January 2012
28 posts
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Youth Voice
From the National Youth Leadership Council Service-Learning Tip Sheet on Youth Voice:
Young people are powerful contributors to society, but too often adults don’t seek or hear their voices. Youth voice is not about “letting” youths help, but about working with youths as partners, leaders, and advocates to improve the world.
Following are some tips on working effectively with...
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Funding the Learning Revolution
A couple of very exciting organizations in the learning revolution need your help in reaching their fundraising goals today. This is the big final day of funding campaigns for the Institute for Democratic Education (IDEA) and The Future Project (actually, IDEA says they will extend the deadline, if necessary, but that shouldn’t delay your donations!).
Here’s what the folks at The...
The Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie...
From Roger Schank:
The following cognitive skills are developed gradually over time. This is the stuff that we need to learn how to do in order to function well in the world. The more proficient you are at these skills, the smarter you appear and the more you can learn:
Conceptual Processes
Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions
Modeling: Building a conscious model of...
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Room to Read
From UNESCO’s Reading Room program:
The Need
In 2003, UNESCO launched an initiative called the International Literacy Decade in response to the fact that 796 million people in the world could not read and write.
While some countries have made significant progress in increasing literacy among children and adults, it still remains a major challenge throughout the world. UNESCO...
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Alternative Learning Places →
Interesting project-based instructional approach, from Roger Schank:
We focus on the cognitive skills that matter – the ones you need to function in the world, the ones that affect how you are perceived and judged by others. These skills, listed below, are developed gradually over time. Our curriculum is designed to help students practice and hone these skills.
Conceptual Processes:...
Honor Your Teachers
GOOD magazine is hosting a second Great American Teach Off, taking nominations from the public to find and showcase innovative teachers. GOOD editor Liz Dwyer does a great job covering interesting education stories, so you might want to check out the GOOD education blog as well. Unfortunately, GOOD has made it a mission to make bad companies look wholesome, so this contest is brought to you by...
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Who Needs Sleep?
NIH Sleep Lessons
From the National Institutes of Health:
We spend about one-third of our life sleeping. Science—and our bodies—tell us that sleep greatly influences our decision-making, livelihood, and survival. There are few text books for educators and students that address the science of sleep, which is why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created its website and lesson...
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Design Squad Nation
From PBS Kids:
Design Squad Nation Guides
Teacher’s Guide
Especially for middle school STEM classrooms
Read more Download PDF: Full guide (English)
Invent It, Build It
Activities focusing on invention
Read more Download PDFs: Full guide (English | Spanish)
Activity Guide
Great for afterschool programs
Read more Download PDF: Full guide (English)
...
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What Kids Can Do
From What Kids Can Do, resources for students and teachers to build youth power in redesigning education:
WKCD has a deep commitment to school reform, especially high school. We believe that students should be seen and welcomed as crucial investors in school improvement. We join those who seek to promote, in some of the nation’s most urban and rural areas, an unprecedented number of...
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See What the Kids Can Do
“There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties. And if that’s what the grownups have done with this world that was given to them, then we’d better get those boys’ camps started fast and see what the kids can do.”
[From Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart and Jean Arthur]
Jefferson Smith’s epic...
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Brain Pickings →
You should really check out the wonderful website Brain Pickings, if you haven’t already:
Brain Pickings is a discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are. Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our...
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MLK: "Be careful, brethren! Be careful, teachers!"
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Purpose of Education”: January, 1947
As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever...
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Ana Tijoux's "Shock" & The Chilean Student...
Throughout 2011, students in Chile organized mass demonstrations and school occupations in protest against the inequities of Chile’s privatized voucher system, which was design by the exiting Pinochet dictatorship. We say: ¡que siga la lucha en 2012! Here is a montage of video from the Chilean student protests, for Ana Tijoux’s beautifully righteous song, “Shock” (decent...
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Let's Start a Learning Revolution
The founders of Skillshare believe we need a learning revolution. We’re on board:
The pinnacle of education should revolve around learning and gaining knowledge, and not going to college. Our mission is to flip the traditional notion of education on its head and democratize learning. We’re building Skillshare because we believe the world needs a learning revolution.
Why We’re...
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The K-12 Education Lab at the Stanford d.school ...
Headed to Stanford today for a crash course in design thinking at the d.school. Pretty exciting! The d.school is leading the way in teaching creative approaches to problem solving and design. In the K-12 Lab, they’ve been training students and teachers to use design thinking to revolutionize our school systems in order to solve the massive institutional problems we face and meet the needs...
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Students For a Democratic Society
The reincarnated SDS released an organizing guide and other organizing materials that students can download to get involved in Student Power for Accessible Education. Here’s what they say about the goals and principles of the campaign:
Education is necessary for success in America. Sadly, the cost of higher education in our country is skyrocketing. The Project on Student Debt recently...
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We Love Kurt Vonnegut
Even from beyond the grave, Vonnegut won’t take any guff from those sadly narrow-minded, anti-intellectual folks that would seek to impose their own extreme ignorance upon the children in this country, given half a chance. We supported the cause. From the Kurt Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis, last August:
Stop the Madness!
The KVML is giving away free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to...
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Read Banned Books
May Vonnegut’s feisty spirit be an inspiration to us all. To defend academic freedom, we can all read banned books! You can be sure to hear more from us on this when Banned Books Week rolls around again this year, September 30–October 6, 2012.
As an aside, does anyone else think it a little odd that the American Library Association chose to personify the liberated thinker with the...
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Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures
“We must encourage those lazy ones, however–once they have grasped the basic points-to interconnect everything on their own, to use memory to guide original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting-point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting - no more - and then it...
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