Dear Friends,
Whenever I want to know what is happening on the cutting edge of education there are a few sites I review. Among them are:
Edutopia - www.edutopia.org
New Horizons for Learning - http://education.jhu.edu/newhorizons
Project Zero - http://pzweb.harvard.edu
The Edutopia site was created by George Lucas and contains amazing blogs, articles, and collaborative projects with educators from all over the world. If you visit the website, I guarantee you will be inspired about what is possible in education and the amazing global connections that students and teachers are making.
The New Horizons for Learning site is connected to Johns Hopkins University and has very interesting articles, teaching ideas, and research about what is helping students. I particularly like this link: http://education.jhu.edu/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/index.html which focuses on neuroscience and what we have learned about the brain - and how to teach it! The articles are very encouraging and give us a new view of how to teach everyone.
Project Zero was created by Howard Gardner, Ph.D. and is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Gardner is also the creator of Multiple Intelligences and the idea of intelligence revealing itself in many different ways. His website is: http://www.howardgardner.com/index.html The Project Zero website is also a place that is continually pushing the boundaries of what we know, how we teach, and how to best empower our students and teachers.
I have become particularly interested in a book that was written by the Principal Investigator of Project Zero, Veronica Boix Mansilla and co-authored by Anthony Jackson. The book is called, Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage. This book offers a skill set that we can bring to our teaching to help students not only connect with the world but also engage, take action, and make a difference in the lives of others. The list of competencies is fascinating and takes the ideas of character education to another level!
I hope you have a few moments to check out some of the links - they will stretch what you know about education.
Wishing you a wonderful day - filled with inspiration and new learning!
Kimberly Borin
Learning Specialist
