A Promise Renewed is a great new dashboard for investigating child mortality rates around the world over the last 10-30 years. Struggled to embed the dashboard into my own site, but it's all on a nice stand-alone page for students to investigate various trends in the data!
0 Comments
Challenge yourself and your students to be creative. So many good Approaches to Learning in this video! It might be a great way to start off a new lesson or project that you want students to work on, or use it as an advisory lesson starter. Whatever you do. . . stay creative! 29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo. Originally posted on June 1, 2012 I am totally addicted to this game right now thanks to Dan Meyer. Who cares that it’s probably designed for 4th graders! I like how the creators of the game explicitly state that the game is not a lesson in fractions, but rather requires knowledge of fractions. I think this game would make a great starting inquiry into fraction concepts. Students can play the game and later reflect and induce some fraction rules. That and it’s just fun! You can visit the official page here: http://games.cs.washington.edu/Refraction/
Or, just PLAY THE GAME! You can check out their other games here: http://games.cs.washington.edu/site/games Originally posted on March 28, 2012
Reblogged from Inquire Within: What if students were able to choose when and what they wanted to be assessed on? That simple question was posed by colleague, recently to me in a staffroom chat. It quickly exploded into an hour long discussion, that resulted in about 2 weeks worth of work on re-imagining my classroom experience for next year. I think I was alway comfortable with the idea of students choosing their own topics or concepts for inquiry, but I was never able to come up with many good assessments that allowed for good student initiated action. It was hard to think of open ended assignments. My colleague’s question allowed for an end-around to the problem of the teacher structuring tasks, and then making students fit their learning and inquiry into the teacher’s structure and time-frame. Luckily, I teach within an MYP context, so there are skill driven objectives set out for my classes already. Currently, I set an assignment for a specified objective, like I think most teachers do. Why do I do it that way? That’s just the way it was always done. Teacher gives instruction; teacher gives assignment; teacher chooses objective; teacher gives a grade; and so on. Why do we usually not let students decide on what they want to demonstrate when studying plants, or civilizations, or poetry? Most likely, we teachers want control. If we let students run free, then how will we ensure they’ve learned!? So what we’ve come up with in addressing that question is a simple framework in essence, but difficult in management. I will be teaching a few weeks of base content, then allowing students to inquire into anything they want that addresses the unit’s key/significant concept. I will be conferencing with students regularly (once a week minimum), and negotiating how they will meet certain minimum requirements over the course of the year. Most likely students will need to choose two or three ways to be assessed over an 8 week unit on a particular concept, and keep a portfolio journalling their progress. However, they may choose more if they are really into that topic, or fewer if they could care less. The skill driven objectives of the MYP admittedly make this much easier. The role of the teacher will drastically change. It’s honestly a bit scary! Students will be allowed to decide what objectives they want to meet; how they will demonstrate they met them; how and when they will be assessed; and who their audience will be. They will be free to choose more, while I spend more time directing, rather than dictating, learning. So what if students actually had the choice to choose how and when they were assessed? Here are a few advantages and challenges I foresee right now before diving in. Please leave comments and feedback to help us work through this process of enabling students to direct their own assessment! Pros
Originally posted on March 28, 2012 Have you ever needed to find the source of an original image, but you can’t remember where you found it? Try using your iPhone to take a picture of the image on your computer using Google Goggles, to locate where the source site is located. In my latest foray of total nerdiness, I decided to create an HTML5 widget to add to my class page and iBook that I’m building for my unit on plants. Since I decided to go full out on this one, I wanted to be able to share the resource. So I scoured the internet for Creative Commons licensed images (which led to a few blog posts of their own:MorgueFile, Behold, ImageAfter). However, when I finished, and decided to license my own work, I realized I had forgotten to attribute two of my pictures. Unfortunately, they were public domain off of the Wikimedia Commons, and I couldn’t find the originals to properly attribute them. Since I haven’t yet built that time machine to go back and kick myself for not recording my sources better the first time, I ended up pulling my iPhone out of my pocket and using Google Goggles. Found the first image with ease, but struggled with the second. Luckily finding the first one jogged my memory and I was able to browse until I found the second. I know there are searches like TinEye out there, but it didn’t work for either. I honestly had to laugh at myself taking a picture of a picture on my computer, to search for the picture on my phone rather than on the computer. Bit round about, but effective. Whatever gets the job done, right? NOTE: Google Images now does makes this redundant! Head over to image.google.com and click on the camera icon in the search bar. In the popup you can copy a link to the image you're interested in (I find it's great for Imgur and Reddit related image searches that don't do a great job of keeping the original source. Often you'll find it hosted on a site that includes a proper citation!
I’m always a little bit wary of info graphics, largely because as a scientist/mathematician I want to see the raw data too, just to make sure sure I agree with the presentation of the data. However, that doesn’t mean that all info graphics are incorrect and they are increasingly more popular, so teaching students to evaluate them is an important 21st century skill. The Aside Blog has a fantastic page full of links to various info graphics for you to use in class. I also love the video they highlight by Column Five which talks about specific visualization strategies for presenting data. So if you’re interested in data visualization and info graphics, head on over to the blog and start indulging your inner data geek. Originally posted on March 22, 2012
I don’t usually post hardware solutions to classroom technology issues here at Embed_Ed, but this one was too good to pass up! Alex Wilde has posted at Scientific American about a simple trick to turn your iPhone camera into a microscope! One drop of water is all you need. I tried this out quickly, and found that indeed it did work. Flipping the camera over quickly and smoothly seemed better than trying to slowly turn the camera in regards to getting the water droplet to stay in place. It’s tough to hold it and shoot as well, which is why Alex suggested using something as a stand. Moving the object would probably be easier than moving the camera! If you’re interested in other DIY iPhone microscope tricks, check out Sallaha’s Blog. She has some great examples of using various common lenses. |
Welcome to The MYP Teacher and
|