Sir Ken Robinson: education’s “death valley” & what we need to change

I like to follow a lot of the TEDtalks. They are often thought-provoking and frequently challenging.

Yesterday, when I checked, I found that one of my favourite speakers, Sir Ken Robinson , has done another talk for them. He is again champions a radical rethink of our school systems. Although not talking specifically about the Australian system, it is easy to apply his logic here. Watch the video and then answer his challenge: How do we get out of the educational “death valley” we now face? How do we nurture our students, teaching them to value and cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligences.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Useful links

  by  crystal.eisenhauer 

• 20 Google Docs Secrets for busy teachers and students. – Edgalaxy 20 great tips every teacher and student should be using to get the most of the collaborative learning opportunities Google Doc’s offers.
• 24 Digital Tools That Represent New Ways To Study
• Wartime Snapshots ”Wartime snapshots are background information guides with teaching activities on topics of Australia’s wartime history.  The wartime snapshots relate to posters developed by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and distributed for Anzac Day, Remembrance Day or to mark special commemorative anniversaries.  These guides containing background information, resources, website links and teaching activities and are suitable for teachers to use to introduce or explore a theme, or encourage discussion around an image.”
• cooltoolsforschools » home A great wiki site to find good resources
• Top scientists agree climate has changed for good – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ABC article: “The nation’s top climate scientists and science bodies have for the first time endorsed a major report that says Australia’s climate has shifted permanently in some cases.”
• How 7 Education Technology Platforms Have Changed How We Learn
• Metropolitan Library System eMedia on Vimeo
• Ken Robinson on Passion on Vimeo In this video from The School of Life, Robinson articulates the ethos at the heart of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and echoes, with his signature blend of wit and wisdom, many of the insights in this indispensable collection of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
• Social Media in Education: Pros and Cons – EdTechReview  Social media is being widely used to support learning. It offers new opportunities to share knowledge and experiences in fun and exciting ways. Good post and great infographic.
• How To Cite Social Media: MLA & APA Formats | TeachBytes Now you can officially cite social media sources in MLA and APA formats.
• Why (Not How) We Should Use iPads In Education | Edudemic  You can also insert the term “Tablet” for iPad: the questions and arguments for thinking about the task before the technologies are still very valid and worth considering.
• 6 Time-Saving Writing Apps For Students | Edudemic Some options for organizing your writing and writing on the go with different apps and web tools.
• 9 Steps to Create A Classroom Poster Using Google Docs ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning  ”Google Docs has a drawing canvas that is really excellent for creating posters for your classroom and here is a step by step guide on how to do it”.
• Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: writing tools  Links to posters on writing.
• 22 Ways to Apply Blooms Taxonomy to Twitter ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ” A good graphic from Teachbytes”
• Designing Libraries – Planning school libraries  Collection of articles that discuss the important considerations for designing the learning environment for modern, 21st Century school libraries.
• 10 Techy Icebreakers for The 21st Century Teacher ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Several lists of digital tools you can use for these activities. Icebreakers are ” discussion questions or activities used to help participants relax and ease into a group meeting or learning situation” (Dover, 2004). Icebreakers are very important in the learning-teaching process that takes place within the classroom. They can help in creating and maintaining a healthy and successful learning environment for students and are also the best warm-ups to get students engaged in a learning task.”
• Barcode Feature & Bibliophiles | Free | AppCrawlr: Search Engine for Apps
• Apps similiar to Kobo – 1 million FREE Books – Read eBooks! » alternative recomendations » for iphone,ipad  Book apps
• Cool Cat Teacher Blog: 89 cool apps, sites, and tools for teaching  A lot of those mentioned are for Apple products but some android devices too.

Useful links – some of the January ones

• How to Make Unique, Inexpensive Book Displays in Your Library | eHow.com The ‘eHow’ website offers a lot of ideas and advice. Here Virginia Allain gives lots of catch phrases and great ideas for creating library displays for every month of the year. It is an American site so the themes are sometimes out of kilter with Australian seasons here.

• Libraries Should Own the Future-Here’s How They Can | Cities on GOOD Libraries Should Own the Future—Here’s How They Can – Goodreads & Meetup, coffeeshops & bookstores and CSAs

• Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: youtube tools There is a whole section to how teachers and educators can best leverage the power of this video platform in education.

• The Best YouTube Tools and Tips for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Tricks and resources for teachers

• Five Custom Searches You Should Enable In Your Browser Right Now Custom search engines are one of the better features of the modern browser. With just a few keystrokes, you can search Wikipedia right from the address bar or do a custom Google search

• Breaking Research: Most Apps Bad – EdTech Researcher – Education Week  Article that evaluates 137 recently published “educational literacy” apps, websites, and e-books. Considers most of them as very basic. Good read for those who might be thinking about creating their own (and help them avoid the pitfalls)

• How to Raise Boys That Read (As Much as Girls Do): Not With Gross-Out Books and Video Game Bribes – WSJ.com Thomas Spence writes on The Wall Street Journal Taste page about the reading gap between boys and girls, but says that the current recipe, which involves giving boys ‘gross-out’ books about bodily functions, will not work, while taking away video games will certainly help.

