionally designing learning activities in which students move between the factual and conceptual levels of thinking, we can help them construct understanding, facilitate transfer, and build their sense of agency. Questions to Consider During Lesson Planning To help students go from surface to deep learning, we can ask ourselves three questions: From the facts or skills being taught, which concepts are at the heart of the learning? These questions reflect different levels of conceptual thinking. 3 Ways to Promote Conceptual Thinking 1. Concept formation activities:
Digitalisierung in der Schule: Wann sind Apps und Tablets im Unterricht sinnv... SENDETERMIN Heute | 8.30 Uhr | SWR2 Von Lukas Meyer-Blankenburg Der Digitalpakt garantiert den Schulen Milliardenhilfen bei der Digitalisierung. Doch noch ist nicht klar, welche Geräte wie eingesetzt werden sollen. Pädagogische Konzepte und Weiterbildungsangebote für Lehrkräfte gibt es bislang kaum. Fünf Milliarden für die Digitalisierung Im März stimmte auch der Bundesrat dem sogenannten "Digitalpakt Schule" zu. Die Digitalisierung verändert das Lernen Für ein neues, umfassendes Medienkonzept benötigten Schulen circa sechs bis zehn Jahre, schätzt Ralph Müller-Eiselt, Bildungsexperte der Bertelsmann Stiftung. Der Lehrer als Lernbegleiter Die Digitalisierung verändert auch die Rolle des Lehrers. Junge Lehrer sind skeptisch Gerade angehende und junge Lehrer stehen der Digitalisierung eher skeptisch gegenüber. Die digitale Schule als Lernatelier In einigen skandinavischen Ländern, aber auch in den USA und Kanada gibt es bereits Schulen mit einem völlig neuen, digitalisierten Lernkonzept.