Featured 3-31-2014: Next Generation Science Standards

Through a collaborative, state-led process, new K–12 science standards, Next Generation Science Standards for Today’s Students and Tomorrow’s Workforce, have been developed.

 

Rich in content and practice, the Next Generation Science Standards are logically arranged across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education. 

 

The process for developing the science standards included having the scientific and educational research communities identify core ideas in science and integrate them across grade levels.

 

 

The scientific practices in the NGSS include critical thinking and communication skills that students need for real-world success. In the standards, these science practices are intertwined with content.

 

 See Paul Andersen introduce his video series on the Next Generation Science Standards.

 

The Next Generation Science Standards are based on the Framework for K–12 Science Education developed by the National Research Council. The writing process began in the summer of 2011, and the final version of the NGSS was released in April of last year.

 

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The Rearview Mirror 3-29-2014

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance.

 

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Monday

Classroom groups can exchange ideas right in the pages of digital texts using Subtext, a free iPad app, opening up opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

Tuesday

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! is a game-based learning and assessment tool designed to engage middle school students with a high-quality game experience in which they can develop real-world problem-solving skills.

Wednesday

The Inquiry Project aims to build an understanding of science in students ages 8-10 that lays a foundation for later understanding of matter in terms of molecules and atoms.

Thursday

Created by a team of Russian photo enthusiasts, AirPano is a not-for-profit project focused on high-resolution spherical panoramas shot from a bird’s eye view.

MS OneNote for Mac OS X

I have been an Evernote user since long before Evernote was trendy. I was among the first 10K users. Evernote has a prominent position in my digital life and many of my workflows.

Yesterday, I downloaded and tried Microsoft OneNote for Mac OS X. Hey, it’s free, so why not. Here are my impressions.

 

OneNote has a very nice interface. If you are an Office user (I’m not), you’ll find the interface very familiar with the ribbon metaphor. There is a lot of flexibility in the creation and content of new notes. You can place a text box anywhere in the note and include various kinds of media.

 

I would think that OneNote could be very useful to anyone who would use it principally for note-taking.

 

 

However, my main use for Evernote is capturing and organizing web content. The browser extension Web Clipper gives a number of options as to what exactly you want to capture and what you can do with it.

 

Unfortunately, OneNote falls woefully short in this regard. You capture a web page using a simple bookmarklet which creates a new page in OneNote consisting of a static ‘screenshot' of the web page which is not editable and contains no live content. Any links are the page are not functional. You cannot select and copy or delete text. Maybe Microsoft will add more capturing features in future versions, but right now it comes up short.

 

OneNote syncs through a MS OneDrive account. My experience was that it was slow updating. Web page captures did not appear in the app for a few minutes. This could be just an early-days glitch.

 

Also, some pages didn’t render very faithfully. The proper positioning of page elements was lost. Be aware as well, that there appears to be no simple way to import your existing Evernote data.

 

At this point, OneNote doesn’t have the extensive integration with other apps to match Evernote, but that will likely improve over time.

 

After these experiences, I didn’t try out much else, because I realized OneNote was not going to work for me. But, that’s me.

 

It’s FREE, so if the issues I noted are not deal-breakers for you download it from the App Store and give it a try.

 

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Featured 3-27-2014: AirPano

Created by a team of Russian photo enthusiasts, AirPano is a not-for-profit project focused on high-resolution spherical panoramas shot from a bird’s eye view.

 

AirPano claims to be the largest resource in the world (by geographical coverage, number of aerial photographs, and artistic and technical quality of the images) featuring high-resolution aerial 360° panoramic photographs.

 

During next two years, AirPano plans to create aerial photo panoramas and virtual tours of more of the most significant places in the world. They currently have nearly 2000 aerial panoramas showing over 200 famous locations, including the North Pole, Antarctica, the Mariana Trench, and even the view of the Earth from the stratosphere. New virtual tours are published every week.

 

 

A spherical panorama can give you and your students a sense of being on location, where you can turn completely around and have a closer look at every detail. This can be especially effective when viewed on a large screen such as an interactive whiteboard. You can zoom in closer and examine objects of interest, or "fly" to a new location by simply moving your hand.

 

AirPano offers most panoramas in several different resolutions to accommodate the viewer’s internet connection speed and computer hardware. There are even panoramas suitable for mobile devices.

 

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Featured 3-26-2014: The Inquiry Project

The Inquiry Project aims to build an understanding of science in students ages 8-10 that lays a foundation for later understanding of matter in terms of molecules and atoms.

