More amazing blog posts from this past week:
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Astronomy & Astrophysics 101: Dark Energy
Dark energy is the name given to the as yet unknown energy source that is causing our Universe’s expansion to accelerate. Our Universe is expanding. One of the great mysteries of modern astronomy is that the expansion rate appears to be accelerating.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Five Virtual Tour Creation Projects for Students
Google’s old VR Tour Creator offered a great way to create virtual tours that can be viewed in your web browser and or in the Google Expeditions app. Unfortunately, Google shuttered both those programs last year.
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Why You Should Limit Discussion In Your Classroom – Smart Classroom Management
Walk into any classroom any time of day and chances are the class will be in the middle of a discussion. Led by the teacher, the dialogue will typically narrow to a predetermined conclusion. Sometimes an assignment will follow. Often, however, it wil…
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Schools Matter: ABOLISH THE SECOND AMENDMENT
Warren Burger became Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court during the first presidential term of Richard Nixon, who was, up until that time, the most conservative president in U. S. history.
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Free Comic Strip Makers for Students | Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
October 3, 2017 Comic strips can be a great way to engage students in a wide variety of multimedia enriched learning activities. Using group work, you can assign each group with a writing or digital story telling project to work on using comic strip…
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7 Ways Principals Can Support Teachers (Opinion)
What is the one thing a principal can do to support his/her teachers, and why is what you’re suggesting so important? My simple response to this question would be that principals, and all administrators, are best advised to lead with their ears, ins…
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5G Technology – An Infographic Overview – e-Learning Infographics
5G Technology is on the rise currently. 5G networks and services are being rolled out in stages over the last year or two and are spreading all over the globe. The technology is expected to generate various new applications, uses, and business cases…
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Free Technology for Teachers: Three Observations About Quality School District Websites
This morning I spent a couple of hours looking at the websites of relatively large school districts. These are my thoughts and observations after viewing them from the perspective of a parent. Make It Obvious! The good sites make it obvious for pare…
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The biggest mistakes in mapmaking history – Kayla Wolf – YouTube
Travel through the history of mapmaking and discover what big mistakes cartographers made about the world’s geography. — For thousands of years, people made both functional maps and what are known as cosmographies, illustrating the earth and its po…
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Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create a Custom Theme for Your Google Site
Do you use Google Sites for your classroom website? Do you have students use it for classroom projects like making digital portfolios? Are you tired of using the same stock themes that Google provides? If you answered yes to any of those questions, …
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Why playing games is good for you – BBC Future
After Federica Pallavicini’s father was treated for brain cancer, she wanted to help him with his recovery from the surgery. “I began to look into ways of improving his cognitive health without it being a burden or reminder of his situation,” she sa…
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Two Wonderful Journeys for Extraordinary Animals – GeekDad
These two books come from different places but they both help kids, each in their own way, to understand how fragile creatures and environments can be. This is a nonfiction illustrated book that can help us wrap our minds around the incredible fact …
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Earlier this week, I flashed back to a semi-obscure movie called Conspiracy Theory. Two sentence summary? The main character is freaked out because she keeps seeing this guy, meeting him in elevators, or jumping into a cab before realizing that he’s…
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Bacteria Found Living in Snake and Spider Venoms | Technology Networks
Newly published research led by Northumbria University shows that, contrary to what is commonly believed, the venom of snakes and spiders is actually populated with microbes, including bacteria that could cause infection in people who have suffered …
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Free Technology for Teachers: A Teacher’s Guide to Creating Common Craft Style Videos
Yesterday, I published a post about a live course that I’m teaching in June. If you’re looking for something that is self-paced, Common Craft offers an interesting course about making videos.
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Conducting a Retrospective of the Year – Dr. Catlin Tucker
A retrospective, or “look back,” is a strategy that can be used by school leaders, professional learning communities (PLCs), and teachers to engage a group in a structured reflection and brainstorming session. A retrospective can happen any time dur…
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Rest is Essential to Growth – George Couros
For this month’s post revisit, I wanted to share a post that I originally wrote in 2021. Not that long ago, but I think that many people were surprised that this last school year was more challenging than the previous one.
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Math is Not (Strictly) Hierarchical – The Reflective Educator
There is a widely accepted truth that learning in math is strictly hierarchical. Before children can learn how to factor polynomials, they have to first learn how to factor whole numbers.
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Another murder spree has taken place at an elementary school, this one in Texas. Unfortunately, they’re common enough that I have a very large special section on this blog dealing with gun violence in schools.
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How to Talk to Kids About Tragic Events – WeAreTeachers
I teach seventh grade at an urban, Title I school. My students are not sheltered. But the past couple of weeks have been hard on us. A kid from their community was kidnapped and raped. A student’s 15-year-old cousin died of the flu.
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Assessment Tools (Cameras, Portfolio, Book & Quill) – MEE
Minecraft: Education Edition provides helpful items to inspire creativity in the classroom and beyond, such as cameras and portfolios. This article explains what they are and how to use them. The topics covered will be:
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In Minecraft: Save your Python Code to a Board and increase student engagement – Tech with Class
How can students using Minecraft for education share the code they have made in the MakeCode editor? One way they can share their code is to post their code using the sharing link and share the code directly with their teacher. This is what they may…
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Diigo is the first web service that comes into mind when talking about web annotation. . Diigo has a tool that lets you annotate web pages, add notes and colour specific chunks of a paragraph to share with your colleagues.
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Accurate Interpretation: Think Big, Start Small | All Things Assessment
Effectively using the data that we gain from our assessments is always important, and perhaps never more so than right now. There is a reason that accurate interpretation is a tenet in the Solution Tree Assessment Center model, and it is certainly w…
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Free Technology for Teachers: Alternatives to Book Reports – A Post Inspired By My Daughter
My five-year-old daughter has a healthy obsession with the According to Humphrey the Hamster series of books. She got one of the books for Christmas and we’ve been reading through the entire series since then.
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Two blog posts in a row about our Library being a Safe Space for our LGBTQIA+ kiddos. Why? Because we’re aggressively passionate about being allies to our kids. Also, the news is chock full of alarming examples where parents, school districts, and c…
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Ask an Environmental Expert: What’s the Carbon Footprint of the Internet? | The Walrus
When it comes to our growing carbon footprint, it’s easy to blame cars, agriculture, or factories.
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The Rules of Civil Conversation
This is not a legal contract, just a promise to act in good faith. See below for more info. Provided free of charge by 501c3 non profit schoolofthought.org. See terms and conditions.
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ELL2.0 – End of Class Reflection Based on Blooms
Reflection
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A Principal’s Reflections: Improvement is Always Possible
We have been made to think certain things are absolute truths for most of our lives. Take, for example, the saying that practice makes perfect. While this sounds great in theory and can be a great motivation to pursue growth opportunities, an underl…
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