Roominate—Girls in STEM Fields

Using the Roominate kit, girls can create their own dollhouse building rooms and complete circuits as they wire their own house and create their own gadgets. According to Wired, “Instead of dumbing down, Roominate is smartening up.”  Some of the objects that can be made are: an elevator, a circular saw, a rotating fireplace, and a washing machine. The Deluxe Kit sells for $49.99 and other kits, such as Flight Engineer, Electrical Engineer, Architect Pack, and Design Engineer Pack, are priced from $9.99 to $24.99.

Reading Eggs & Eggspress—Edmentum

Edmentum’s Reading Eggs helps PreKindergarten through Grade 2 students become proficient readers by giving them lessons that feature phonics, sight words, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, in addition to spelling and writing. The self-paced program is interactive and treats students to “egg” awards. Eggspress, for students in Grades 2-6, focuses on reading comprehension and motivation for reading. The library includes more than 600 full-colored fiction and non-fiction ebooks and a wealth of exciting educational games.

Twitter Educational Hashtag Help

For guidance in educational Twitter resources, check Jeff Dunn’s A-Z Dictionary of Educational Twitter Hashtags. You’ll find the following lists: Most Popular Hashtags (global, teaching, kindergarten, etc.; Technology (apps, mobile learning, game-based, etc.); Subject Specific (math music, arts, history, etc.); Specific Areas/Roles (bullying, chat, homeschool, play, etc.); and full list (nearly all educational hashtags). According to Dunn, the educational hashtags on the list were curated by Cybraryman and the Creative Education blog, tweetsmarter.com, and hashtags.org.

Bookabi

There are 2D and 3D characters, fun backgrounds and stickers, and lots more in Bookabi by Tamajii, Inc. Your students can make up their own stories by using the resources available and adding speech bubbles. Students can take their own photos and use them as backgrounds in the story.

PBS for PreK

You can sign up for free or login to your PBS account to view resources that help students learn about topics that span the curriculum. If you search for Caillou on the PBS site, for example, you’ll find PreKindergarten activities, printables, songs, and other goodies all featuring the four-year-old Caillou. At PBS Learning Media, there are Caillou videos about life science, health, investigation, and social, physical, and emotional development. Caillou’s Cricket, for example, is an engaging story about a preschooler who finds a cricket in his little truck. During a search for the cricket throughout the house, Caillou learns about crickets and the sounds they make. Be sure to watch Caillou’s Dance Party, Shadow Scientist, and Caillou Makes a Meal.

Let Their Minds Soar

Let your students’ minds soar as they think about newly evolving technologies. You might start with 3-D printing and interactive holograms, since these technologies are not only coming into the school market but also inspire dreams of the future. 3-D printers can make plastic objects and yummy chocolates, and even build new human bone.  MIT Technology Review reports that “the world’s first 3-D printed battery” and a “bionic ear” have been created. The “ear” was for demonstration purposes only, but 3-D or additive printing gives glimpses into what may be possible in years to come.  As for interactive holograms, introduce your students to the possibilities shown on zSpace. The zSpace Science Station, for example, features a 3D virtual holographic system for subjects such as biology, earth science, and chemistry. —And that’s not all programmers are doing with zSpace.

The need is great for us to encourage our students to learn to think “outside the box” so that they can be innovators of the future. Already Silicon Valley and other tech communities throughout our nation are worried about finding innovators who can envision products that will help us all.

Change Mindsets to Change Schools

J. Robinson in the Tech & Learning Advisor Blog tells us that installing technologies in our classrooms isn’t the way to bring about change, since many teachers will continue as they have always done and as their predecessors did before.  What we need to do is to “stop automating the twentieth century ways of teaching and learning” to move forward.  If the mindset of teachers doesn’t change, teaching won’t change. —But, Robinson doesn’t tell us how to accomplish a change in mindset.

Of course, some teachers have already changed, and they are helping others to follow. Isn’t that what Apple’s Classrooms of Tomorrow research said many years ago—be patient, because you can’t force change? Perhaps, for all classrooms to change, those tech savvy kids of today will need to jump into tomorrow’s classrooms.

Adam Bellows Says Create, Not Just Consume

Adam Bellow, who gave the closing keynote, “Change the World” at ISTE 2013, says that we need a “start up culture” in our schools.  This culture would embrace individualization, not standardization, in “environments that ‘respect failure, embrace curiosity, and grow dreams.’” To bring about these changes, Bellow suggested that we use tools like MineKeeper, Minecraft, and Raspberry Pi, and that we share with each other through social media and personal interaction. Bellow is an inspiring speaker; his ISTE speech is available online. If you listen to it, you’ll get some excellent ideas for starting the 2013-2014 school year.

Big History Project—13.7 Billion Years

The Big History Project starts with the Big Bang and continues today. Its purpose is to help students ‘better understand people, civilizations and our place in the universe” through 13.7 billion years of historical themes and patterns. If you’d like to try this “world class curriculum and online experience” with your students, you can register for the Beta version. When the project is complete, it will be free for all schools to use.

Achieve 3000

Achieve 3000 is all about believing in students and reaching them at their own levels. It’s about making sure students believe in themselves and know that they can go on to the next level of learning. Achieve 3000’s products provide differentiated instruction in both literacy and science. In reading, individual student levels are determined and are continually assessed as students move through the program. Science instruction through eScience3000, a core science program, and The World of Biology, a supplemental curriculum for middle and high school students, are designed to help teachers “produce the forward-thinking scientific minds that will meet the demands of the 21^st century.” Case studies and implementation models are available on the Achieve3000 site.