 

The Inquiry Project is centered on material, weight, volume, density, and related ideas that are important and challenging for students. Elements of this work are the integration of mathematics and the focus on investigative inquiry.

 

Research, curriculum, assessment, and professional development are blended in one coherent system, each component being essential to developing an understanding of how to best prepare learners.

 

 

The basis of The Inquiry Project lies in three content-specific dimensions of inquiry: measurement of matter, change and conservation, and scale. It has been designed to feature the following fundamentals of scientific inquiry:

• Questions
• Evidence
• Explanations
• Knowledge
• Communication

 Watch an intro to Talk Science Pathways

 

The Inquiry Project is a partnership between teachers, TERC, and Tufts University funded by the National Science Foundation.

 

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Featured 3-25-2014: SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge!

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! is a game-based learning and assessment tool designed to engage middle school students with a high-quality game experience in which they can develop real-world problem-solving skills.

 

 

Playing the role of mayor, students are challenged to address environmental impact while balancing the employment needs and the happiness of the city’s citizens.

 

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! was designed in partnership with assessment experts from Educational Testing Service and Pearson. As well as helping students learn about the factors affecting the environment in a modern city, the game also provides formative assessment information about students’ ability to problem solve, explain the relationships in complex systems, and read informational texts and diagrams.

 

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! consists of six different missions centered on the theme of environmental impact. In each mission, students are required to solve increasingly complex problems.

 

 

 Watch SimCityEDU: Engaging 21st Century Learners

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! addresses such 21st century skills as critical thinking and problem solving. It also aligns with several Common Core standards such as citing specific textual evidence to support conclusions, integrating information from texts and diagrams, reading and understanding text and making logical inferences from it.

 

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Featured 3-24-2014: Subtext

Classroom groups can exchange ideas right in the pages of digital texts using Subtext, a free iPad app, opening up opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

 

Subtext was built to support classroom reading, with practical features such as getting everyone on the same page in class to insight into how your students read.

 

With Google Books and Feedbooks built in, you can search for any book or digital document, or import your own ePub formatted documents. You can also share and discuss web pages with a class in the same way as books.

 

A set of annotation tools helps to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills. Students can highlight key passages or tag a set of commonly-used literary concepts.

 

 

Set up a closed class groups in Subtext to keep your students focused and secure as they read. They will only see notes from you and their classmates.

 

Subtext can help you follow how students and classroom groups progress, including reading speed, word look-ups, highlights, notes, and quiz results.

 

See Subtext in Action

 

Subtext is aligned with the Common Core Standards. When students read with Subtext, they are encouraged to analyze what they read, articulate what they think, and make connections between texts and the real world.

 

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The Rearview Mirror 3-22-2014

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance. 

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Monday

Students can learn by doing using the interactive online activities that can be created with Oppia.  It allows students to engage more deeply with activities in a way that videos or books often do not permit.

Tuesday

Knowmia is a free, easy-to-use collection of video presentations and interactive assignments that can impact students both in and out of the classroom.

Wednesday

Created Equal brings together four acclaimed documentary films on the long Civil Rights movement: The Abolitionists, Slavery By Another Name, Freedom Riders, and The Loving Story.

 Thursday

America's first presidential library is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.  It is also the only one used by a sitting president, built under President Roosevelt's direction and opened to the public in 1941.

Extra 3-21-2014: NYPL Children's Books

 

A group of librarians from The New York Public Library read more than a thousand titles this year, shared countless stories with the children who visit their branches, and compiled Children's Books 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2013.

 

This list includes the titles NYPL’s librarians thought to be the very best children's books for toddlers through sixth graders. 

 

 

Many of the stories focus on classic, timeless themes, stories that reveal feats of bravery, quests for justice and redemption, friendships lost and found. In these books, "heroes and heroines find ways to slay dragons, right wrongs, and prevail against all odds. They offer reassurance and inspiration in a world that can sometimes seem strange and dangerous."

 

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Featured 3-20-2014: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

America's first presidential library is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum  It is also the only one used by a sitting president, built under President Roosevelt's direction and opened to the public in 1941.

 

The mission of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is "to foster research and education on the life and times of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and their continuing impact on contemporary life.”

 

 

The education division of the FDR museum offers a number of both on- and off-site professional development workshops that take advantage of the rich resources and knowledgeable staff available there. Teachers can sharpen their skills, renew their enthusiasm, and earn PD credit by participating in a variety of workshops.

