Tuesday, December 27, 2011

‘Investing in Innovation’ Creates STEM Awards

The Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) competition provides funding to school districts and non-profit organizations around the country to develop new approaches to longstanding challenges in education.  Today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the 23 applicants who will receive grants from the 2011 i3 competition. For the first time, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education was a priority of the competition.  Five of the 23 awards will address that critical area and include programs devoted to:
    • Expanding student access to STEM Advanced Placement courses;
    • Creating an “innovation ecosystem” that identifies specific barriers to success in STEM courses and connects schools with instructional designers to help overcome them; and
    • Developing a robotics program to help reduce summer learning loss in middle school.
Other areas that i3 grants will address include teacher and principal effectiveness; high-quality standards and assessments; turning around low-performing schools; and improving rural achievement. Some of the projects in these areas will:
    • Expand an early childhood program that improves school readiness and increases family involvement in education;
    • Use technology for teacher coaching, professional development, and recruiting, including building professional development “recommendation engines” like those used by Amazon and Netflix; and
    • Turn around low-performing rural high schools by implementing a STEM and technology-supported school model.
In addition to the $148 million in funding provided by the Department of Education, the applicants raised $18 million in private-sector commitments from a wide range of philanthropic organizations, local businesses, and individuals.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

M.I.T. expands Its Free Online Courses

Though students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for classes, the university will declare a new program on Monday agree to anyone anywhere to get M.I.T. courses online free of charge and for the first time receive official certificates for representing mastery of the subjects educated.

“There are several people who would love to enhance their education by having admission to M.I.T. pleased, people who are very skilled to get a certificate from M.I.T.,” said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, in a seminar hall with reporters Friday. 

M.I.T. guides the way to a period of online scholarship 10 years ago by posting course materials from approximately all its courses. Its free OpenCourseWare now consist of nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people. 

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online education platform will go advance, giving students admission to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student deliberations. 

“The technologies accessible are much more superior than when we started OpenCourseWare,” Mr. Agarwal said. “We can offer educational tools to self-assess self-pace or make an online learning community.”
The M.I.T.x classes will have forums and online discussions where students can raise questions and, frequently, have they replied by others in the class. 

While access to the software will be free of charge, there will most likely be a “reasonable” charge, not yet strong-minded, for a documentation. 

M.I.T. said its new education platform should ultimately crowd a virtual community of learners around the world and develop the education of M.I.T.’s on-campus students, with online tools that improve their classroom and laboratory practices. 

The growth of the new platform will be attended by an M.I.T.-wide research program on online teaching and learning, together with grading by computer.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Best Christmas resources for primary educations

Christmas is just about the curve, so we’ve made a new Christmas source pack to have a good time. Take a look at the associated teacher’s comments, which can be found below.

Christmas Slideshow

A slide show planned to begin children to Christmas traditions in different countries. The arrangement consists of exciting facts about each country as well as a set of queries. These can be used to get young students talk about the topic and evaluating the celebrations with their own.

Christmas Wordsearch

A word search includes different names for the ‘gift giver’ that shows at Christmas time about the globe. Few of these gift givers are just like Father Christmas, whereas others, such as Nisse the gnome, are very special!
After the children have created the words, you could get them to investigate one of the characters. Give confidence to children to select a name, then use manuscripts or the web to locate out its country of origin.

Christmas Poems

A set of Christmas poem models for your class to use.
If you prefer to do this action, make sure to model it first. Try generating a mind map of expressive words to use in the poem. Then as a class, converse ideas for every line, before writing the most excellent selections on the board.

Once your students know the concept, allow them try a poem on their own. It’s greatest to use the shorter templates for lesser capability children and the longer ones for the more intelligent.

Postcards

Our final Christmas resource is a collection of postcards. Easy to cut out and make, they’re a grand way to support independent writing as Christmas approaches.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Why smartphones are popular in your classrooms

Current reports have revealed that children as young as nine could pick up their knowledge by using smartphones. 

Teachers and specialists are now stimulating over students using smartphones to contact the web and other educational assets. Their submission is, that as many children previously own a mobile, they might have a ‘high impact’ on learning.

There has newly been a huge deal of interest in the subject of whether or not mobile phones have probable to improve or hamper learning. Several studies have been started into the potential than m-learning. These have been getting together with an equal amount of rebuffals from sceptics who point out the negative crash of mobile phones in the classroom.

In my teaching profession I’ve observed both boundaries. Mobile phones have been used to grand result by scholars and by colleagues occupied in a handheld learning project that I guided. Similarly I’ve tolerated countless hours as a Head of Year trading with subjects relating to mobile phone theft, abusive text messages etc., said by Prefessor Dan.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Teaching Tolerance credits Five Educators for brilliance in Culturally Responsive Teaching in US


Teaching Tolerance, a plan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has declared the winners of its Culturally Responsive Teaching Award. The award was considered to identify educators who have established brilliance in teaching students from various racial, tribal, and cultural backgrounds.
The five winners, elected through a precise application and assessment process, will each accept $1,000. They will also be privileged at a special meeting on culturally reactive pedagogy in Washington on Dec. 9, 2011. Education Week Teacher, which is serving to systematize the awards event, connects Teaching Tolerance in praising the winners in US. The winners are :

              Silvestre Arcos, middle school math teacher, the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, New York
  •       Sonia Galaviz, 5th grade teacher, Endeavor Elementary School in Nampa, Idaho.
  •       Katy LaCroix, literacy specialist and 4th and 5th grade teacher, Logan Elementary School, Ann Arbor, Michigan
  •       Amber Makaiau, National Board-certified social studies teacher, Kailua High School, Oahu, Hawaii.
  •       Tracy Oliver-Gary, history teacher, Paint Branch High School, Burtonsville, Maryland.