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Avid Reader of the Arias

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The Social Studies--classroom work that "Matters"

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The Social Studies--classroom work that "Matters"

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A teaching Aspiration. . . expanding the classroom out into the community

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That's an especially frustrating reality for me because in my travels to schools around the world I see lots of examples of "work that matters"; high school kids in Philadelphia designing solar panels for hospitals in the African bush; middle school kids in San Diego writing books about their local ecosystems and selling them in local stores; primary school kids designing a new classroom wing being built at their school outside of Melbourne, Australia. And more.

The growing access to knowledge, information, people, and tools that our students are getting demands a shift in how we think about the work they do in school.

"Work that matters" has significance beyond classroom walls; it's work that is created for an authentic audience who might enjoy it or benefit from it even in a small way. It's work that isn't simply passed to the teacher for a grade, or shared with peers for review. It's work that potentially makes a difference in the world.

And while we've always been able to do "work that matters" in our classrooms, our growing access to the Web and the tools and technologies of the modern world can certainly amplify the potentials for audience and for real world application of whatever it is our students are doing. Suddenly, our students have a potential audience of 2.5 billion people who could become readers or collaborators, and they've got all sorts of tools and apps in their backpacks that they can use to create really beautiful, meaningful work in ways that most of their teachers couldn't imagine doing when they were in school. I would argue, in fact, that the growing access to knowledge, information, people, and tools that our students are getting demands a shift in how we think about the work they do in school, one that moves them away from traditional, institutionally organized "assignments" and toward more student-organized projects that are centered on the intersection of their interests and the subject or standard at hand.

That argument becomes even more compelling when you look at the work some kids are doing on their own, outside of school, around their own interests and passions. Like 16-year-old Sean Fay Wolfe, whose 422-page book Quest for Justice (a novel set in Minecraft) currently ranks in the top 1 percent in sales of books sold on Amazon. Or like 12-year-old " Super Awesome Sylvia" Todd, who designed and helped to create a water color replicator that now sells in kit form for $295. Or 15-year-old Jack Andraka, who used his after school time to work in a Johns Hopkins laboratory to invent a cancer test that obliterated the current gold standard.

Are these kids outliers? Sure. But they are also examples of what is now possible for every child and, I would add, each one of us as well. And those examples and the thousands more like them should compel us to rethink what's possible in our classrooms if we begin to open up to the potentials. Instead of passing paper, digital or otherwise, back and forth between students and teacher, what if we allowed students to do real work for real audiences that can read and interact far beyond the limits of the school walls, schedule, and curriculum? What if we let our students do work that they actually cared about and wanted to create, not for a grade but because of its potential contribution to and effect on the world?

No question, this kind of work is harder to manage and to assess; there is very little if any "work that matters" that happens when students sit to take state assessments. Even though this type of work might tell us much more about what a student has learned and can do with that learning than any traditional test, it's not as efficient or quantifiable or rankable.

Still, we can start small, can't we? What if we took 10% of what we're currently doing and handed it over to our students, asking them to meet the standard or the outcome we've set for them in a way that they care about and that had a purpose beyond the classroom? What if we created opportunities for them to educate, entertain, inspire, or connect with people from all over the globe who might be sincerely influenced by the work they're doing? And what if we asked them to assess their own work in ways that matter to them, ways that inform them what worked, what didn't work, and how they might do it differently down the road?

Schools and classrooms should support a deep culture of "doing work that matters," where the adults in the building serve as models for the type of creating and learning we might expect from kids. And there should be a clear vision that everyone understands and works toward, one like the vision at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta which states: "We are a school of inquiry, innovation, and impact." Impact, as in the work that students do carries more weight than just a grade.

The reality of this moment is that every one of our students can create and share and connect in ways that didn't exist even a decade ago. I can't imagine what it's going to be like a decade from now. But I know this: if our students look at the work we're asking them to do today and say "It doesn't matter," we're missing a huge opportunity to help them become the learners they now need to be.
Will Richardson will be the opening keynote for the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit in Chicago.

