Bill edited Doing Work that Matters - Rochester MN

KQED Do Now Prompts:Every Friday, San Francisco public television station KQED publishes a prompt designed to give students opportunities to form opinions and engage in public discourse about controversial issues. Each prompt is drawn from current events and paired with resources that can be used by readers to build background knowledge. Exploring KQED prompts can help you spot a cause your kids will care about. Or consider using KQED prompts as the starting point for regular conversations in your classroom about issues that matter beyond the schoolhouse walls. Doing work that matters starts with awareness, and KQED Do Now prompts are easy ways to build that awareness.
DoSomething:The DoSomething.org team has one simple goal—to help people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five make social change. Visitors to the site can sign up to participate in projects ranging from collecting jeans for homeless youth to developing digital training sessions for senior citizens. Participants receive ideas and resources to support their efforts and can see examples of similar projects accomplished by students in other cities. While DoSomething.org specifically targets high school students, elementary and middle school teachers can use the site to discover interesting project ideas that can help their students make a difference in the local community.
Crellin Elementary School:For the teachers and students at Crellin Elementary, learning starts by identifying problems worth solving in the local community. "I'm not going to ask them to memorize those multiplication tables because I have nothing else to do," writes principal Dana McCauley. "It's because later on, when we're calculating how big that composter needs to be, they'll need to know the area we're going to be using, and they'll to do it quickly. So it's about applying the knowledge." Learn more about Crellin’s work in this bit on the Edutopia website.
Spread Positivity Projects:For Chase Mielke, one of the primary purposes for public schooling is to give students chances to make an impact on the world around them. “If an end goal of education is to create skilled, altruistic citizens,” he writes,” why wait until after a student's post-secondary training?” To develop these skilled, altruistic citizens, Chase gives the kids in his classroom chances to create Spreading Positivity Projects. Small groups work together to make the world a better place by driving change on the local, national or global level. Learn more about the work Chase is doing in this bit on the Edutopia website.
Design for Change: Design for Change is an organization that promotes Design Thinking -- a process for solving meaningful problems that puts an emphasis on empathy, iteration and revision -- as a tool for changing classrooms. Their goal is a simple one: To empower young people to learn 21st Century skills, to build character and to do good. After creating a free account, teachers can find guidance on how to implement design thinking projects and processes in their classrooms. More importantly, teachers can find examples of classrooms who have used design thinking to give their students chances to change the world for the better.

from Digitally Speaking
http://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/Doing%20Work%20that%20Matters%20-%20Rochester%20MN