Blogs on High (9-12)

Financial Literacy Month is April -- just around the corner -- and it's never too early to prepare. Personally, I believe this is a great opportunity to use games in an intentional way to teach students financial literacy skills. Games can be used as a "hook" or anchor activity, as well an instructional activity that is revisited throughout a unit of instruction. A game can help scaffold the learning of important content as well as providing context for application of content. If you really trust the design of the game, it can also be an excellent assessment tool!

So I hear you've been mulling over building a virtual classroom to weave in some online strategies with your face-to-face traditional classroom. Bravo. You rock. You won't regret it.

Ever since I was a kid, I loathed back to school commercials. They always showed parents gleefully skipping through aisles of pencils and notebooks as the kids, sullen and dejected, sluggishly followed along. It's a scene we are all too familiar with, and one that creates a negative stigma around school. But what if that scene were flipped? What if the kids were happy and eager to get to school? Is that possible after roughly 90 days of sun and fun? It is, and at Burlington Public Schools, we have seen it over the past two years during our iPad launches at the high school and middle school.

More and more, we're hearing the term "Digital Citizenship." I think we should simply call it "Citizenship."

In our increasingly connected world, what it means to be a citizen is contextualized by more than just our countries and communities; we are global citizens. Part of being a citizen these days is manifested in what we do digitally, and because of that, I will adhere to the term "Digital Citizenship" -- for now. I hear parents, teachers and community members talking about their concerns over their children's online behavior, and rightfully so. I believe it is our job as educators to teach and assess Digital Citizenship, and I also believe PBL is a great way to target this objective in an engaging and authentic way.