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For Students, the Importance of Doing Work That Matters

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That's an especially frustrating reality for me because in my travels to schools around the world I see lots of examples of "work that matters"; high school kids in Philadelphia designing solar panels for hospitals in the African bush; middle school kids in San Diego writing books about their local ecosystems and selling them in local stores; primary school kids designing a new classroom wing being built at their school outside of Melbourne, Australia.

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(5) Exceptional

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Modern Connections

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Life of Pi

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Socrative Data Analysis

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Real Life Skills Lesson, in 90 degree heat.

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PBL- researched facts about China's faceted society

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If IPad's are not accessibile

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How strong is your "quote"?

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Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like.'" A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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Published Pop Blogging

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Call 630-901-9689 to schedule an interview

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Call 630-901-9689 to schedule an interview

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Thank you,

Amber Bell

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Assessing for Learning using "Teachem"

Identify the vocab word and then correctly use it in a sentence to describe the clip

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Let's refine those reading skills and build our vocabulary

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All skill assessments may be corrected and resubmitted for full credit one day after getting it back.

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TOPICS: Philosophy, Professional Development, Lesson Plans for Social Studies & English, Common-Core Assessment Rubrics, and Artistic Stimuli for creating engaging lessons plus Credentials

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TOPICS: Philosophy, Professional Development, Lesson Plans for Social Studies & English, Common-Core Assessment Rubrics, and Artistic Stimuli for creating engaging lessons plus Credentials

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PURPOSE: To demonstrate how in this last two years of long-term subbing/aiding I continue to expand my professional/content development by establishing my own digital citizenship in the teaching network.

DIRECTIONS: Scroll down the wall to view the colored version of my teaching accomplishments, professional development, and personality. When you see a file or book icon, this is a hyperlink to either

another website or uploaded PDF. Click on it to view the artifact. The artifact will open in the same viewing page. When you are done viewing the artifact, click on the back button, at the top

of your web browser, to return to my wall.

*NOTE: Some pages may not open fully in your web browser when you click on the file or book icon. In order to view the full artifact, click on the purple "SOURCE" button to open the full page. This will open the artifact in a new tab. To return to my wall, click on the tab that says "Ms. Amber Bell".

Enjoy!

--Ms. Bell

DISCLAIMER: Depending on monitor size, formatting could become overlapped.

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Abel Korzeniowski - W.E. (Music from the Motion Picture)

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Stimuli for MY Engaging Lessons- Talk About Stuff/ Social Good that Matters

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Stimuli for MY Engaging Lessons- Talk About Stuff/ Social Good that Matters

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Found via my FlipBoard and RSS Feedly Accounts

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Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false - consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world and to invent languages for channeling that wonder - the wonder of the inner world, the language for which is art, and the wonder of the outer world, the language of which is science. Binding the two and translating between them is the crowning glory of our consciousness: music.

How these two languages mirror and inform each other is what Philip Glass explores some lovely passages from his memoir Words Without Music (public library).

Glass - who was grinding lenses and building telescopes at age eleven, and who has written more operas about science than any other composer - recounts the enchantment science cast upon him as a freshman at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, studying chemistry under a Nobel laureate who had chosen to teach eighty teenagers with electrifying enthusiasm for the subject - a testament to how one great teacher can shape a life, can set into motion the orrery of wonder from which all creative work springs. Looking back on these lectures, Glass recognizes the parallels of passion that great artists and great scientists share:

Professor Urey lectured like an actor, striding back and forth in front of the big blackboard, making incomprehensible marks on the board... His teaching was like a performance. He was a man passionate about his subject, and he couldn't wait until we could be there at eight in the morning. Scientists on that level are like artists in a way. They are intensely in love with their subject matter.

What also shaped Glass's creative spirit and his understanding of creativity was the school's rather unusual choice to teach students from primary sources - the voices and visions of great artists, writers, and scientists rising from the page directly, unmediated by a biographer's interpretation or a critic's commentary. Not yet twenty, Glass and his classmates read Schrödinger and Dalton, Newton's Principia and Darwin's On the Origin of Species, replicated Mendel's fruit fly experiments and restaged Galileo's rolling balls. Something more than learning emerged from this immersion - something radiant with understanding, a way of seeing how individual ideas fit in a larger framework of knowledge, the framework we call culture. Glass reflects on how this imprinted his imagination:

The study of science became the study of the history of science, and I began to understand what a scientific personality could be like. This early exposure would be reflected in Galileo Galilei, which I composed forty-five years later, in which his experiments become a dance piece - the balls and inclined planes are there. I found the biographical aspects of scientists intensely interesting, and the operas about Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay tribute to everything I learned about scientists and science that came out of those years.

