Teaching Outside the Box

Title: Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains (3rd Edition)

Author: Louanne Johnson

ISBN: 1119089271 | 2015 | 352 pages

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Bring a fresh perspective to your classroom
Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition integrates practical strategies and engaging advice for new and experienced teachers. Whether you are preparing for your first year of teaching or have been working in the classroom for decades, this conversational book provides you with answers to the essential questions that you face as an educator—how to engage students, encourage self-directed learning, differentiate instruction, and create dynamic lessons that nurture critical thinking and strategic problem solving. This updated edition includes expanded material that touches on Project-Based Learning, brain-based teaching, creating smooth transitions, integrating Common Core into the classroom, and other key subject areas. Questions for reflection at the end of each chapter help you leverage this resource in book groups, professional development courses, and in both undergraduate and graduate classes.
The art of teaching is one that evolves with changing educational standards and best practices; to be the most effective teacher possible, daily self-reflection is critical, along with a need to see things from a different perspective. This means we must step outside the box—moving our focus from ‘fixing’ the students when a problem arises to helping a teacher improve his or her practice.

Improve classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale
Explore strategies for arranging your classroom, engaging students, and avoiding the misbehavior cycle
Create an environment where students learn and teachers teach
Leverage insight from teachers and students</li>
Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition is an essential resource for teachers at any stage in their careers.

UNBORED Games

Title: UNBORED Games: Serious Fun for Everyone

Author: Elizabeth Foy Larsen, Joshua Glenn
2014 | ISBN: 162040706X | English | 176 pages

UNBORED Games has all the smarts, creativity, and DIY spirit of the original UNBORED (“It’s a book! It’s a guide! It’s a way of life!” -Los Angeles Magazine), but with a laser-like focus on the activities we do for pure fun: to while away a rainy day, to test our skills and stretch our imaginations-games. There are more than seventy games here, 50 of them all new, plus many more recommendations, and they cover the full gambit, from old-fashioned favorites to today’s high-tech games. The book offers a gold mine of creative, constructive fun: intricate clapping games, bike rodeo, Google Earth challenges, croquet golf, capture the flag, and the best ever apps to play with Grandma, to name only a handful. Gaming is a whole culture for kids to explore, and the book will be complete with gaming history and interviews with awesome game designers. The lessons here: all games can be self-customized, or hacked. You can even make up your own games. Some could even change the world.

The original UNBORED has taken its place as a much beloved, distinctly contemporary family brand. UNBORED Games extends the franchise — to be followed by UNBORED Adventure — in a new handy flexibound format, illustrated in full color throughout. Soon, there will be a whole shelf of serious fun the whole family can enjoy indoors, outdoors, online and offline.

Title: UNBORED Adventure: 70 Seriously Fun Activities for Kids and Their Families

Authors: Joshua Glenn, Elizabeth Foy Larsen

English | 2015 | ISBN: 1632860961 | 176 pages

UNBORED Adventure has all the smarts, innovation, and free-wheeling spirit of the original UNBORED and its 2014 spinoff, UNBORED Games, but with a fresh focus on encouraging kids to break out of their techno-passivity and explore the world around them–whether that’s a backyard, a downtown, or a forest. Combining old-fashioned favorites with today’s high-tech possibilities, the book offers a goldmine of creative, constructive activities that kids can do on their own or with their families. From camouflage techniques, survival skills, and cloudspotting advice to instructions on how to build an upcycled kite or raft, to using apps to navigate and explore, it’s all here–along with comics that dive into the secret history of everything from bicycling to women explorers. A fun corrective to our over-anxious parenting culture, UNBORED Adventure encourages kids to become more independent and resilient, to solve problems and ask questions, and to engage with both their community and natural environment.

Innovations in Smart Learning

Title: Innovations in Smart Learning

Authors: Elvira Popescu et al

English | ISBN: 9811024189 | 2016 | 252 pages

The book aims to provide an archival forum for researchers, academics, practitioners, and industry professionals interested and/or engaged in the reform of the ways of teaching and learning through advancing current learning environments towards smart learning environments. It facilitates opportunities for discussions and constructive dialogue among various stakeholders on the limitations of existing learning environments, need for reform, innovative uses of emerging pedagogical approaches and technologies, and sharing and promotion of best practices, leading to the evolution, design and implementation of smart learning environments. The focus of the contributions in this book is on the interplay of pedagogy, technology and their fusion towards the advancement of smart learning environments. Various components of this interplay include but are not limited to:
● Pedagogy: learning paradigms, assessment paradigms, social factors, policy;
● Technology: emerging technologies, innovative uses of mature technologies, adoption, usability, standards, and emerging/new technological paradigms (open educational resources, cloud computing, etc.);
● Fusion of pedagogy and technology: transformation of curriculum, transformation of teaching behavior, transformation of administration, best practices of infusion, piloting of new ideas.

See also this post: Smart Education

Problem-based Learning into the Future

Title: Problem-based Learning into the Future: Imagining an Agile PBL Ecology for Learning

Authors: Megan Yih ChynA.Kek, Henk Huijser

English | ISBN: 9811024529 | 2016 | 216 pages | PDF | 2 MB

In this book we respond to a higher education environment that is on the verge of profound changes by imagining an evolving and agile problem-based learning ecology for learning. The goal of doing so is to humanise university education by pursuing innovative approaches to student learning, teaching, curricula, assessment, and professional learning, and to employ interdisciplinary methods that go far beyond institutional walls and include student development and support, curriculum sustainability, research and the scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as administration and leadership.

An agile problem-based learning (PBL) ecology for learning deliberately blurs the boundaries between disciplines, between students and teachers, between students and employers, between employers and teachers, between academics and professional staff, between formal and informal learning, and between teaching and research. It is based on the recognition that all of these elements are interconnected and constantly evolving, rather than being discrete and static.

Throughout this book, our central argument is that there is no single person who is responsible for educating students. Rather, it is everyone’s responsibility – teachers, students, employers, administrators, and wider social networks, inside and outside of the university. Agile PBL is about making connections, rather than erecting barriers.

In summary, this book is not about maintaining comfort zones, but rather about becoming comfortable with discomfort. The actual implementation is beyond the scope of this book and we envisage that changing perceptions towards this vision will itself be a mammoth task. However, we believe that the alternative of leaving things as they are would ultimately prove untenable, and more distressingly, would leave a generation of students afraid to think, feel, and act for themselves, let alone being able to face the challenges of the 21st century.