Inspired Ideas
West Virginia Offers Engaging 24/7 Learning Online
It may have been conceived as a way to keep kids busy during snow days (staying home from school), but West Virginia’s Learn21 online educational game program is turning into a legitimate step toward learning outside school boundaries. From the Register-Herald: “West Virginia Deputy Superintendent Jorea Marple sees this new initiative as another step along [...]
School of One Revolutionizes Traditional Classroom Model
“There are things we hold near and dear about what school is, but we’re asking people to reimainge it,” said Christopher Rush, co-founder of a revolutionary new learning system called School of One. So imagine this: A student arrives in school in the morning and answers five questions that will be calculated in a customized [...]
Preventing Dropout Effort Starts in Kindergarten
San Francisco Unified School District is putting more money into reducing the city’s 15.8% dropout rate with a $1 million federal grant that comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Part of the fund will go to a program called Plan Ahead, a mandatory ninth-grade class devised by the district along with [...]
Garage Band: Not Just for Music
Teacher HadleyJF is trying a new strategy to help her students develop ideas for writing. She uses Garage Band. “When I explained that the goal was to use their laptops in a new way to develop their thinking, and most importantly that no one was going to hear their recordings but them, they began to loosen [...]
Students Learn in Class, Think and Discuss at Home
Frustrated with not having enough time to teach everything she needs to and carry on meaningful discussions in class, educator Catlin Tucker has found a solution. She uses blended learning technique with an online tool called Collaborize Classroom, allotting time in class to teach the content, then assigning thoughtful questions online to spur discussions that [...]
Getting E-Readers into Schools, One Class at a Time
Everyday, rolling carts full of laptops and mobile devices are wheeled through the halls of four high schools in the Acalanes Unified School District, delivering gadgets to students who use them to study science, English, and foreign language, among other subjects. The mobile devices — whether it’s the iPod Touch, the iPad, the Kindle or [...]
Teachers and Students Create Their Own Curriculum in Alaska
By Sara Bernard The Bering Strait School District (BSSD) in Alaska – which spans a swathe of land and sea the size of Great Britain — is one of the few districts in the nation that has replaced textbooks with online content that can be modified by any of its teachers, students, parents and anyone [...]
Give Them a Second Chance: A Case For Re-Taking Tests Online
Flickr:DAEllis By Anthony Armonstrong Anthony Armstrong is an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Del Mar Middle School in Tiburon, Calif. One of my goals as an instructor this year was to nurture a “growth” rather than a “fixed” mindset when it comes to my students and their learning. The idea of the “growth mindset” comes [...]
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