Professional Learning for Busy Educators

A few weeks ago I (Jo Boaler) was working in my Stanford office when the silence of the room was interrupted by a phone call. A mother called me to report that her 5-year-old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers. This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.

This is the seventh post is a series of posts covering educational iPad apps to use with elementary students. We are trying to build a repository of good apps elementary students and teachers can easily  access and use in their learning and instruction. To learn more about the previous posts we have published so far check out this section. Today's collection features a number of useful apps to use with young learners when teaching social studies. These apps, which we curated from iTunes App Collections, cover 3 main themes: Geography, History and World Cultures.

I absolutely love all of the new robotics toys that have been coming out for elementary age learners.  I have been using them for my summer maker camp, with my gifted education classes, and for my upcoming Saturday morning program. One of my gifted girls noted, “Where do all of these robots come from?” I laughed and told her, “It’s actually has become one of my passions. Collecting them has become a major hobby of mine.”

I usually use them for an hour per week with my two groups of gifted learners.  I am an advocate of student-centric learning and giving them choices as to which instructional activities they would like to engage. For their robotics hour each week, I am giving them the following choices with their goal of using five of the robotics to complete five of the tasks provided.

Earlier today I had an opportunity to speak for 5 minutes during the OAME 2017 Ignite Session. If you haven’t attended an Ignite, you’re missing out. Each presenter has exactly 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes to discuss an educational topic of their choice. While most presenters would agree that being asked to do an Ignite is an honour, it can also feel like a curse. The constraints of slides and time really do create a pressure that is difficult to match in other presentation formats. But, just like last year, I felt a sense of accomplishment after doing the talk.

Feel free to watch my ignite or check out the slides and transcript below.