Edina Digital Age Learning

The State of Minnesota Department of Education has a state-wide license for Geographical Information Systems . On September 27th, I had a chance to attend a training at MDE to learn more. Applications: In social studies, Substrand 1 on Geospacial Skills, have two standards where technology is embeded. Students are to formulate questions on topics in geography and use geospatial technology to analyze problems and make decisions within a spatial context. GIS is a great tool for this.  Authentic problems, like transportation and flooding can be addressed. In science, students are to use maps, satellite images and other data sets to describe pattersn and make predictions about natural systems in a life science context. Students could use GIS to use online data sets to compare wildlife populations or water quality within Minnesota. Sara Damon, a social studies teacher from Stillwater Public Schools talked about Spatial Thinking with Geotechnologies. Sheis a strong advocate fo...

Brad Latimer, Kenneth Rochester and Caitlin Latimer talked about benchmark projects that they have used in their mathematics curriculum. Note: This site has all of the sessions and streaming channels can be seen here . Here are the project discriptions Latimer - Each kid picked a city and had to get data on temperature and sunset times. Then they needed to apply transformations to sin and cosin functions to match their Requirements Graphs w/ functions and data Process guide Concept map tied to the rubric. Some students made brochure, some could create a presentation, etc... Alison, a student who's project was featured took data and put it in Excel, then into Geo-Sketchpad, and used "Pages" in iWork to create the brochure. She wanted a print out that people could take with them and not need a computer. What went well: Students grabbed a hold of it and were engaged. (In student journal entries), Open ended in how they would present the material, 5 core values were met very ...

This afternoon, I'll be heading off to Educon 2.1 at the Science and Leadership Academy(SLA) in Philadelphia. Chris Lehmann , the principal at SLA has been a strong proponent of student-centered instruction, and Friday will provide an opportunity to meet with students and staff to "learn how they learn" at SLA. Tomorrow will be a Pre-Conference on Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge , led by Gary Stager , executive director of the Constructivist Consortium , and frequent blogger on educational issues . I'm hoping that the conference will provide some good examples of implementing student-centered learning without sacrificing high student acheivement. The best part of the conference will be networking and connecting. The focus of Educon is not so much on the tools, but on learning. The guiding principles of the conference are: Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members Our schools must be about co-creating -- together with o...