10 Important Skills Students need for the Future The future. What do our students really need to know and be able to do to succeed in future education and careers? Content is a part of what they need to know. Standardized tests test content knowledge and some skills. Content is important to a point. I learned many of these skills in college because even 20 years ago, my school, WPI, understood these ideas. Research by the Institute for the Future released in a report entitled “Future Work Skills 2020″ shows that preparing for a specific career area based on content is difficult and, instead, people should be developing certain broad skills. Here are the skills: Sense-making. Social intelligence. Novel and adaptive thinking. Cross-cultural competency. Computational thinking. New-media literacy. Transdisciplinarity. Cognitive load management. Virtual collaboration. A summary map of the skills:
PBL Tools Many people have requested a source for the management tools that are used in the Project Based Learning plans on Teach 21. Here is the place. You will find rubrics, checklists, task management charts, learning logs and other documents that will help your PBL planning and delivery. Rubrics Learning Logs and Journals Presentation Tools Self and Peer Assessments Task Management and Student Contracts WVDE Template for Project Based Learning Design WVDE Project Design Rubric Lowell Milken Center Return to PBL Page Return to Teach 21 Home
Three Responses to "But I Don't Have Time to Blog" Earlier this month at the Authentic Learning Workshop I was asked, "what do you say to teachers who say I don't have time for a blog?" I offered a few responses and here they are: First, don't think of blogging as something you have to do on a daily basis. Second, think about a blog as a living document. Third, think about all of the time that you spend on activities that don't benefit you or anyone else.
SLJ Reviews Gobstopper and Subtext: Apps that Enable Interactive Classroom Reading “If you think about math teachers, they’ve always been able to give assignments in which students are required to show their work. That makes it easy for them to check individual understanding, pretty much on a daily basis. English and humanities teachers who give extended reading assignments have never had that luxury. Instead, they’ve comparatively been flying blind, taking it on faith that most students have done the required reading, without knowing for sure, and moving along daily without solid evidence that kids are really ‘getting it.’” That’s what Jason Singer, the CEO and founder of Gobstopper, told me was the central issue his product is designed to address: the challenge of ensuring that every student is meaningfully moving forward in a given reading assignment—and not just faking it. Subtext, launched a year ago and currently available as a free iPad and Edmodo app, is another application that doubles as a collaborative reading platform that focuses on Common Core skills.
Born to Learn ~ You are Born to Learn 10 Practical Ideas For Better Project-Based Learning In Your Classroom By Jennifer Rita Nichols, TeachThought Intern Teachers are incorporating more and more projects into their curriculum, allowing for much greater levels of collaboration and responsibility for students at all levels. Project- based learning is a popular trend, and even teachers who don’t necessarily follow that approach still see the benefit to using projects to advance their students’ learning. Projects can be wonderful teaching tools. They can allow for a more student-centred environment, where teachers can guide students in their learning instead of using lectures to provide them with information. The increase in classroom technology also makes projects more accessible to students. Despite general agreement about the benefits of using projects and project-based learning in general, it must be noted that all projects are not created equal! This may happen fairly often because teachers are wary about being able to assign grades to the final assignments handed in to them by students.
A Must-Have Guide to Canadian Education #Hashtags Looking to kick-start your Twitter identity this summer? Using social media to connect with other educators can be a great way to learn new things, chat with others who are doing similar things in their classroom, and to meet new colleagues. The handy infographic below (created by MindShare Learning) highlights some of the more popular education hashtags on Twitter – that are specific to Canada! We’ve gotten a lot of requests lately from readers in Canada for information specific to them, and this infographic came across our desks just in time! Check out the plethora of useful hashtags below! A Quick Hashtag Refresher: Whether you’re a new or seasoned Twitter user, you likely come across confusing hashtags that probably look like a bunch of nonsense. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keyword or topic in a Tweet. For example, the popular #edchat hashtag is used by thousands of users every Tuesday. The Hashtag’s Early Start
Daily Five and Technology As of this moment, one of the bigger movements in my school district at the elementary level involves The Daily Five, by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. “The Daily Five is a series of literacy tasks (read to self, read with someone, writing, word work, and listening to reading) which students complete daily while the teacher meets with small groups or confers with individuals.” The book “explains the philosophy behind the structure,” and it shows teachers how to train “students to participate in each of the five components.” As teachers begin to implement different aspects of the Daily Five into their classrooms, many teachers have been curious as to how one would integrate technology with the Daily Five. Read to Self: There are countless websites that students can use in order to record themselves while they are reading. Finally, if you have a Twitter account (and you should), the quickest way collaborate and get fresh ideas about the Daily Five is by searching for #d5chat.
The Learning Lab Project-Based Learning: Why and How? EducationWorld is pleased to present this article by Aimee Hosler, an OnlineSchools.com contributor and mother of two who writes about education and workplace news and trends. She holds a B.S. in journalism from California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo. "Learn by doing." This is the type of experience that great teachers strive to facilitate for students. PBL is an instructional strategy in which students work cooperatively over time to create a product, presentation or performance. estion. Despite the buzz PBL has generated in academic journals and at teaching conferences, most modern classrooms still rely on teacher-led, paper-based learning. Scholastic's Administr@tor Magazine notes that while there are no official statistics on PBL's increasing popularity, a rash of new PBL-based schools have emerged. Not sure you're ready for it? 1. Think PBL is just another pedagogical trend? 2. 3. 4. 5. Yes, PBL is good for students, but its benefits do not end there.
Katie Salen on the Power of Game-Based Learning (Big Thinkers Series) Student: It's really cool school. I've never gone to a school quite like it. Student: Well, we get to design games and play each other's games, so instead of just doing work, work, work all day. Student: Well, we have the basic classes of a school, but we gave them different names, like math is called Code World. Student: We learn everything that all the other schools learn. Katie Salen: My name's Katie Salen and I wear a couple of different hats. Quest to Learn is a new sixth grade through twelfth grade public school that opened in New York City in Fall 2009, and it's a school that has the tagline, school for digital kids. So it's a school that from the ground up has been designed to leverage the kind of digital lives of kids, and it also looks at the notion of how games work as learning systems, and it's developed a pedagogical approach that delivers what we call game-like learning. Student: And then you have two goals, but one of them is impossible to get to. Teacher: Okay.
Incorporating Technology in the Daily 5 by Matthew Radowski on Prezi