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What happens when a teacher is given the opportunity to play? I spent some time playing with Scratch to get a sense of how my students might approach the task of designing their own video games. Here's a screencast that I created to capture the process.
After the better part of a decade honing how I give written feedback, I’ve found a degree of success by sticking to certain practices.

As a longtime writing student and new instructor at the college level, Bad Ideas About Writing put into words the discomforts that I was already feeling about institutional attitudes towards “academic writing.” While these discomforts had been brewing for a long time, I was never quite sure how to express them - or whether I was even allowed to express them. In my undergrad program, and even as far back as high school, there had always seemed to be a general underlying disdain for recent generations of students’ writing and literacy skills.

Cheryl Ball and Drew Lowe's new FREE ebook Bad Ideas About Writing is your new #1 weapon to bury zombie ideas about writing and writing instruction for good!
Given that one needs a phone, tablet, or computer and service to access it, the Internet is not the great equalizer that it has been touted to be.
A more affordable, convenient, and well-organized source of knowledge is an unabridged dictionary. Recently, I picked up a free copy of the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. The copy had been abandoned, along with other household items, in a box marked “FREE STUFF” on the sidewalk.
Any student who is reading below proficiency--or even below advanced--would benefit from a formal course or even a homemade study of an unabridged lexicon like Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary.
Introducing new collection of resources that exemplify some of the best connected learning practices from Pittsburgh.
When I studied Latin during my freshmen year of college, I was astonished to learn that our English word sentence derived from the Latin sententia, which means feeling, thought, opinion, vote, judgment, determination, will, and--of course--sentence.
Saying that sententia means sentence, which is a grammatical unit of one or more words that expresses a declaration, a question, or an exclamation, does not tell a curious mind much at all. However, when one thinks of a grammatical sentence as a feeling, a thought, or even someone’s will, which is to say one’s desire or volition, a curious mind may wish to know more. After all, what does a sentence have to do with feelings?

This lesson plan was developed by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the Share and Spread Connected Learning Collection, organized by The Sprout Fund with the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation.
You can download a PDF of this lesson plan and its supporting materials on RemakeLearning.org.
Developed by: Jamaal Davis, adapted from a lesson plan created by multiple CLP staff
Subjects: STEM
Estimated Time: 5 days, 2 hours per session
Grade Level: 6-8

This lesson plan was developed by the YMCA Lighthouse Project at the Homewood-Brushton YMCA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the Share and Spread Connected Learning Collection, organized by The Sprout Fund with the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation.