Guiding Question: How might technology be used to foster and support higher level thinking in our schools?
Guest: Peter Pappas
Tips of the Week:
Peter: Ken Watanabe - Problem Solving 101 - interesting in that he designed the book to teach Japanese children critical thinking. It caught on with adults and has since spread. It includes a variety of problem solving strategies. Great inspiration to incorporate in the classroom. Slideshare on Students as Historians.
Mark: Stich.it is a site that allows you to “stitch together” Web content into a sequential collection. It is great for creating resource links, but even better for creating guided explorations of topics for your students online. With each site or bit of content you link to, you can create a title and brief directions at the top.
David: Andrew Taylor in his blog adds to the conversation about digital textbooks. Also, we have spoken about the idea of creating menus of instructional and assessment strategies to be built into units of study when your curriculum collaboration teams meet. This means teachers can have lots of choice in deciding which learning strategies work best to differentiate lessons. There is an excellent series of books entitled Differentiating Instruction With Menus for Language Arts, Social Studies, etc. written by Laurie Westphal published by Prufrock Press that offers this same model. The books are filled with learning activity types as we spoke about in our last show. They are presented in a menu fashion for students to have choice over how they communicate their understanding. Here is a link to a Amazon listing of all the books. Thanks to Kathy Heyder of Alexandria Country Day School for sharing these excellent resources for differentiated instruction.