Kickstart Your Mobile Learning Project

Looking for digital content for your mobile or 1:1 initiative? PowerMyLearning is a collection of engaging free activities including academic games, interactives, and videos that are searchable by subject, grade, and Common Core standard.

Curated by a team of educators, PowerMyLearning also includes several sets of tools to help personalize and maximize instruction, such as playlists, a student dashboard, and other tools. Quiz Packs, available for select content areas and topics, focus on a specific Common Core State Standard and contain one of PowerMyLearning‘s top digital learning activities plus two short quizzes. 

PowerMyLearning resources come from a number of well-known educational content providers such as ReadWriteThink, PBS, BBC, and LearnZillion. Teachers or parents can set up level and interest-appropriate activities, or students can direct their own learning by choosing activities of interest to them. Both adults and students also have access to reports that monitor progress.

Digital literacy is integrated into PowerMyLearning by providing students the ability to choose avatars, create profiles, and tackle special challenges to earn more power for their “Wizmos.”
The PowerMyLearning collection is constantly growing and adding new activities and features. Create a free login and explore activities for your students at at http://powermylearning.org/

Google Launches Helpful GApps Tutorials

Google recently launched a new series of mini-courses to support teaching and learning with technology. Each course has tutorial videos, supplementary links, periodic quizzes, and a final assessment. Topics include Internet 101, (Google) Apps for Education, Gmail, (Google) Drive, Chrome OS and Chromebooks.

For schools and districts who have adopted Google Apps for Education as well as districts with mobile initiatives or those going BYOD, the GApps Tutorials could be a fabulous supplement to the ongoing professional development necessary to truly integrate technology into teaching learning. The courses are freely available online and participants who log in with a Google account can track their own progress and even receive completion certificates.

Access the GApps Tutorials at  https://educourses.withgoogle.com/course

Newsela website helps to provide Common Core-aligned materials

The Common Core provides a number of challenges to classroom teachers. One challenge is the requirement for the increased use of informational text within lessons. To utilize these texts effectively, teachers must provide materials at appropriate reading levels for each student as well as assess each student’s learning and growth.

A new website named Newsela provides innovative solutions for these challenges by providing engaging news articles that teachers can assign to students at one of four lexile levels and provides matching quizzes to assess comprehension. Although students need accounts to use Newsela,  they do not need email accounts, and may be assigned usernames and passwords through a school district's Google domain. Teachers create an account at the Newsela website and receive a 5-digit code that their students use to join the class.

Teachers then assign articles to groups of students by standard, topic and lexile level, and monitor student work through a teacher dashboard called a “binder”. Students working online have their progress recorded automatically in both student and teacher binders, but hard copies of texts and quizzes may also be downloaded and printed.

Additionally, Newsela has partnered with the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University Teachers College to identify some best practices for using Newsela in the classroom in large class, small group, and individual groupings. Supplementary lesson plans and ideas have been shared by schools in Newsela pilot projects and other innovative early adopters.

The Newsela website provides a collection of continuously-growing resources for teachers looking for relevant, Common-Core-aligned, engaging non-fiction texts as well as those looking for digital resources for 1:1 or mobile deployment projects. Be sure to take a test drive at Newsela.com

Resources for Digital Citizen Week

October 21-25, 2013 is Digital Citizenship Week. Digital citizenship is part of the process of learning to live, learn, and work in the global community, so these skills need to be embedded into students’ everyday lives, both at home and at school.

Edutopia and Common Sense Media are two leaders in providing resources for teachers and schools to facilitate engaging and relevant lessons and projects that incorporate important concepts such as copyright, internet safety, cyberbullying, digital footprints, communication, collaboration, and media literacy.

Common Sense Media’s resources include comprehensive, age-appropriate curricula for pre-K through 12th grades, while Edutopia’s collection includes videos, lesson plans, and projects from which teachers can pick and choose to find the ones that best fit into their classroom activities. Both sites also have materials for parents, families, and community members as well.

