Comics - Uclick

Natural Born Learners : A tribute to Roland Meighan: Contributor to the Natural Born Learners reader. It is with great sadness that we learned about the passing of Personalized Education Now, founder and autonomy in education advocate, Dr. Roland Meighan. I had the honour of interviewing this inspiring gentleman and was thrilled that he consented to be included in the reader Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education. He did not live to see it in print.

Social Interaction Design Primer II: 2. Action Systems We need an action system for our content/information system. Action systems traditionally belong to interaction designers, and they tend to describe actions that are constrained and enabled by the user interface, as well as back-end architecture, features, and functionality. Action systems conventionally hew pretty closely to visual design languages, and there are many standard and conventional systems (including pattern languages) around for user behavior around UI elements, such as pulldowns, lists, multiple selection windows, form pages, wizards, and so on. Action systems describe the user interaction with what is on the screen, and with what the user’s (inter)action does: search > results; submit > preview; mouse over > popup, and so on. The screen can only display so much, so once a user begins to interact, her actions result in new content, windows, screens and so on. Attention: this article is part of a series.

How Integrating Arts Into Other Subjects Makes Learning Come Alive Art has long been recognized as an important part of a well-rounded education — but when it comes down to setting budget priorities, the arts rarely rise to the top. Many public schools saw their visual, performing and musical arts programs cut completely during the last recession, despite the many studies showing that exposure to the arts can help with academics too. A few schools are taking the research to heart, weaving the arts into everything they do and finding that the approach not only boosts academic achievement but also promotes creativity, self-confidence and school pride.

Attribution Theory Attribution theory provides an important method for examining and understanding motivation in academic settings. It examines individuals' beliefs about why certain events occur and correlates those beliefs to subsequent motivation. The basic premise of this theory is that people want to understand their environments and, therefore, strive to understand why certain events happen. Visible Thinking Purpose and Goals Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them

Literacy Collaborative at The Ohio State University: Acquiring Second-Languages through Constructivist and Communicative Approaches in Literacy Collaborative Schools By: Shelly Schaub, K-2 Literacy Collaborative Trainer English Language Learner (ELL) populations are growing at fast rate in most school districts across the United States. Projections suggest that “language minority students (those who speak a language other than English at home and who have varying levels of proficiency in English) will comprise over 40 percent of elementary and secondary students by 2030 (Thomas & Collier, 2001). Many questions are being asked about how to meet the needs of ELL students in classroom literacy blocks. The purpose of this article is to link the constructivist approach of the Literacy Collaborative framework for literacy instruction to the communicative/constructivist approaches to second-language acquisition. Literacy Collaborative is a school-reform literacy project that supports teachers in raising their expertise through on-going professional development.

Education Department Pledges to Prioritize Needs of Language-Learners - Learning the Language The U.S. Department of Education says it is developing a strategy to elevate the national focus on English-language learners, the nation's fastest-growing student population. The plan, which touches on topics ranging from parent engagement to teacher preparation, is a "framing guideline for how we want to think about English-learners across different levels of the organization," said Libia Gil, the head of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition, or OELA. Gil unveiled a draft of the plan Wednesday while addressing the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund's school governance conference in Washington. More than 70 Latino school board members, higher education trustees, and state lawmakers attended the event.

Culture - Where do witches come from? Ask any Western child to draw a witch, and the chances are that he or she will come up with something familiar: most likely a hook-nosed hag wearing a pointy hat, riding a broomstick or stirring a cauldron. But where did this image come from? The answer is more arresting and complex than you might think, as I discovered last week when I visited Witches and Wicked Bodies, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London that explores the iconography of witchcraft. Witches have a long and elaborate history. Their forerunners appear in the Bible, in the story of King Saul consulting the so-called Witch of Endor. They also crop up in the classical era in the form of winged harpies and screech-owl-like “strixes” – frightening flying creatures that fed on the flesh of babies.

Learn to Draw Animals Print and enjoy our Learn to Draw Animals pages for kids of all ages. Kids can use our step by step illustrations to discover how to draw all sorts of animals and build up their skills and confidence in the process...plus they are just good fun! You could build up a whole folder of these printable pages for rainy days - teachers might even want to laminate them and keep them ready as a time-filler or reward. And of course many of them tie into classroom themes, too. We have over 80 of these animal drawing pages so you are sure to find one that appeals! Explore our learn to draw animals printables below...

Larry Ferlazzo: Five strategies for ELL vocabulary instruction Reading, writing, listening and speaking in a new language demands a number of prerequisites -- a desire to do so; a certain level of self-confidence; a supportive atmosphere and, of course, knowing the meaning of words in the new language. In other words, vocabulary. Here are five of the many instructional strategies I and, I'm sure, many other teachers use when teaching vocabulary to English Language Learners. Word Jumble: Practicing sentence structures It appears in several activity books and I have come across it in various course books as well. In ‘Five-minute activities’ (Penny Ur & Andrew Wright, Cambridge University Press) it is called Jumbled Sentences. I’ve known it as Word Jumble. I have used this activity a few times and I have tried several different ways of presenting it.

Why ‘Design Thinking’ Doesn’t Work in Education “This process—which has been called design thinking—draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world.” Stanford University’s dschool webpage No doubt readers are familiar with the term Design Thinking. The concept of Design Thinking has yet to reach levels of MOOC mania, however it’s a movement in its own right. The recent surge of design-thinking-as-a-method coverage by various newsletters and journals is due to its success in the business sector, mostly with consumer and technology companies. The shift to the customer-in-the center of the process is one factor that has motivated companies and now education institutions [with its own shift to the student-focused model] to implement the Design Thinking approach.

Six Sources of Influence The six sources of influence model is a powerful model for change. I first learned about the Six Sources of Influence from my Influencer Training. The Influencer Training is based on the book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.