I often get asked for recommendations for simple website builders that teachers and students can use to create small websites. Google Sites is fine, but the aesthetics still have a long way to go. Services like WordPress and Weebly are great, but have way more menus and options than what’s needed for a quick and simple site. Carrd.co is a new service that just might fill the need for an easy-to-use tool to quickly create good-looking, simple websites.
I gave Carrd.co a try this afternoon. In ten minutes I created a little photography portfolio site that looks way better than anything I could have created with Google Sites or WordPress. Watch this short demo video to see how you can create a portfolio site with Carrd.co. Applications for Education Carrd.co could be a good little tool for high school or college students to use to create simple websites to share information about themselves and their work. They can create sites that are useful to have and share when applying for an internship, a scholarship, or a job. Create a Portfolio With Carrd.co published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Create a Portfolio With Carrd.co
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Google Docs users who regularly create multiple page documents will be happy to learn that Google is adding a new page break feature to Google Docs. The new page break option will let you insert a page break before any new paragraph. This means that you’ll no longer have to manually insert spaces to create a page break. Likewise, your formatting of the page break will be preserved if you have to later add more text or images to a page within your document.
Applications for Education This new page break will be welcomed by anyone who uses Google Docs to create long documents like worksheets that incorporate a lot of images, charts, or special text formatting. The new page break option should make it easier to preserve the formatting of pages without having to manually insert or delete spaces. A Helpful New Feature for Formatting Google Docs published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr A Helpful New Feature for Formatting Google Docs
This week Google announced a new feature that will be welcomed by any teacher who regularly uses Google Meet to host online classes. That feature is the ability to selectively mute participant audio and video. For quite a while you’ve been able to mute all participants and turn off their webcams. The new feature prevents participants from unmuting themselves after you’ve muted them.
Those who have access to breakout rooms in Google Meet will find that the participant audio and video settings will also apply to breakout rooms. It should be noted that if your students are joining from an Android device or iOS device, they will need to be updated to the latest version of the Google Meet apps. If they don’t use the updated apps, they won’t be able to join your meeting if you have the audio and video locks enabled in your call. Applications for EducationI can think of at least a few times in the last 18 months that this new feature would have been helpful to me. I’ve muted students who wanted to interupt and had them unmute themselves. It then became kind of an annoying game of “mute, unmute” that distracted the class.
Like almost all Google Workspace updates, this one will take a couple of weeks to appear in all users’ accounts.
Google Adds More Audio and Video Controls to Google Meet published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Google Adds More Audio and Video Controls to Google Meet Arts education is often an afterthought in schools, but Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks we’ve got it all wrong. In her new book, “How the Arts Can Save Education: Transforming Teaching, Learning and Instruction,” Halverson argues not only do the arts belong in schools, but the core tenets of arts learning belong in every classroom. Education should use the arts—and especially the process of how artists create their work—as a blueprint to re-make more effective learning. Halverson’s arts experience comes from Whoopensocker, an arts-based organization she founded that teaches elementary school students the process of writing and performing original plays. Through that work, she came to a realization: using standardized test scores as the measure for learning limits what students have the opportunity to learn, and gives students the impression that test scores are the final destination. But the arts offer a new way of looking at learning. Her thesis resembles project-based learning: if classrooms embraced the cyclic process artists use to create new work—beginning with an idea, finding a way to express that idea (something she refers to as a “representation”), and then presenting the finished product to an audience—more real learning can flourish. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Holly: When I was a kid, my memory is that the arts were a part of a lot of things we did. We sang songs, put on plays and puppet shows, made drawings in a lot of classes. It was a part of the way that we learned. But now, in my work as a journalist, I go into a lot of classrooms, and I feel like for the most part that’s all gone. And it got me thinking about, why did you want to write this book? What were the challenges that you were seeing in education that you wanted to address? Erica: This goes back to the advent of the accountability system in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, where for very good reasons that have to do with issues of equity and inclusion, policy makers focused on metrics of success such as test scores on fixed, normed reading and math tests, and measurable outcomes like attendance metrics, as the primary way that we as a society could understand whether we were serving all of our kids. I think that approach was fundamentally misguided—because it eliminated all of those inspiring and arts-based practices that you described that were hallmarks of our childhood teaching and learning experiences. Because all of a sudden, if what counts as good learning looks like performance on a reading test, then all of our educational efforts get laser-focused in service of performing well on those metrics. My experience both as an artist and an arts educator, is that the outcomes of