Be sure to join in the celebration of Digital Citizenship Week, and check out the various resources on both of these sites to find the perfect fit for your student’s needs!

http://www.edutopia.org/cyberbullying-internet-digital-citizenship-resources
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

Need training for 21st Century skills?

Is your school or district looking for help with training for 21st Century skills? The Goodwill GCFLearnFree.org website provides over 250 free tutorials on a variety of 21st Century topics including email, spreadsheets, social media, iPads and Google tools, as well as some basic tutorials on reading, math and job search skills.

The GCF tutorials take many forms: text, video, interactives, simulations and games. The tutorials and lessons could be used as a means of initiating a discussion, offering supplementary training or providing remedial assistance for those who missed a day of school. Frequent blog posts on the website also provide resources on many topics for learning and living in the online world such as Internet safety, searching and evaluating online information, and even advanced skills such as using Microsoft Excel’s vlookup function.

The Goodwill Community Foundation, whose motto is “Creating Opportunities for a Better Life,” is a program provided free of charge by the Goodwill Industries of Eastern North Carolina. Tutorials can be used by anyone without logging in, but users can also create a free GCFLearnFree.org account to track their class history and create transcripts. Since GCF is accedited by IACET, the International Association for Continuing Education and Training, participants who register may earn CEUs for successfully completing the online classes.

With fabulous content and a the perfect price point, GCFLearnFree.org might be the solution your school and district has been looking for!

Got Technology? Meet Graphite.org

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the volume of apps and educational media you encounter daily? Check Graphite.org, a free website created by Common Sense Media that provides reviews and ratings of apps, games, websites, and digital curricula. Created and curated by a team of professional educators, Graphite.org also blends the field notes contributed by teacher-users to provide practical insights to using each digital resource in a classroom. Site visitors can search by type (apps, games, websites), content area (language arts, math, science, and more), grade level, and price (free, free to try, paid). Additionally, it’s connected to the Common Sense Media website, that has a multitude of free resources for digital literacy as well as book and movie reviews. Give Graphite.org a try!  It is sure to become one of your most-visited sites!
(cross-posted from orvsdtraining.org)

Dancing with Robots

School reform...the Common Core...college and career skills...STEM...21st Century learning:  what does it all mean? As we endeavor to connect teaching and learning to life in a future world which we cannot quite envision, what are the fundamental concepts that will endure? In their paper, Dancing with Robots, Frank Levy, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Richard Murnane, from MIT, state that “We must refocus our education system around one objective: giving students the foundational skills in problem-solving and communication that computers don’t have.” Access it here:  http://issuu.com/thirdway/docs/dancing-with-robots?e=0/3958493#search

One of my projects for 2012-13 is helping folks to utilize instructional technology to teach to the Common Core. Last week, I attended a two-day workshop presented by NCCE, using the Library of Congress' Teaching with Primary Resources program that does just that. Today's Education Week Spotlight showcases the Reading Like a Historian program, created by Sam Wineburg at Stanford, that is the foundation of these NCCE/Library of Congress professional development sessions. Powerful, engaging, and FREE--it doesn't get any better than that!

Searching...

In the 21st Century, searching for information is a big part of our lives. We even created a new verb for it: Googling.

Pretty much everyone performs searches, but many do not have strong skills for doing so. Here is an infographic that explains several tips and tricks for "Getting More out of Google"--drilling down more effectively to find the information you need:

http://t.co/ClLZS1Md

MacLife - FreeApp Friday

FreeAppFriday, part of the MacLife website, serves up just that-- reviews for a few free apps, usually with a theme. This week's were music related. There are also a few other posts that help Mac/iPad/iPhone users keep up with what's happening in the iOS world: http://www.maclife.com/ Happy tapping!