• Future of Impacts: ‘How to’ guide to social media, podcasting, blogging and writing your REF impact case study | Impact of Social Sciences

• The Innovative Educator: Top 5 most popular technology solutions in 2013 Five solutions that should become reality but probably will be on the 2014 list

• Do We Still Need Libraries? | John Palfrey A post that dicusses one of the New York Times Room for Debate series: The future of libraries. The debaters include Luis Herrera, director of the San Francisco Public Library: Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Buffy J. Hamilton, a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia; and Berkman fellow Matthew Battles. All four of their essays are excellent. And each of them answers the “debate” question in the affirmative: yes, we do still need libraries.

• How To Know If You’re Correctly Integrating Technology – Edudemic  The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, collaborative, constructive, authentic, and goal directed. The TIM also associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells.

• The 17 Best Twitter Hashtags for Education (2012 ) ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• A Simple Guide To 4 Complex Learning Theories – Edudemic ”This helpful infographic does a solid job of breaking down the basics of learning theories in a visual and understandable format.” tag

• Six Traits for Identifying Complex Texts > Eye On Education The Common Core State Standards for Reading call upon students in grades K-12 to read and comprehend complex literary and information texts independently and proficiently. But before students can learn how to tackle complex texts, teachers must be able to identify texts that meet this challenge. In Big Skills for the Common Core: Literary Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom Amy Benjamin and Michael Hugelmeyer outline six traits that can be used to identify complex texts and the difference between informational texts and literary nonfiction.

• Copyright & Schools: photocopy, scan, screen or broadcast copyright resources in classrooms – simple advice for teachers  “One-stop-shop with guidance for teachers copying and using books, magazines, newspapers, music, film & TV in classrooms – from the CLA, ERA, NLA, CCLI, PPL, PRS, MPLC, PVS”

• Now you can download your Twitter archive – Technology on NBCNews.com  If you can’t remember what you tweeted 2 hours or 2 years ago now you can access them. Twitter has introduced a feature that lets you download your Twitter archive.You will get all your tweets — including retweets — going back to whenever you started using Twitter.

• Pitfalls of Using Wikipedia for Academic Research ”Wikipedia may be easy and fast, but its not a reliable source for academic research for a multitude of reasonsstarting with the fact that its intended to be used as an encyclopedia, not an academic resource.”

• 6 Great Videos on Teaching Critical Thinking ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning  “Critical thinking is a skill that we can teach to our students through exercise and practice. It is particularly a skill that contains a plethora of other skills inside it. Critical thinking in its basic definition refers”  to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined way “. All of our students think in a way or another but the question  is , do they really think critically ? are they able to evaluate the information they come across ? are they capable of going beyond the surface thinking layer ? Can they make connections between what they learn and the outer world? Can they question the status quo of their knowledge ?”

• Free Technology for Teachers: Crash Course – The Great Gatsby  The video (part 1) by John Green who has started a new Crash Course series on English Literature.  ”These videos won’t replace actually reading and discussing the works with teachers, but they can provide students with some help in understanding the major plot lines of The Great Gatsby.”

• Educational Technology Buzzwords A interesting interpretation of where we are heading with the current technology available to us.

• The Readventurer – Home A blog by 2 avid readers about reading and encouraging reading

• mind blown by searching google and evernote at the same time | Brad Kozlek

• 10 New Educational Web Tools for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• The “Cheap and Cheerful” Librarian, Melissa Techman, Shares Tips on Pinterest – The Digital Shift libraries

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Clever people celebrating Christmas

It’a almost time for our Christmas break.

So much has been done in the last two weeks and still quite a lot more to do before I close the door for the last time.

So getting into the Christmas spirit I thought these, found thanks to the twittersphere, and would be good to share them to help get into the Christmas spirit.

I like this Christmas sand art by Shane Chapman. So clever and beautiful.

and this is an interesting version of the nativity story (lego)

National Year of Reading celebrations in our library.

It has been busy this week – first week of term 4 with senior students are getting ready for exams and we intend to do another big stock take to keep the library resources relevant to the curriculum. We still have time to celebrate however.

After school yesterday we had an afternoon tea for all the students who entered our NYR Film It! and Snap it! competitions and in particular the winners of all the competitions, our own Whitefriars NYR Ambassadors and the boys who completed the Premiers’ Reading Challenge and our own Whitefriars Reading Challenge (read between 10-14 books).

It was wonderful to see so many parents and siblings come along to celebrate with the Whitefriars boys.

Many really loved the photographs that were on display. They liked seeing the photographs professionally printed and framed. You can see a slide show of the photos the boys entered on our library blog.

We also had a screening of all the  book and reading trailers. Young and old alike became engrossed in short films created by the boys and played on our large television screen.

We  gave book prizes out to the PRC and Whitefriars Challenge boys as well as the NYR Ambassadors and the Guess It! winners.

The boys were given the opportunity to choose their book prize. We then put a book plate into each one and created matching certificates.

We offered a kindle as first prize for the Film It! competition and gift cards for the runner’s up.

The Snap It! competition’s major prize was a 12″ digital photoframe and a package made up with a packet of some very good quality photographic paper, mounts and artist’s sketch pad for the runner’s up

Yesterday afternoon the principal congratulated each boy and handed him the certificate and the book or his prize.

 

We are very lucky to have a very talented library technician who creates all our superb certificates adn book plates, Each of the Reading Ambassadors had a different image on their certificate and we had a special certificate and prize for one of our senior students who has spoorted all our activities over the past 6 years at school

Full set of images here