100 People: A World Portrait
Global Studies lesson plans included!
“While living in Paris, I received an e-mail from my friend and fellow filmmaker Isabel Sadurni entitled, “If the World Were 100 People.” It offered an accurate description of the world population proportionally represented by 100 individuals (1:62.5 million), based on criteria such as age, nationality, gender, religion, and language. We both found the statistics describing the present state of our humanity on the planet both stunning, and deeply moving. We then asked ourselves, what do we really know about the people with whom we share the planet and why should we care about them, or more to the point, how do we express our care? We recognized that as a result of looking at the world population as a village of 100 people, we could better come to know …
- Published in Digital Literacy, Global Studies
Yummy Math
Yummy Math provides teachers with an easy way to bring real-life into their math classrooms. It is our belief that when math is explored in contexts that are familiar and of interest to students, students will be more engaged to do math, reason, think critically, question and communicate. Our activities are written to correspond with the NCTM Process Standards and the CCSS Standards for Mathematical Practice.
While the site is free to teachers, to get a solution page in addition to the problems you must pay a nominal fee. The fee is $24.95 and definitely worth it to help support this creation of wonderful resources.
Activities include and exploration of lots of yummy food activities of course, but also interesting explorations of the Iditarod, Super Bowl, weather related units and much much more!
Check out the sampling below:
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- Published in Common Core, Mathematics
The Beginning of Time
There is an entire page of this website dedicated to teacher time. But it is a topic we find ourselves as educators returning to over and over and over again. Maybe because being a teacher is the only career where you have self imposed guilt for leaving your classroom for 2 minutes when your bladder is about to burst just to rush across the hall to take a restroom break. Or possibly it has to do with the fact that you have 30 minutes scheduled for lunch each day all while being accompanied by a class of about 28 students that have no chance of ever knowing who Emily Post is.
Time is a teacher’s greatest commodity. So when I saw a friend’s post on Facebook with a picture of her nuzzling her newborn baby daughter captioned by “The …
- Published in Digital Literacy, School Climate, Teacher Time
“Snow Days” turn into “Know Days” in Rowan-Salisbury, Orange and Transylvania Schools (in N.C.)
There is a little county in North Carolina that doesn’t get much national press. But Rowan-Salisbury Schools in North Carolina made a historical move for teachers in our state today. With that move they blew up regional social media posts with teachers across the state talking about what it is they have done.
The following message was posted to their website:
Jan 9 & 10 School Status
Due to predicted low temperatures over the next few days with little or no changes anticipated, schools are cancelled for students on Monday and Tuesday.
These will be optional workdays for staff with the option of working from home with supervisor’s approval.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes! Finally, a system that gets it. This has been a no-brainer for a very long time. And it is what teachers have been pleading for. Teachers work …
- Published in Latest posts, Uncategorized
Happy New Year 2017
Greetings to each of you as we embark on a fresh new calendar year. For most educators a new year is actually in August when the school year starts. But January is always a great time to reflect upon the year so far, where we have been, and of course where we are going. January through about March is a traditionally long stretch for many of us as we dig in to meet state requirements and help our students be successful as they finish out their year. Many of us pray for snow days just to get a little break in between.
At US Digital Literacy, we are keeping a watch on changes from the No Child Left Behind Legislation to the Every Student Succeeds Act. “With this bill, we reaffirm that fundamentally American ideal—that every child, regardless of …
- Published in Betsy DeVos, Common Core, ESSA
Frontier
eSpark Learning is enabling students to succeed in school and in life with innovative, differentiated technology. Frontier is one of their products that will captivate unique interests, challenge learners at all levels, and inspire creative application. It is a great way to start personalizing learning in your classroom. Students sign in and select a project based on a topic of their interest. Each project is aligned to the student’s unique learning level. Within each Frontier students are faced with an Essential Question that is meaningful to them. Engaging, diverse, online resources are curated to to help students research the essential question. Quick quizzes are interspersed throughout the project between articles, videos, infographics and podcasts to help them synthesize learning. Finally they express and publish their work to a larger audience.…
- Published in Digital Literacy