arts practice are themselves the measure of learning. Making art of any kind is an act of representation, taking an idea and giving it a form for other people to respond to. That form is anything from a painting, a song, a Tik Tok video, you name it. Art-making is an act of representation. And the ability to create an effective representation is actually the single most important skill for all classroom learning. The challenge is, when we fix the outcome of representation as performance on an exam, then we’ve eliminated all the choices for moving around the representational process. Because we’re not really asking the fundamental questions that make learning compelling, like, What’s the idea you have? How do these tools allow you to represent that idea? And how do audiences respond to your representation as a good version of that idea? And that’s true from writing expository essays to using math equations to represent how to communicate a mathematical practice, to a complicated science experiment. That’s a long way of saying: I think we went off the rails when we let the outcome measures of standardized learning drive the design bus. Holly: The title of the book leads me to believe you think the arts can save education, and you have an interesting and unique perspective. Because I think people say versions of this all the time—but yours is different. It’s not necessarily more time spent in music class playing the violin. Erica: It is remaking our systems of teaching and learning by using arts practices as the foundation for what good teaching looks like, for what good learning can be, and how our learning environments can function. Here’s an example: in the chapter where I talk about remaking curriculum, I describe how the process of art-making is fundamentally the cycle of coming up with an idea, creating representations and then sharing those with an audience. The strong argument I’m making is that cycle, that process is the model for how all learning experiences are designed, regardless of the discipline that you’re in. The foundation of the learning process ought to be coming up with the idea that is the subject of your inquiry, and developing tools for representation that are germane to that discipline. Every discipline has its own tools for representation. I don’t think music ought to be used necessarily for representing math, though there is a place for that. What I’m saying is, what are the tools for representation in mathematics? And how do those tools afford you to represent the idea or concept, and then what happens when you share those representations with an audience? What kind of feedback do you get? Does that give you an opportunity to help you think about the connection between the idea that you had and the representation that you’ve chosen? Does it teach something about that idea that they didn’t already know? Either way, how should we understand what you get out of that process beyond simply knowing the facts of a particular discipline or domain. Many of us grow up with artistic superpowers, artistic ways of knowing and doing. You don’t have to be a tuba player! These artistic superpowers could serve us productively in our inquiries into other disciplines. And that’s another way of saying, it’s not that we all need to learn the tuba, right? It’s the way of engaging in arts practice, which pretty much we all do whether you’re a cook, or you make clothes for your family, or the myriad ways we express ourselves. In education we do everyone a disservice by not acknowledging that we should be drawing on those ways of knowing and doing as an integral part of how we learn to do stuff. Holly: Okay, I have to stop you and ask questions here. What I often see happening in classrooms is that kids don’t even know the facts. Here’s an example: my fourth grader could not learn his multiplication tables. I took him to a tutoring center, and they said, “This is so easy, there’s a scientific way that kids need to learn this stuff, and the reason he doesn’t know his times tables is because he doesn’t know the basic facts of 0-10. Once he knows those, and we will teach it to him, he will be able to multiply with ease. What I worry about is that students have to have the basic facts first in order to enjoy this kind of learning—what you’re talking about here is a lot like project-based learning—and what we’re missing, especially most often for the most vulnerable children, is that they don’t have the basics to work with. Erica: I think two things. There is a place for drill and practice as a tool for acquiring information. And the arts certainly do our versions of drill and practice—if you want to become a trained singer, you spend 20 minutes a day warming up your voice, to set the conditions for being able to sing. So I’m not arguing that there is not a time and place to use those tools. I think what we miss when we say you need to start with the basics, is that cognitively if students are not ready to use those tools to make something they care about, none of it is going to stick. Here’s an arts-based example: Video editing is an extremely technical and trying process, with many sets of technical tools, informational processes, etc. If you have no need for audio level adjustment, memorizing where and how audio level adjustment works is a bit of an act of futility. But, once you need to adjust the audio levels of an interview you’ve done—that info and knowledge, whatever you want to call it, is much more likely to become part of what you know and do if you use it than if you are in a video editing class and it was the week to learn about audio level adjustment. The same goes for multiplication tables. We need to drill and practice in order to make that part of your memory, of course, in the same way that a video editor needs to adjust audio levels 40 times, so when it comes to being able to do that seamlessly they can do that with no problem. However, if the impetus of that drill isn’t grounded in some practice of conceiving, representing and sharing, it’s going to be much harder to motivate, much harder to sustain, and it’s going to be harder to convince young people that it matters for them. Holly: It makes me think of Jal Mehta’s and Sarah Fine’s book “In Search of Deeper Learning.” Some kids seem to gravitate towards this kind of project-based