New Film Addresses Mental Health By Challenging Us To ‘Listen’ To Our Youth Voice — from gettingsmart.com by Michael Niehoff

New Film Addresses Mental Health By Challenging Us To Listen To Our Youth Voice

 


Also see:

IW Official Guide: World Mental Health Day Supporting the workplace during the pandemic and beyond

IW Official Guide: World Mental Health Day Supporting the workplace during the pandemic & beyond — from inspiring-workplaces.com by Aimee O’Leary

For World Mental Health Day 2020, we have created a quick guide of 10 top tips for you. It has been compiled from experts around the world on how to support the mental health of your people during these challenging times.

It includes:

  • How to do your part to break the stigma
  • How to create functional routines
  • How to look out for colleagues without being invasive
  • How to stay connected
  • and more

Lastly, before reading the guide, reach out to someone you know today, who you have haven’t spoken with in a while and simply ask… How are you, really? It will make a huge difference.

*****************

 


Addendum on 10/13/20:

As the Pandemic Grinds On, Here Are 5 Big Worries of College Presidents — from chronicle.com by Michael Vasquez

Excerpt:

Campus mental health is the No. 1 worry. The college leaders were asked to select their five top concerns from a list of 19 Covid-related issues. Fifty-three percent of presidents listed student mental health, and 42 percent pointed to faculty and staff mental health as being among their biggest worries. Anxiety, uncertainty, depression, and grief — compounded by the isolation of the pandemic — have exacted an often invisible toll on people who study and work in higher education.

 

3 winners for the GSV Cup: Abwaab, Prepmedians, and Ringbeller! Congratulations!! These three exceptional companies won out of over 550 applications.

First Place Winner – Watch the pitch below from Abwaab

Second Place Winner – Watch the pitch below from Prepmedians

Third Place Winner – Watch the pitch below from Ringbeller

 

[Re: online-based learning] The Ford Model T from 1910 didn’t start out looking like a Maserati Gran Turismo from 2021! [Christian]

From DSC:
Per Wikipedia, this is a 1910 Model T that was photographed in Salt Lake City:

The Ford Model T didn't start out looking like a Maserati from 2021!

 

This is what online/virtual learning looks like further down the road. Our journey has just begun.

From DSC:
The Ford Model T didn’t start out looking like a Maserati Gran Turismo from 2021! Inventions take time to develop…to be improved…for new and further innovations and experiments to take place.

Thinking of this in terms of online-based learning, please don’t think we’ve reached the end of the road for online-based learning. 

The truth is, we’ve barely begun our journey.

 


Two last thoughts here


1 ) It took *teams* of people to get us to the point of producing a Maserati like this. It will take *teams* of people to produce the Maserati of online-based learning.

2) In terms of online-based learning, it’s hard to say how close to the Maserati that we have come because I/we don’t know how far things will go. But this I do know: We have come a looooonnnnnggggg ways from the late 1990s! If that’s what happened in the last 20 years — with many denying the value of online-based learning — what might the next 5, 10, or 20 years look like when further interest, needs, investments, etc. are added? Then add to all of that the momentum from emerging technologies like 5G, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, bots, algorithms, and more!


From DSC:
To drive the point home, here’s an addendum on late 9/29/20:

Mercedes-Benz Shares Video of Avatar Electric Car Prototype

 

Editorial: Spaces is only a small part of Apple’s enormous AR/VR puzzle — from uploadvr.com by Jeremy Horwitz

Excerpt:

A demonstration of Spaces’ latest tech shows a cartoony teacher offering whiteboard presentations with accompanying lip and body synchronization — a gentle evolution of existing VR avatar technology. You could easily imagine the 3D model replaced with one of Apple’s current Memoji avatars, enabling an iPad- or iPhone-toting teacher to offer a presentation to a virtual class over Zoom.

 

Just released today! Jane Hart’s Top 200 Tools for Learning

Jane Hart's Top 200 Tools for Learning -- released on 9-1-20

Top 200 Tools for Learning — from toptools4learning.com by Jane Hart

Excerpt:

The Top Tools for Learning 2020 was compiled by Jane Hart from the results of the 14th Annual Learning Tools Survey, and released on 1 September 2020. For general information about the survey and this website, visit the About page. For observations and infographics of this year’s list, see Analysis 2020.

 

 

From Beth McMurtrie in this week’s “Teaching” over at The Chronicle:

  • Examples of innovative assessment strategies
  • An instructor’s request to help students engage with digital textbooks
  • Some resources for effective online, equitable, & antiracist teaching

Teaching -- over at The Chronicle

From DSC:
I especially appreciated the item re: the creation/use of multimedia-based content in place of a more traditional assessment. This type of assignment/assessment allows more choice and it opens up opportunities for more creativity and expression.

