Free, Shareable Resources from Open Course Library

Eighty-one courses are now available from Open Course Library. The Library, funded by the Washington State Legislature and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, features courses for four-year and community colleges. Many of these courses, such as those in mathematics, science, social studies, and foreign language, include shareable materials, which could be used or adjusted for high school student learning. These are not online courses, such as those available through Coursera, but instead materials and ideas you can use to enhance your own courses. An Open Course Library (OCL) How-to Guide is available to help you with downloading pdf versions of the courses.

List of Grants & Contests

WE are TEACHERS maintains a list of grants, contests, competitions, and sweepstakes to help you get the resources or funding you need for your dream classroom projects. Two random drawings are currently on the list, but other types of grants/competitions will be added as they come available. If you try the educational software HP Classroom Manager, you will be entered in a drawing for prizes such as $1000 cash, $500 HP Gift Cards, and HP Tablets.  The Worth Ave. Group awards three i-Pads each month (until October 31, 2013) to educators selected in random drawings.

Making Pop-Up Books & More

Jill Faison, a professor at Fresno Pacific University and author of the Art for Elementary Teachers blog, offers us a lesson in how to help elementary students make a pop-up book.  Faison says that these books are perfect for end-of-the-year projects. That’s because students have a great time creating the books and can include events of their lives and perhaps of the school year in them. Instructions are given for using 6 sheets of 9”X12” construction paper to make the book, how to make pop-up tabs, how to cut and fold, and how to assemble each child’s book. The Art for Elementary Teachers blog contains lots of other ideas (how to organize art supplies, observing color and drawing flowers, making Earth Day hats, finding books with great image files) that will be helpful to elementary art teachers and elementary classroom teachers.

Common Core Pushback

What’s all the fuss over Common Core Standards? Marc Tucker, in his Education Week blog piece “Testing, the Common Core, and Consumer Resistance”, says that American teachers are used to tests that don’t match the curriculum, are cheap, don’t really assess complex skills or creativity, are too dependent on multiple choice questions, are far too frequent, and aren’t like those used in countries with top-performing students. Therefore, the rebellion against Common Core is understandable, especially if schools don’t have curricula and tests that align with the standards. Perhaps, we are not ready for Common Core? Do other parts of our educational systems need to be revamped before we can put such standards into place? Do we need to change testing by grade level and test, like some other countries, just a few times in a student’s education? Do teacher evaluations need to be linked to test results? Anti-Common Core groups such as Hoosiers against Common Core and Arizonans Against Common Core are springing up throughout the country. Indiana, for example, has decided to “pause” entrance into Common Core. We know that we need to improve our schools, but many parents and teachers are telling us that Common Core and frequent testing is not the way.

Year-Round School?

Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts is a year-round charter school for students K-5 in Petersburg, Virginia. There are 8 other elementary level year-rounds in Virginia. According to a report by WTVR in Richmond, there were initial problems involving transition to a new schedule. The year-round school, according to Patrick Henry principal Sabrina Beamon, allows students “that continuation of learning, of studying and being about to be remediated during the school year.”

Those interested in more information about year-round schools may want to take a look at the National Education Association’s Research Spotlight on Year-Round Education. Some of the arguments for and against year-round schools include: The Pros - remediation can occur when needed, increase in retention rates, more efficient use of buildings; The Cons – scheduling may differ from that of other schools and programs, extracurricular programs suffers from scheduling problems, and inconclusive studies related to academic benefits.

Gaming for a Better World

We know that students like educational games, but most teachers don’t think of themselves as game designers. Perhaps, we will take that on in the future, or at least take on the editing of some games—just like we do with other educational resources. Keeping in mind that students and many adults find some games addictive, we need to consider why this addiction happens and how we might use this knowledge to improve educational games and perhaps solve other problems as well. If we can create games that motivate students into problem solving modes, just like the most popular online games do, this will not only mean learning across the curriculum but also learning that may benefit education and our world.

Game designer Jane McGonigal's goal is to show everyone that game play can help solve the world’s problems. Just consider: playing games online helps students “learn as they go” and to collaborate and cooperate with others. Games match ability to game levels, offer collaborators to help, feature inspiring stories, give rewards, and leave users with a feeling of satisfaction. Many students spend as much time gaming as they do in school. Also, gamers may get better feedback in virtual worlds than they do in our schools. Because of her belief that gamers can offer solutions to many of our world’s problems, McGonigal has developed three games to test her theory. These include: World Without Oil (what happens when oil supplies run out), SuperStruct (gamers have 23 years left on Planet Earth), and Evoke (motivating social innovation skills especially for those in developing nations). Evoke is available online for you and your students to try. Users of these games have, according to McGonigal, come up with some “amazing solutions.”

Google Glasses in Schools?

In a few years just about everyone will probably have Web-connected watches and Google Glasses.  Students are already bringing mobile devices to school that can capture images and actions in our schools, but as “wearable technologies” become more popular, teachers and administrators will need to place additional emphasis on privacy and etiquette issues. Questions such as —Where will the devices be allowed?, How will teachers know if students are using the devices if all it takes to take a picture or start a video is the literal wink of an eye?, What information must be added to digital citizenship programs?, How might the devices be used to enhance the curriculum?, and What educational apps are available for reality-augmented devices?—will need to be addressed.

Digital Storytelling with Multimedia Tools

Mind/Shift recommends what it calls cool, new, and easy-to-use multimedia tools for students.  Meograph (with teacher licenses beginning at $19.99) helps students create multimedia stories with “Meograph Moments” that may feature video, audio, timelines, text, images, maps, links, and student narration about their moments. Zeega, free to individual users, lets students make their own interactive Web stories as they capture content available in the cloud. Zeega stories developed by students may be viewed by others who “click their way through each story, one webpage leading to another. . .  WeVideo, with free and for pay versions, is a video-editing collaboration tool that your students can use to upload media clips and edit them.  A group of students can work on a project at the same time, and projects can be stored in WeVideo’s Google Drive App.

If you are interested in digital storytelling, you’ll want to take a look at the handy Mind/Shift chart that compares the following video editing tools: Windows Live Movie Makers, iMovie11, WeVideo, Zeega, and Meograph.

Lighthouse Coalition

The Coalition of Lighthouse Schools is a group of educators, school administrators, and IT professionals who are working together to implement one-to-one digital learning in their schools. Coalition members, mostly from charter and independent schools, are integrating Apple mobile devices into their school curricula and are eager to collaborate with others who are also integrating 1-1 programs in their schools.  The networked educators work with Apple Computer representatives in order to better prepare their students for the future. The group is hosting its iSummit, July 24-25, in Atlanta.

Attracting Girls to the STEM Careers

The Scientific American piece, To Attract More Girls to STEM, Bring More Storytelling to Science, by teachers Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross, says that integration of the arts and sciences is the key to getting girls into STEM careers. The authors suggest that teachers of STEM courses include fiction books like Vonnegut’s Player Piano, artwork such as that by M. C. Escher, and information about the story behind the HeLa cells in their courses. As storytelling activates brain cells, enjoying real-life stories such as that of Henrietta Lacks (see photo) and those called “polymaths” such as Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, will do more to motivate girls toward STEM careers than will, according to Olsen and Gross, “a pink microscope.”