learning. In the book, they talk about how it’s often the after-school activities that kids get so deep into—sports, the arts, marching band—because of exactly what you’re saying. Erica: Yeah, of course, you’re going to find that in your ‘after-school’ time, because those practices are part of what it means to make things. And where are we mostly making things? We are mostly making things now outside of school time. There are often critiques of those after-school learning spaces, “But you’re only talking about the kids who opt in.” And my response has been, “That’s because we don’t give all kids the opportunity to do these things. We treat them as if they’re special. What if there was an all-in system, because this is how we do teaching and learning at scale?” Holly: What I find most compelling about the arts when it comes to education is that it’s a different way to be smart. It gives kids who may not be particularly good at math or reading a reason to go to school. Can we talk about that? Because I feel like some of what your book is saying is that we need to recognize the different ways in which people are smart. Erica: Yes, and I think an even stronger claim is to stop equating school performance with smartness. The problem is not with the kids, the problem is with the way we’ve set up what these learning experiences are for. What you said—well that person isn’t good at math. I would say, are they not good at math? Or, is the way that school math was designed not reflective of what it means to be smart in math? And like, you may not like math class, but what I would hope for, is that we give more kids more chances to be smart, and enjoy more school-based disciplines, when we use these arts-based strategies to engage. Holly: Let’s talk about your theatre company, Whoopensocker. What did you learn about traditional education from going into schools and doing these shows, where basically kids invent a show from scratch? How did that inform what you’re doing? Erica: I think the number one thing that I learned is that good teaching and learning is built on a foundation of risk-taking. That is, learners’ willingness to take a risk, and teachers’ willingness to take a risk. Risk-taking means everything from a willingness to try out an answer and be wrong, to a willingness to take leadership, cognitive leadership or project leadership. There are a lot of ways that it looks. But my mantra is: we can’t teach or learn anything unless we are willing to take a risk. And a thing that I’ve learned from formal learning systems of all kinds, from tutoring to college classes to K-12 school: we don’t scaffold risk-taking as a normal part of the way we design learning environments. Like, “getting to know you” games have a really bad reputation, and I think the reason is we’ve lost sight of what they’re for. What they’re for is to set the conditions for people to be able to take risks together, to learn and do new stuff. There are many classroom teachers who do that as a natural part of their practice. When we go in with Whoopensocker, you can tell right away the classrooms that are set up to do that kind of risk-taking. We always start with warm-up games for everyone. In classroom spaces that are not scaffolded for risk-taking, sometimes that is as far as we get in the first few weeks, just getting learners and teachers to do a call and response game altogether, which is its own form of risk. In classrooms that are set up for risk-taking, they are ready from the jump to contribute new ideas and let those ideas be a dialogue. What I have learned from being an arts educator for 25 years in elementary school classrooms, is that scaffolding risk-taking is the single most important feature of an effective learning environment. Holly: This is the perfect lead-in to my next question: How are teachers going to incorporate these ideas? What I see when I go into classrooms is teachers who are teaching a mile a minute. They have a stack of standards, of things they have to say and do on specific days. It feels like there is no room for them to incorporate this. Erica: We can’t afford for there not to be room. The kids who are consistently left out of the system, and this has not changed one iota since No Child Left Behind, are still being left out. Accountability systems have not created universally more successful schooling or equitable schooling. So I would argue that we need to ditch the content-forward, content-pressured model of schooling, in service of scaffolding risk-taking as the mechanism into much deeper and more meaningful understanding of concepts and information and how they’re represented in a discipline. I know as an individual classroom teacher, that’s not a super-helpful comment, because that’s a system-level response. This only happens if we all collectively acknowledge that sticking things in the margins is not the way to systemic change. When you clean out your closet, how often are you shoving tee shirts into a drawer before you finally say, this drawer can’t hold any more tee shirts? And you dump the whole drawer out? The model of, “how do we shove more pieces into an already packed agenda?” is never going to get us anywhere. Holly: If there is one thing that you would like teachers to think about when they’re done reading this book, what would it be? What could they do today? Erica: The one thing is to see their job as scaffolding risk-taking to prepare students for learning. In the book, I give some pretty direct ideas for how to scaffold risk-taking in the classroom. That’s my takeaway for all teachers, that scaffolding risk-taking is the foundation for all teaching and learning, and that nobody can learn unless they’re willing to take a risk. How arts practices can be the foundation of teaching and learning published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr How arts practices can be the foundation of teaching and learning
WorldCover Viewer is a new interactive land use map produced by the European Space Agency. The map lets visitors see how land is used worldwide and in specific places. Visitors can pan and zoom to see land use for an area or use the statistics explorer tools built into the map to see land use statistics for a country, state, or province. Views of the map and associated data can be downloaded from the WorldCover Viewer.
