VoiceThread, developed at the University of North Carolina, is a collaborative tool that allows users to post images, documents, video and other media artifacts and add comments in five different ways. This workshop will showcase how VoiceThread is used to encourage and foster student engagement. This innovative teaching practice allows teachers to support their students’ learning by providing different experiences to meet individual learning preferences and needs.
**Note presenter change due to cancelation by Nesrin Bakir
This hands on workshop will inform educators of applications and creative ways to effectively use the iPad in their classrooms to support students struggling with math concepts at the primary and intermediate grades. The presenter will demonstrate how to use the iPad to improve student performance and understanding of concepts through creation, not just consumption. Participants should bring their iPads so they can download and explore the suggested applications as well as the ways to effectively and creatively use them in the classroom.
Thinkfinity.org is a web site and community with over 60,000 free curriculum resources for K-20 learning. Learn how to access these resources and use them effectively to improve student engagement in your classroom. Participants will learn how to search the Thinkfinity database, explore learning objects and lesson plans, find activities that will wow their students and participate in the Thinkfinity Community. We will explore other great resources as well and learn how to connect these resources to building 21st-century skills, including communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.
From mobile computing to blended instruction, the choices and directions are daunting and exciting. What is "school" when students can literally carry their learning with them on a digital device and their "campus" is wherever they are? Come see a demonstration of how learning becomes less linear, more discovery and Internet-based, and more personal through blended approaches using open educational resources.
A year ago, a group of people without any chemistry background played the game Foldit and resolved a protein problem that stumped scientists for over 12 years. They did it in ten days. This talk focuses on the most powerful question that arose from our Foldit discoveries: is possible to achieve general world-class mastery in a specific domain through voluntary prolonged game play? I will discuss our recent work that applies the same principles to early-math education with focus on fractions, proportional reasoning and algebra. Specifically, we turn the education process into a data driven science that, through use of student and teacher interactions discovers best interventions for each unique student as well as the best teacher practices. Our engaged learning process optimizes not just for student mastery of mathematics, but also for their long term engagement and self-identification with STEM material in general. I will describe our approach to achieving both engagement and mastery in our classroom trials across US. The talk will conclude with our recent studies towards creating a teacher community around these tools that allows for rapid teacher development as well as student improvement.
Bring your own iPad and learn the best questioning strategies and practices for using free iPad apps, such as Edmodo, Socrative and Google Forms, to elicit students’ responses to guide your teaching. Participants will discuss higher-order questioning strategies, classroom applications for formative and summative assessments, and more.
This meeting will focus on the details of commencing in-school trials of early math games capable of adjusting to each student and providing detailed assessment of learner's conceptual understanding of Common Core concepts. Some of our early findings show that just two hours of voluntary game play can enable a fifth grade student to solve complex linear algebraic equations on a written post-test. The games in the trial cover fractions, proportional reasoning and algebra. We will describe the current ongoing trials and how schools and districts in Minnesota can take part in these trials as early as next January, or in the second round next fall. The meeting will describe multiple ways games can be used in classroom and out of school, and how a teacher portal is currently developing a teacher community capable of developing a new just-in-time teacher development through sharing the most effective interventions on a targeted micro-concept level.
Research shows shows that 21st-century youth spend more time texting than talking, more time surfing the Internet than watching TV. This session will discuss the nine themes of digital citizenship and hot issues such as cyberbulllying and illegal downloads. NETS-T VI A and D standards will be addressed.