 

Comprehensive curriculum guides introduce students (ages 8-17) to key topics of the Roosevelt era. The guides are designed for use by teachers of civics, citizenship, government, economics, geography, fine arts, history, writing, and journalism. Included in the guides are primary source documents, photographs, study questions, and other resources from the library archives.

 

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day is an interactive chronology documenting Franklin Roosevelt’s daily schedule as President, from March 1933 to April 1945. Here you will find digitized original calendars and schedules tracing FDR’s appointments, travel schedule, social events, guests, and more.You can search the chronology by keyword and date. Day by Day also includes an interactive timeline of additional materials from the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum to place each day’s calendar into larger historical context.

 

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Featured 3-19-2014: Created Equal

Created Equal brings together four acclaimed documentary films on the long Civil Rights movement: The Abolitionists, Slavery By Another Name, Freedom Riders, and The Loving Story.

 

Each of the films presented in Created Equal tells remarkable stories of individuals who challenged the social and legal status quo of deeply rooted institutions, from slavery to segregation. The films document the efforts to bring about equality for all races through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Each explores a different time period, from the antebellum abolitionist movement through the post–Civil War transition period for African Americans, and into the late twentieth century.

 

 

The thematic content presented by these documentaries can be used to address Common Core Literacy standards in Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening. Students have the opportunity to participate in discussions of the central themes of the civil rights struggle and then engage in writing activities built on the primary evidence they saw in the films. The Common Core writing standards for history are very specific and detailed regarding the presentation of evidence in order to express an argument or conclusion.

 

 See a video overview of Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle

 

As part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Bridging Cultures initiative, Created Equal encourages people to revisit the history of civil rights in America and to reflect on the ideals of freedom and equality that have helped bridge racial and cultural divides in our country.

 

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Featured 3-18-2014: Knowmia

Knowmia is a free, easy-to-use collection of video presentations and interactive assignments that can impact students both in and out of the classroom.

 

Knowmia is designed for education, without limits or ads. Knowmia's growing library of educational video content includes over 25,000 video lessons from teachers everywhere on a wide range of school subjects. Each lesson is tagged, making it easy to find.

 

Teachers can use the Knowmia library to share lessons with a wider audience as well as with their own students. Users can upload any video file. Because students have individual learning needs, Knowmia welcomes a variety of teaching styles.

 

The Assignment Wizard Tool is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that enable you to create assignments with video lessons, summary or instruction slides, and interactive questions. Each assignment can include a series of lessons that you create or find in the lesson library. Once you send out an assignment, assignment tracking provides real-time results with detailed reports on each student.

 

Free training for teachers shows you how to use the Knowmia tools to create and find engaging video lessons and share them with your students. Gather five or more interested teachers and schedule an online learning session.

 

 Watch an Introduction to Knowmia

 

 The Knowmia Teach iPad app is a free lesson planning and recording tool. It helps you create video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia  Import your own visuals, organize them in steps, and record your voice and face. You can record illustrations as you draw them and create animation sequences.

 

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Featured 3-17-2014: Oppia

Students can learn by doing using the interactive online activities that can be created with Oppia  It allows students to engage more deeply with activities in a way that videos or books often do not permit.

 

Oppia uses interaction dialogues to facilitate the way that a student has and a teacher work together. In an interaction dialogue, a teacher asks a student a question, and the student then reacts. The teacher responds in a way that is helpful to the student. Unfortunately, the teacher will sometimes not have time to address every individual issue or to work out an appropriate response. In many cases another teacher in a different school has been faced with the same question. Teachers using Oppia to record such interactions can share their knowledge with more students without duplicating effort.

 

Oppia explorations are the main units of learning. These multi-stage interactive activities are meant to engage readers in a learning conversation and provide formative feedback.

 

Any user of Oppia can play through, browse, and search for any public explorations. To create or edit explorations, a user will need to be logged-in and author his/her work under a username. All explorations are initially private, meaning they can only be viewed by the exploration's editors, invited playtesters, and site administrators. 

 

Responses submitted to explorations are stored anonymously. These responses are shown to exploration's creators and editors, in order that the explorations can be improved over time. When an exploration has developed to the level of being appropriate for general use, it may be published.

 

 

Writing, editing, or learning from explorations on Oppia is completely free, no trial periods, no freemium plans, no advertisements. Additionally, all lessons on oppia.org are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which means that you are allowed to copy, modify, and reuse lesson content.

 View an overview of Oppia

 

Much of the code that powers this site was written as an open-source project by a group of Google engineers in their '20% time.' However, Oppia is not a Google product, and Google bears no responsibility for the content of this website.

