Schools.com

world-shaker:

Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions

Another great post from User Generated Education (who you should check out if you haven’t already). Here’s an excerpt:

• Begin a New Unit with Students Developing Questions: Try starting a new unit by asking your class to think of questions that could be asked about the topic.
• Create a Taxonomy of Questions: When students begin to label the different kinds of questions, they learn to select different kinds of questions to perform different kinds of thinking. No matter what the level of schooling, some kind of label can work effectively.
• Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework (this would work with the Flipped Classroom): Put your classroom questioning typology to work with your homework assignments. If students read an assignment, let them form questions for the next day’s discussion. Ask them to:
  • write three comparison questions about the story they are reading;
  • identify the question the author was trying to answer;
  • find a question which has no answer, or two thousand answers or an infinite number of answers;
  • ask a question that is the child of a bigger question that they can then ask the rest of the class to identify.

everyfiredies:

Truth is, I’m jealous of my students’ phones because I never had one in high school. I’m glad when they use them to take pictures of assignments or homework as a means of remembering them. As teachers, I think we could do them a huge service by teaching them how to use their phones’ calendars and to-do lists and alarms and all the other things that adults use to help them stay organized. Students lose the agendas/planners we give them, but they will not lose their phones. And frankly, since I got a phone, I no longer use a planner myself.

Why shake our heads when we could be praising their resourcefulness and appreciating the fact that we can move on to something project-based because they have the notes already? Why roll our eyes at their texting ability instead of appreciating the fact that they’re writing essays on their phones and turning them in on GoogleDocs instead of not doing them at all?

Sorry for the rant, but I really believe that instead of admonishing the upcoming generations we embrace their efficiency and resourcefulness because it will allow us to do so much more in the classroom.

(Source: givecaesarhisdue, via iamlittlei)

The infographic above explores the shrinking product cycles of electronic devices, the mounting challenge of hazardous e-waste, and how various governments, schools and professionals are becoming involved. You can also check it out here: http://www.alliedhealthworld.com/visuals/e-hazards.html