Many of you may be familiar with Wonderopolis, a fun site to learn about all kinds of topics that may have piqued your curiosity at one time or another – and even topics that you didn’t know might cause you to wonder. This summer, the site is offering another free, online camp. It looks a … Read more
For today’s Phun Phriday post, I want to share with you something that my students are certainly having a lot of “phun” with! Brad Gustafson (@GustafsonBrad), the principal of Greenwood Elementary in Minnesota, just posted a social media challenge this week, and he is inviting everyone to participate. Brad (who has been nominated for a … Read more
Last year, I posted about a “Dream Team” project, inspired by Angela Maiers, that my 5th graders did using the Puppet Pals app. If pressed to name my own Dream Team (which would have a larger roster than all of the teams in the NBA combined!), Angela Maiers would definitely be part of it. Two … Read more
In past posts, I’ve mentioned using “Socratic Dialogue” with my students. Sometimes this is referred to as “Socratic Method”, “Socratic Seminar”, or “Socratic Circles.” You can learn more about this teaching technique here and in my post on “Socratic Questions.” I recently ran across an excellent post on the Langwitches blog called, “Socratic Seminar and … Read more
You might be familiar with Mitch Resnick, one of the co-creators of the Scratch programming language, and a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. I’ve talked about teaching kids how to program quite a bit on this blog, and featured a T.E.D. talk presented by Mitch Resnick on this topic in one of my posts. … Read more
You may remember a post I did last week on using Twitter with younger students, based on a presentation by Matt Gomez about his Kindergarten class’ experience with “Twitter Friends.” I couldn’t wait to try connect my 1st graders with a class on Twitter, and was thrilled to receive a reply to my request for … Read more