With an eye to the singular power of this primary-source method of learning, he adds:

The effect on me was to cultivate and understand in a firsthand way the lineage of culture. The men and women who created the stepping-stones from earliest times became familiar to us - not something "handed down" but actually known in a most immediate and personal way... I now see clearly that a lot of the work I chose was inspired by men and women whom I first met in the pages of books. In this way, those early operas were, as I see it, an homage to the power, strength, and inspiration of the lineage of culture.

Looking back on his own creative trajectory, he reflects:

Music and science have been my great loves. I see scientists as visionaries, as poets... What interests me is how similar these visionaries' way of seeing is to that of an artist. Einstein clearly visualized his work. In one of his books on relativity, trying to explain it to people, he wrote that he imagined himself sitting on a beam of light, and the beam of light was traveling through the universe at 186,000 miles per second. What he saw was himself sitting still and the world flashing by him at a really high speed. His conclusion was that all he had to do - as if it were a minor matter - was to invent the mathematics to describe what he had seen.

Glass adds:

What I have to do when I compose is not that different. All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I've been working in the language of music all my life, and it's within that language that I've learned how ideas can unfold.

Complement with physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the shared psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science, then revisit the neurophysiology of how music enchants us and the story of how Pythagoras and Sappho revolutionized music.

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SoulPancake | We make stuff that matters

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Sign up for the SPoonful, and get a weekly dose of joy delivered directly to your inbox.

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Historical Playlists

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“Good conversation is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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Student-Driven Discussions

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"The good news is...you get to decide!"

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Skill Rubric for Reading

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Teaching about all voices

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University of Illinois: BAS: History, Minor in Secondary Edu & English Endorsed

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Engaging Classroom Stimuli

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

By providing middle school students a chance to walk in someone else's shoes, teachers can help them develop empathy-and a stronger connection to content.

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A free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education.

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Challenging the Status Quo

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TeachThought is an organization dedicated to innovation in education through the growth of innovative teachers.

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5-Point  Rubrics- Clear Communication with Students/         Assesses Skills and Common Core Standards

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5-Point  Rubrics- Clear Communication with Students/         Assesses Skills and Common Core Standards

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Adaptable for any project and any subject

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START HERE:  If you could pick a song to play in the background of your life, what would you choose?

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START HERE:  If you could pick a song to play in the background of your life, what would you choose?

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Duplicate this tab (Right Click) and then open these tracks to listen to my two choices while exploring my portfolio.

A: "The Ripples Must Be Endless" from The Adjustment Bureau . Composed by Thomas Newman

B: "Abdication" from W.E. Composed by Abel Korzeniowski

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Life Skills in the Classroom-- designed by Popplet

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Thomas Newman - The Adjustment Bureau (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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The Adjustment Bureau (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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Digital Portfolio May '12

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As a pre-service Social Studies teacher, I am excited to bring Social Studies alive! When I was in Kindergarten, I knew already that I wanted to become a teacher. My dedication to my...

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"For me, teaching is about what I can do for my students....not what I did to them." #NoEnabling 

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"For me, teaching is about what I can do for my students....not what I did to them." #NoEnabling 

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"My Responsibility as a teacher is to empower students to set achievable goals for their future, take ownership in their education, and practice their skills and disciplined behavior correctly in a secure twenty-first century environment."

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--created at Taxedo.com

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Expert In Anything Northern Virginia Photographer

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Click Source to View new #edTweets

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Technology in the Classroom-- designed by MindMeister

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Digital Learning in the 21st Century Classroom DI...

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Digital Learning in the 21st Century Classroom DIRECTIONS: Click on Start Slide Show. When you see a (->), this is a hyperlink to a website or artifact, and when you see a [=], this is a note you should click on to see how I will use this idea in my classroom.

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At 25, I have experienced a diverse set of teaching experiences that have prepared me to teach in any environment.