The map represents ten categories of land use. Those categories are:
As you’ll see in my video overview of WorldCover Viewer, it include a tool for measuring areas of land use. In my video overview I also demonstrate how to enable different layers on the map.
Applications for Education WorldCover Viewer could be a great resource for students to use to learn about how land is used in the area around them and globally. Students might be surprised to learn how much land is or isn’t built-up in their home state or province. I can see using WorldCover Viewer as the starting place for student research into environmental challenges and concerns about land use.
H/T to Maps Mania for sharing WorldCover Viewer.
An Interactive Land Use Map published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr An Interactive Land Use Map
After five years of warnings, Google is finally ending support for the old version of Google Sites on December 1st. If you’ve been clinging to the hope that Google wouldn’t force you to transition to the current version of Google Sites, it’s time to give up that hope and convert your old site to the current version of Google Sites. Otherwise, on December 1st you’ll no longer be able to edit your site or do anything else with it.
In the following video I demonstrate how to convert your old Google Sites websites to the current version. Fortunately, the process is very simple and quick. Just head to sites.google.com then click on “classic sites manager” in the left margin of the page. Then on the next screen you can select the site(s) that you want to convert. Once you’ve clicked “convert” Google will handle the rest. If you’re not sure which version of Google Sites you are using, watch my video to learn how you can quickly tell which version you’re using. On a related note, I have a complete playlist of Google Sites tutorials right here. The best video to get started is this one that walks you through everything you need to know to create your first website with Google Sites. Reminder - Old Google Sites are Going Away! published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Reminder - Old Google Sites are Going Away! This story includes the topic of suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. A coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health has issued an urgent warning declaring the mental health crisis among children so dire that it has become a national emergency. The declaration was penned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which together represent more than 77,000 physicians and 200 children’s hospitals. In a letter released Tuesday, the groups say that rates of childhood mental health concerns were already steadily rising over the past decade. But the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the issue of racial inequality, they write, has exacerbated the challenges. “This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and represents an acceleration of trends observed prior to 2020,” the declaration from the pediatric groups says. When it comes to suicide in particular, the groups point to data showing that by 2018, suicide was the second-leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 24. Teenage girls have emerged particularly at risk. From February to March of this year, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts were up 51% for girls ages 12 to 17, compared with the same period in 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, the data shows that in 2020, the percentage of emergency department visits for mental health emergencies rose by 24% for children between the ages of 5 and 11 and 31% for those 12 to 17, compared with 2019. “Young people have endured so much throughout this pandemic and while much of the attention is often placed on its physical health consequences, we cannot overlook the escalating mental health crisis facing our patients,” the American Academy of Pediatrics’ president, Dr. Lee Savio Beers, said in a statement. The crisis effects children of color even moreThe declaration from the pediatric groups notes that the disruptions children and families have experienced during the pandemic have disproportionately affected children of color. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics showed that 140,000 children have lost a parent or grandparent caregiver to COVID-19. A majority of those children were kids of color. The study showed that, compared with white children, Native American children were 4.5 times more likely to have lost a primary caregiver. Black children were 2.4 times more likely, and Hispanic children nearly twice as likely. “We are caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, their communities, and all of our futures,” said Dr. Gabrielle Carlson, president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Pediatric leaders are urging policymakers to invest in telemedicine and mental health in schoolsThe declaration calls for policymakers on the local and federal levels to fund and improve mental health care for children when it comes to screening, diagnosing and treatment. Access to telemedicine and mental health care in schools should be a priority, the letter says. The groups also want to address the challenge of children experiencing a shortage of beds in emergency care. The Biden administration announced in August plans to invest nearly $85 million in funding for mental health awareness, training and treatment for children.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
Pediatricians say the mental health crisis among kids has become a national emergency published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Pediatricians say the mental health crisis among kids has become a national emergency
A couple of weeks ago I discovered CBC Kids News and I shared a great video that explains what the word indigenous means when referring to people. This afternoon I browsed through CBC Kids News again and found a nice animated video that explains the United Nations to kids.
United Nations Explained is a short video designed to help elementary school students understand the basics of what the United Nations is, it’s purpose, how it functions, and what it says about kids. Watch the video right here or as embedded below. Applications for Education The video is good on its own as an explanation and introduction to the United Nations. You could have students answer some basic questions about the U.N. after watching the video. But I’d prefer to have students write down lists of questions that the video raised in their minds while they were watching. Questions like, “what if the countries don’t get along?” and “what happens if they break the rules?” could lead to some great classroom conversations and lessons. The United Nations Explained for Kids published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr The United Nations Explained for Kids
On Tuesday I published a blog post about Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow contest that is now open for entries. This afternoon it was brought to my attention that Samsung has extended the judging period for initial entries. Initial entries are still due by November 8th (it only takes a few minutes to enter) but the state winners will now be selected in early December instead of on November 18th as I wrote yesterday.