 

From edsurge.com today:

THOROUGHLY MODERN MEDIA: This spring, a college theater course about women’s voting rights aimed to produce a new play about the suffrage struggle. When the pandemic scuttled those plans, professors devised a new way to share suffragist stories by creating an interactive, online performance set in a virtual Victorian mansion. And their students were not the only ones exploring women’s voting rights as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.

…which linked to:

The Pandemic Made Their Women’s Suffrage Play Impossible. But the Show Went on— Virtually — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig

Excerpts:

Then the pandemic hit. Students left Radford and Virginia Tech. Live theater was canceled.

But the class wasn’t.

“Neither of us ever said, ‘Forget it,’” Hood says. “Our students, they all wanted to know, ‘What are we doing?’ We came to them with this insane idea.”

They would create an interactive, online production staged in a virtual Victorian mansion.
…
“Stage performance is different than film or audio. If you just have audio, you only have your voice. Clarity, landing sentences, really paying attention to the structure of a sentence, becomes important,” Nelson says. “Students got a broader sense of the skills and approaches to different mediums—a crash course.”

 

From DSC:
Talk about opportunities for interdisciplinary learning/projects!!!  Playwrights, directors, actors/actresses, set designers, graphic designers, fine artists, web designers and developers, interactivity/interface designers, audio designers, video editors, 3D animators, and more!!!

 

The performance website, “Women and the Vote,” premiered on May 18, 2020

 

Using the TV as a key tool in our learning ecosystems

From DSC:

  • If one doesn’t have access to the Internet, a computer, or any such mobile technology as seen in the image above…could TV become the medium through which one could be educated during this next year of the Coronavirus situation? That is, until we can develop better and more equitable policies, plans, funding, systems, infrastructures, and connectivity for all students!
  • After that, could we see more televisions morph into smart/connected TVs?
  • Could PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other major networks collaborate with the U.S. Department of Education to help us educate all students? 
  • Could the largest internet company of 2030 be an online school as Thomas Frey predicts?

A few years ago, I had hoped that Apple was going to go all-in with their tvOS platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 9: Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the New Apple TV during a Special Event; 9/9/15.

 

Though it’s still early in the game, that really hasn’t happened to the extent that I had hoped. That said, more recently, I was encouraged to see this article from back in July:

LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND LOUISIANA PUBLIC BROADCASTING TO TELEVISE HIGH-QUALITY MATH INSTRUCTION THIS SUMMER

 



 

Let’s ask the employees of PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other networks if they would be willing to work with the U.S. Department of Education to help educate ALL students! Though educational TV is not new, I’m talking about taking things to a *whole* new level.

With that in mind, I created the following graphic:

Let's use television to minimize the learning gaps that will otherwise be experienced by many students this next year!

(One might ask why I used an old television in the above graphic. I was trying to get at the idea that one might not have a lot of resources to work with.)

 
 
 

A few creative ways to use student blogs — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez

Excerpt:

Since those early days the blog has really evolved as a genre: People have taken the basic framework of the blog and used it to build all kinds of useful, interesting things online. This evolution has given the blog limitless potential as a form of writing, and that’s just as true for student writers as it is for everyone else. So if you’re looking for a nice, meaty assignment, one that in previous decades might have been a research paper or an oral presentation, consider assigning a blog instead. It’s not only a highly relevant form of writing, but because it’s done entirely online and worked on over time, it would also lend itself beautifully to remote or hybrid learning.

A blog is part of a larger website, and what makes it unique is that it is dynamic. It changes. It’s regularly updated to provide new material. 

 

Adobe Distance Learning Resources — from edex.adobe.com
Whether your school routinely supports distance learning or is facing unexpected closures, we’ve assembled these resources and learning opportunities to help educators engage remote students through online learning.

  • Talks and Webinars
  • Khan + Create Activities
  • Learn and Create for Social Justice
  • Courses, Articles, and Blogs
  • Go Paperless with your Teaching
  • Higher Ed and K-12 projects that make distance learning engaging
  • Resources to support young learners
 

Join the fight against COVID-19 misinformation — from newslit.org

Excerpt:

This rich collection of guides and resources can help you make a real difference in the battle against dangerous COVID-19 misinformation; it can also inspire and empower your students to enlist in that fight. Doing so [is] one of the most powerful actions we can all take.

Also see:

The Sift Archives -- getting at the truth within the media

 

The News Literacy Project on Twitter

 
 


 

 
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