 

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The Rearview Mirror 3-15-2014

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance.

 

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Monday

Nepris makes it possible for teachers and students to easily connect with the right industry experts, learn from them, and bring the real world to the classroom.

Tuesday

Create quality interactive e-Learning content using CourseLab, a powerful, easy-to-use, WYSIWYG authoring tool.

Wednesday

LessonWriter instantly creates personalized print, web, and mobile-ready literacy lessons using any text providing literacy and critical-thinking support to help students read and understand more.

Thursday

Vyew is a free next-generation online collaboration and web conferencing service that brings people and content together.

Featured 3-13-2014: Vyew

Vyew is a free next-generation online collaboration and web conferencing service that brings people and content together.

 

With Vyew you can give a presentation to an entire class or post a document for review by your students in class or at home, facilitating a 'flipped classroom' concept. Vyew is extremely flexible allowing you to bring online collaboration and sharing into your teaching.

 

Vyew allows you to meet and share content in real-time or at anytime convenient to your viewers. Upload images, files, documents, and videos into a room that users can access and contribute to at no matter when.

 

Vyew is web-based, running in your browser, no downloads necessary. Consequently it's compatible with PC, Mac, and Linux. Vyew supports a broad array of file types: doc, xls, pdf, ppt, jpg, gif, png, swf, txt, rtf, mp3, flv, and more. Mix and arrange files any way you like.

Conferencing features include whiteboarding, video conferencing, screen sharing, and VOIP. Collaboration features such as contextual discussion forums, voice-notes, tracking and logging activity can be found. Continuous rooms are always saved and always-on. 

Key features of Vyew:

• Draw/Annotate – full set of drawing, commenting and discussion tools
• Desktop Sharing – Stream your screen in real-time to people in your meeting
• Instant Screen Capture – Take snapshots of your screen and insert them into a meeting
• Video Conference – Up to 5 people can broadcast their video to everyone in the room.
• Publish – Include read-only versions of your meeting on a web site, blog, in HTML emails, etc.

 View a demo of Vyew

 

Vyew promises the free version (unlimited use with up to 10 people) will remain free, however, it is ad-supported.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 3-12-2014: LessonWriter

LessonWriter instantly creates personalized print, web, and mobile-ready literacy lessons using any text providing literacy and critical-thinking support to help students read and understand more.

 

LessonWriter is fast, free, and easy-to-use allowing users to create comprehensive literacy lesson plans and student materials from any content in minutes.

 

LessonWriter key features:

• Unlimited customized lessons from any digital texts
• Automatic text-specific literacy support
• Graphic organizers, prompts, and questions to support higher order thinking
• Accommodation settings and differentiated Instruction tools
• Unlimited classes and unlimited differentiation groups
• Teacher’s lesson plan with standards
• Lesson resources and ready-made lessons
• Instant reinforcement materials: vocabulary flash cards, word searches and question review sheets.

 

 

 Watch a video demo of LessonWriter

 

A premium LessonWriter account adds more features such as lessonizing any web page instantly, teaching all your lessons online, unlimited student accounts, a variety of lesson designs, and double the word limit.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 3-11-2014: CourseLab

Create quality interactive e-Learning content using CourseLab, a powerful, easy-to-use, WYSIWYG authoring tool.

 

CourseLab's programming-free environment turns out content that can be published on the Internet, to Learning Management Systems (LMS), on CD-ROMs, and other platforms.

 

 

CourseLab is available as a commercial product (version 2.7) and as freeware (version 2.4).

 

Key Features of CourseLab 2.7:

• Unicode support - use any font and encoding supported by the Windows® operating system, including double-byte character sets
• Object-oriented paradigm allows easy construction of even complex e-Learning content
• Objects are highly customizable
• Dynamic HTML-based output can be played in a web browser without any special software

Free CourseLab 2.4 is an older version of CourseLab. It offers the same WYSIWYG environment for creating interactive e-Learning content as the current commercial version, but lacks a number of new features, templates, and interactive objects.

 

 

As well as interactive e-Learning content, CourseLab can be used to create a wide range of applications including tests, quizzes, surveys, guides for policies and procedures, and more.

 

E-Learning courses developed and published with CourseLab may be conformant with the following e-Learning standards: AICC, SCORM 1.2, and SCORM 1.3.

 

 Watch Courselab - Creating a Course

 

CourseLab is a product of WebSoft, a leading Russian independent software vendor that develops a comprehensive suite of software products for e-Learning and humal capital management.

 

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