How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?

Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around lessons, allowing students to use their cell phones to do research and participate in class, and developing their curriculum around projects to ground learning around an activity. These strategies are all part of a larger goal to help students connect to social and cultural spaces. And it’s part of what defines “participatory learning,” coined by University of Southern California Annenberg Professor Henry Jenkins, who published his first article on the topic “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” in 2006. His work sprang out of the desire to understand the grassroots nature of creativity, how projects are being shared online and what an increasingly networked culture looks like. “PLAY describes a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,” Jenkins said. Related Related: Online Teaching Tools

A Collaborative Guide to Best Digital Learning Practices for K-12 Below you will find a collaboratively written document produced in Bangkok, Thailand, at the March 28-31 teacher’s meeting of EARCOS, the East Asia Regional Council of Schools. EARCOS is an organization of 130 primary and secondary schools that primarily use English as the language of instruction. These include AP and IB schools and a number of other private schools. We produced the document below on a public Google doc at a workshop, which I structured on the model of an “innovation challenge” of the kind that web developers use to bring together communities to complete a project. We hope this guide will be useful to any teacher confronting the challenges of introducing new technologies into the K-12 classroom in meaningful, inventive, productive, creative, and connected ways. The Ethics and Responsibilities of the 21st Century Classroom: A Collaborative Guide to Best Digital Learning Practices for K-12 Teachers and Administrators We need collaborative policy making.

Socrative Teacher Age Restrictions. You may only use the Site and Services if you are: (i) at least 13 years of age; or (ii) if you are under 13 years of age, with the consent of your teacher or a legal parent or guardian. By using the Site and Services, you hereby represent and warrant that you are at least 13 years of age or, if you are under 13 years of age, that you have the consent of your teacher, legal parent, or guardian to use the Site and Services. Verification of Identity. You acknowledge that we may choose, but are not obligated, to make any inquiries, either directly or through third parties, that we deem necessary to validate any user’s registration information, including without limitation engaging third parties to provide identity or other verification services. Teachers and Educators. If you are a teacher or educator, and will use the Socrative Services as an education tool, please read this section carefully. Changes. General Use. Mobile Applications. Registering to Use the Site and Services.

Fun Failure: How to Make Learning Irresistible Culture Bao Tri Photography By Anne Collier Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said. Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs know this as adults. Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play and founder of Quest to Learn, the first public school based on the principles of game design in the U.S., explained how failure can be a motivating agent for learning in her presentation at SXSW. Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right. Game designer Jane McGonigal makes a similar point. But the opposite is true in school, Salen said. Over the past year, Salen went on a “listening tour,” interviewing game designers at Media Molecule, Valve, and Blizzard Entertainment. Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. A version of this post appeared on NetFamilyNews. Related

The 21st Century Teaching and Learning Skills for Teachers and Students We have just finsihed working on our fourth ebook this year. The 21st Century Skills Teachers and Students Need is inspired by the popular post under the same title here in this blog.Since its publication last year, thousands of people have been reading it and so we decided to make an elaborate ebook where we can provide more information on this topic. As is the habit with each new ebook we publish, here is part of the introduction and you can scroll down to download and read the entire ebook. ......Digital era, information age, knowledge era are new terms that we start hearing recently because of this digital boom. We live in a digital world where computers, tablets and mobile devices are predominant. Here is the table of content of this ebook to let you have an idea of what to expect to read. Use this Link to share the ebook ( ) Here is the ebook The 21st Century Skills Teachers and Students Need to Have -

Humanities (Online) - Middle Years Programme - IB Store MYP Taskbank: Humanities (Online) is a fully searchable database of approximately 400 MYP Humanities tasks together with additional resources, assessment tools and teacher notes. The extended writing tasks, test questions and assignment tasks in this Taskbank are aligned to MYP: Humanities guide (2012) and are suitable for students in all years of the MYP. Search for tasks using a powerful filtering systemEdit any task online and save to a personalized libraryCreate new tasks and attach criterion tables at the click of a buttonAdd video/audio/high resolution images to any taskPrint tasks directly from the web browser for students Payment for this product is by annual school subscription. If you are purchasing for multiple schools please enter the number of schools you are purchasing for in the quantity box. You can find help videos by following this link:

Weaving Debate into the Writing Process Organized debates are an engaging way to help students discover, explore and organize ideas during the writing process. However, neither my teacher colleagues nor students share my enthusiasm. To find out why, I asked how they felt about using debate in the classroom. Teachers' answers: Students are too aggressive and rowdy to debate. Students' answers: Debates are tedious and repetitive. Rethinking classroom debating might help both the aforementioned groups view this strategy as valuable. Debate activities do not have to mirror the traditional debate protocol, where students stand on opposite sides of the classroom and formally argue about a particular point -- an exercise that students and teachers may find to be tedious. Stage One: Prewriting Activity: Discussion Webs Stage Two: Drafting Activity: Pinwheel Strategy The pinwheel exercise helps students with two major skills that are needed during the drafting process: making connections and citing textual evidence. Stage Three: Revising

A parent guide to 21st Century learning I've just been reading this new guide published by Edutopia, titled A parent's guide to 21st Century Learning. As with much of the material published on the Edutopia site, this is a really useful collection of tips, ideas and links for parents and educators alike (and I qualify on both fronts The ideas in the booklet are grouped according to the age of the students, and use the “4Cs” from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a framework for emphasising the educative value of the learning resources that are shared. Each resource is briefly described, followed by a section on 'how to get involved', providing practical suggestions for how to engage with and use the resource with you children. The resources provide a range of engagements, from projects that promote particiation in social change and the development of digitial citizenship, to using online games and social media to promote collaboration and support project based learning – plus everything in between.

Fastest Way to Create Comic Strips and Cartoons - Toondoo