Communicate .. Create .. EdTech

As teachers, we have the ever-growing responsibility to teach Internet safety and appropriate online behavior to our students. February 11^th is Safer Internet Day – a global initiative to promote online safety.  This year’s theme is “Let’s create a better internet together”.

Safer Internet Day was created by the European Commission in 1999, and has grown to over 100 countries since then.  Their site includes a lesson gallery teachers can access (tip: filter by language, not country) and use in their classrooms. 

We have other phenomenal resources that promote Internet safety.  Check out:

• Common Sense Media
• NetSmartz
• InternetSafety101
• iKeepSafe
• BrainPop
• DigitalID  (Informational webpage focused on digital citizenship by our MERIT colleagues Gail Desler and Natalie Bernasconi)

Digital Learning Day is February 5^th.  The goal of the program is to highlight how technology can be an effective tool to improve student learning.  According to their press release, “Digital Learning Day recognizes innovative teaching and common-sense, effective applications of education technology that support teachers, improve learning, and help students achieve at their highest potential.”
Check out the site, it’s full of resources to help educators infuse their lessons with technology.  If you’ve been apprehensive and need some motivation to take that step, the materials available for Digital Learning Day are a good jumping off point.

Please read What students say when they think we're not listening, a blog post by my friend Diane Main. Some phenomenally insightful quotes from students about school, expectations, their teachers, and tons more. Interesting stuff!

Teaching Common Core math requires a definite pivot for most teachers. Our Standards for Math Practices page - ripped from the CC headlines - outlines the focus at a very high level. You can find the specific standards yourself in many places, including Mastery Connect (and here's a post about Mastery Connect's iOS and Android apps, too).

Here are a few of our most popular Math Video posts, so you can more effectively learn how to implement Common Core Math standards, or provide your students better resources and support.

Teaching Channel- MANY high quality math videos - Teaching Channel has a stunning array of Math videos for you to choose from. Excellent quality, relatively brief videos are the norm here. They have a wide variety of other educator PD, from classroom management to Common Core and more. If you look nowhere else, look here.

Numberphile- Engaging Math Videos - This is for teachers to brush up on certain  topics - laws, theorems, applications, and so on. The videos can also be posted to your class site, and used in a 'flipped' approach so students can learn more directly about the topics you need them to learn.  

SEDL - Common Core Math and more SEDL has a detailed set of videos describing key standards of the CCSS in math, by grade level. Each video focuses on one or more specific standard and includes examples and illustrations. Main purpose: clarify the meaning of the standard, not how to teach the standard.  

Mathalicious- Real-World Problem-Solving -  includes “real life” topics that keep students engaged. This site provides junior high math teachers with lessons to teach math in a way that engages their students and understand how the world works.

And one to grow on...

This is not a video resource, but I'm compelled to put in another good word for the National Science Digital Library. Plan on spending some quality time here - it's a stunning array of easy to find resources and online tools that are directly linked to the Common Core Math standards.

Again, what resources for math do YOU find most useful? Please let your community know by responding to this post!

Girl by OCAL, Clikr

We've had some requests from teachers about how to better support music programs. Here's an interesting article from our friends at Teach.com. We'll circle back soon with some resources that can be used to better support music education in your classrooms. If you have any great resources, please let us know! 

The following article was originally posted on December 16, 2013 on Teach.com .

Whether students are tickling the ivories on the piano or strumming a guitar, the hours they spend in music lessons and rehearsals are worth every penny. According to Education Week, studies presented at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting pointed to the many academic benefits of learning a musical instrument. According to the studies, time spent doing so has been connected to a positive boost in creativity, memory, decision-making and multitasking skills. As with any talent or skill set, the earlier students get involved in music, the better.

One of the greatest outcomes of music instruction is the pleasure that students get from listening to beautiful sounds—an intrinsically rewarding experience. Gottfried Schlaug, the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory director at Harvard University Medical Center, claims that few activities are as rewarding as music instruction. Students must organize and utilize multiple senses simultaneously and work with others while receiving an emotional experience that offers regular, immediate feedback. Schlaug said, “It’s really hard to come up with an experience similar to that.”

The ability to multitask well is one of the most useful abilities that students gain from music instruction. At the University of Montreal, researcher Julie Roy led a study to test both musicians and non-musicians in “sensory processing tasks.” The participants in the study listened to sounds while receiving touch stimuli to a finger. The task was difficult because they needed to ignore the sounds in order to report what they physically felt. When listening to more than one sound, participants often believed that they felt more than one touch. However, seasoned musicians had double the accuracy on these tests than their non-musical counterparts.

The benefits of music training don’t end there. At Beijing Normal University in China, Yunxing Wang led a research team from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning in studying the brains of adults between the ages of 19 and 21. All of the adults had music instruction for at least a year between the ages of 3 and 15 years old. The results showed that individuals who began their music training prior to turning seven had more sophisticated development in the brain areas of “language and executive function.” While starting instruction at younger ages may lead to greater gains later on, researchers argue that music instruction is beneficial at any age. Ana Pinho, a Karolinska Institute researcher in Stockholm, firmly believes that it is never too late to learn an instrument. She said, “Even after stroke and disease, starting musical training can still help you get more from your brain. All of these findings show [musical training] can create a lot of plasticity that can produce effectiveness across the brain, in cognition and behavior.”

All of these findings are good news for music teachers, who have long advocated for quality music programs in schools. University of Southern California neuroscience Professor Antonio R. Damasio shares in such advocacy as he has been studying students from the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. In this orchestra, low-income students are offered free instruments and training while researchers commit to studying students for five years, beginning when students are only six or seven years old. In the Heart of Los Angeles site, teacher/conductor Nikki J. Shorts is impressed by how much the students, many identified as at-risk, mature over the course of a few years. Students learn discipline and how to concentrate. Shorts stated, “In order to cultivate the skills to sit and focus, they’re like athletes: We exercise our brains and our bodies, and then we have to take a break, relax, and come back to it. And over time, that skill builds up.” While schools don’t require students to learn a musical instrument, it’s clear that the benefits of quality music training are priceless.

--Michelle Manno is an Associate Editor at Teach.com where she writes about education reform and pop culture pedagogy.

• What is it I’m looking for? Think about common keywords. DO NOT simply type the question into the search box!!! 
• How would someone else talk about it? What words would they use?  How would THEY describe it?
• Which of those terms would be most common? 
• Which of those terms would be very specialized to this topic?
• What does my answer look like? What am I expecting back? Do I want a single web page, a definition, a collection, an image, or something else?

• Search an exact word or phrase by adding quotation marks around the phrase, e.g.,  "to be or not to be"

• Remove words from your search by including a minus sign, IMMEDIATELY followed by the word, e.g., jaguar –car  (no space after the minus sign!)

• Search within a domain or site. So, to search for Olympics only within the nytimes.com, type olympics site:nytimes.com

• To fill in the blank (if you only remember part of a saying, for instance), add an asterisk (*), e.g.,  a * saved is a * earned .

Control or Command F!

Here are the top 5 posts on Common Core and Ed Tech for December, 2013. Thanks for reading! Let
us know what more you want to see!


Infusing Technology into Literature Circles

Prezi Reinvents Presentations

Thinglink - higher level thinking resource

Keyboarding tools on the web to support CCSS

Hour of Code resources

Happy 2014  and happy learning!

• Hack Education by Audrey Watters
• Blogging Through the Fourth Dimension by Pernille Ripp
• Metwriting by Deanna Mascle
• The Principal of Change by George Couros
• disrupt learning! by Dr. Karen Mahon