Embracing the Enemy

Does your school ban cell phones? Have you thought about all the ways in which cellphones could be used to support learning? Here's a fabulous Presi that shares lots of ideas--be sure to check out the additional links at the bottom of the page!

http://goo.gl/6d5Xn

History as Mystery

Who doesn't like a good mystery? Make history come alive in your classroom by using the techniques presented in this PBS TV series! Learn how to help students become engaged by learning to explore the past, separate truth from myth, and evaluate possibilities. The videos, as well as lots of supportive resources on the accompanying website:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/

Transforming Past Lessons for 21st Century Learners

What a fabulous blog post! None of us really wants to just throw away successful lessons just because they do not utilize instructional technology. Ten Steps to Transforming Past Lessons for 21st Century Learners provides a framework (including a planning sheet!) to help renew and revive an old lesson by infusing technology. Blogger Michael Gorman recommends that teachers first check to make sure the lesson aligns with standards, and that at least two 21st Century Technologies be incorporated--to insure that at least one is measurable.

Thought for the millenium:

WE DID IT! 268 participants, presenters, and vendors, all conveged on Southern Oregon University on Friday, April 22 for the first-ever Southern Oregon Education Technology Summit. Way to go, team!

Here are the photos:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Outrageous!

This blog post says it all about the state of America's schools--we should ALL be outraged!

Top 10 Free iPhone Apps of 2010

Personally, I'm finding myself more and more attached to my iPhone. I attribute this to "backseat" time (This is the term I have given the time kids spend in the backseat playing with digital tools while we parents wrestle with traffic driving them hither and thither).

I accumulated this "backseat time" when my husband was doing most of the driving earlier this year as we commuted back and forth on weekends between one daughter in the Bay Area and the other in Portland. Finally I had time to download weird little apps and play with them.

While not all of the apps in the post below are useful in a school setting, some are useful in terms of personal productivity (e.g. Meebo).


Probably the most useful in the list is AppMiner, which helps you find MORE apps!

Here's the list--happy tapping!

http://techchunks.com/technology/ultimate-collection-of-top-10-free-iphone-apps-of-2010/

New Copyright Ruling Provides No Benefit for K-12

What were they thinking? According to an article in eSchool News, a recent interpretation by the U.S. Copyright Office of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act affords expanded use of video clips ONLY to higher education, "because K-12 education doesn’t need access to visually high-quality clips."

With criticism of the state of U.S. education rampant, one would think that ANY advantage we can give to K-12 educators and students would be valuable.

It's important to keep in mind that today's students are the citizens, business owners, leaders, voters --and taxpayers--of tomorrow!

What have you done for the world today?

I just ran across an interesting website called We Are What We Do. This website promotes grassroots-level methods of improving life on Planet Earth--one "action" at a time. There are a list of 131 simple things people can do such as using a mug instead of a paper cup, carrying your own shopping bags instead of using plastic, and recycling--simple actions that, if everyone does them, can have a significant effect on the world.

Take a look at the list of 131 actions and ask yourself, What have I done for the world today?

Why Not Wikipedia?

A recent article in Education Week, Embracing Wikipedia, by Matthew Shapiro, reports that in 2010, a University of Washington study "found that 82 percent of students use Wikipedia in their course-related research." Yet many teachers and media specialists I have spoken with ban Wikipedia completely, citing concerns over accuracy.

What if, as the Education Week article suggests, we teach students HOW to use Wikipedia rather than just banning it? What if we use it to teach them to become critical consumers of information and to evaluate content for such issues as "authorial bias"?

As Shapiro states in the article, when many of us went to school, our research revolved around the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, which had limited citations, the sources of which may or may not have been available in our print-based libraries. In 2010, our students are constantly inundated by information from multiple sources both print and digital, many only moments away from being live, including 24-hour news networks, blogs, ezines, YouTube, Twitter, and MMS messages that include images and video, as well as text.

Is it our job as teachers to hold back the tide, or to help our students develop the skills necessary to navigate the information technologies of their futures?