Educators can now easily adapt the digital resources from one of the country’s most prominent museums for their lessons with this week’s launch of the Smithsonian Learning Lab.

After five years of development, the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access has released the full version of its free Learning Lab site, created to make the museum’s multimedia resources more accessible for teachers. Read more

The Professional Development Schools Model that the University of Houston Clear Lake used when I was on faculty there was an excellent example of what this article is talking about.

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Lots of good ideas to get students excited and engaged.

Shake Up Learning

To help our underserved students learn, we must eradicate all traces of the argument that access to digital tools is key to minimizing the digital divide, and instead advocate for changes in the use of these tools to better engage our underserved students in authentic tasks that support the development of higher-order thinking skills.

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This is one of my very favorite topics – growth mindset. I really wish I would have done my doctoral research on this topic. I was trying to get to it by observing cognitive overload and frustration level, but it would have been very powerful to combine it with Dweck’s research. The only problem is that she was working on her research at the same time I was working on mine (early 90s).

Flashy spaces and shiny toys in makerspaces are enticing, but it takes time and explicit scaffolding to develop a true Innovator. Building and providing the space for Making to happen is one thing; nurturing a mindset that gives students the mental tools to engage with said spaces is a much larger, and timely, endeavor. Read more at the link below.

6 Must Haves for Developing a Maker Mindset