I should point out that everything else that I wrote about Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow contest is still correct. State winners will receive one Samsung Video Kit (approximate retail value $2,600) and a $6,500 prize package to be redeemed through DonorsChoose. National finalists win $50,000 in classroom technology prizes and the overall winner receives $100,000 in classroom technology prizes. Samsung Solve for Tomorrow - Timeline Extended published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Samsung Solve for Tomorrow - Timeline Extended Natalie Saldana would love to put her 1.5-year-old daughter in a quality child care program while she works and goes to school, but the $700 monthly price tag makes it impossible. “Seven-hundred dollars is almost my rent,” Saldana said. Saldana, 22, is a full-time student, single mom and health insurance agent in South Carolina. She’s one of the many parents struggling to find child care, even as many child care centers have reopened. According to a new poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 34% of families with young children are facing serious problems finding child care when adults need to work. The poll also found that in the last few months, 44% of households with children under age 18 have been facing serious financial problems. That figure jumps to 63% for Black families and 59% for Latino households. As Congress continues to debate a spending package that would expand child care and provide universal pre-K, parents across the U.S. are struggling to find ways to pay for the child care they desperately need right now. How a lack of child care is affecting familiesSafe child care for young children is inherently expensive. Among other reasons, one caregiver can’t safely watch more than three or four infants or toddlers at a time. And the U.S. spends less public money on early childhood education and care than most other wealthy nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. During the coronavirus pandemic, many existing child care centers had to shut down completely or reduce their enrollment numbers for safety reasons. As the economy has opened back up, child care centers, like a lot of businesses, are struggling to find workers. But many cannot provide the same employee incentives, like hiring bonuses, that bigger businesses can. Joe Lopez, a father of three living in Sacramento, Calif., currently pays $1,000 a month to send his youngest to day care, but that high price tag doesn’t guarantee reliability. Coronavirus policies at the day care center mean that sometimes, after Lopez drops his son off in the morning, he has to turn around and pick his son right back up again. “I wake up, log in to my computer to start work from home and then I randomly get a text from the day care that they’re shut down for two or three days,” Lopez said. In NPR’s poll, 36% of adults in households with children say they experienced serious problems meeting both their work and family responsibilities in the past few months. Saldana takes online classes in civil engineering and works from home. She said she’d rather work from an office and take in-person classes, but she needs to stay at home to watch her daughter. “Hopefully I’ll be able to make enough money to pay for child care in the future,” Saldana said, as her daughter called for her in the background, “which would be so much better, because it’s hard when she wants me to do stuff with her or feed her while I’m working.” While there are subsidized child care options in her area, Saldana is concerned about quality. “I’ve seen facilities that teach children how to be self-sufficient, and I thought that was very nice,” Saldana said. “But then you look at the day cares for low-income families, and, yeah, there’s toys, but there’s no interactions with the child to facilitate mental growth.” How the federal government could helpThese child care struggles persist despite 73% of poll respondents with children reporting that they have received financial assistance from the government. Sasha Eugene, a mother of three living in Houston, has been heavily relying on the federal government’s expanded child tax credit after losing her job this month. But the money isn’t enough to cover the cost of a day care center or an after-school program for her children. “[The child tax credit] either goes to them or my bills so that we can keep a roof over our head,” Eugene said. “That check is the only income I get.” As part of his Build Back Better Agenda, President Biden has proposed expanding access to child care and providing universal pre-K. There’s no guarantee he’ll get those measures through, but Biden has made it clear that he wants expanded child care to remain a part of any bill the Senate passes. “How can we compete in [the] world if millions of America’s parents, especially moms, can’t be part of the workforce because they can’t afford the cost of child care or elder care?” Biden said at an event on Friday. Quality early education has lasting benefits, especially for children whose families are struggling economically. But without significant financial support, there isn’t a lot of hope that parents or their children will be able to reap these benefits. “Anything would be better than balancing being a full-time mom, student and working,” Saldana said. “Except paying so much for child care that I’m struggling to pay my rent and bills.”
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
1 in 3 working families is struggling to find the child care they desperately need published first on https://youreduio.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr 1 in 3 working families is struggling to find the child care they desperately need |
About UsI'm a freelance journalist and creative writer who immensely enjoys writing and researching into any topic. I offer high quality content writing services. I've participated in a number of projects, and have experience writing for different platforms. |