Group items tagged

"Culture Teaching Strategies: Science, Math, and Fan Fiction: What's Worth Learning? What happens when you allow kids to figure out their own path to learning by giving them access to the online community? That's one of the thoughtful questions Richard Halverson, co-author of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, brings up in this interview at the CYTSE conference."

"Everyone thinks that Project-Based Learning has something to do with "authentic" learning. But not everyone agrees what this means. Take this quick quiz. "

"Education has to focus on learning how to learn - metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating. "

"It's no longer a given that if a child spends twelve years in school, he or she will learn enough to succeed in higher education or a career. To address this issue, some educators are taking bold measures to help students. Traditionally, classes move forward, covering the curriculum according to schedule. Students are taught the same materials at the same pace. If a student fails to learn a skill, he or she accepts that result and moves on to the next topic with the rest of the class."

"A performance task is any learning activity or assessment that asks students to perform to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and proficiency. Performance tasks yield a tangible product and/or performance that serve as evidence of learning. Unlike a selected-response item (e.g., multiple-choice or matching) that asks students to select from given alternatives, a performance task presents a situation that calls for learners to apply their learning in context. Performance tasks are routinely used in certain disciplines, such as visual and performing arts, physical education, and career-technology where performance is the natural focus of instruction. However, such tasks can (and should) be used in every subject area and at all grade levels."

"The end of the school year presents us with an opportunity for reflection at Envision Schools. We take a final measure of students' progress throughout the school year, celebrate the many Envision graduates that will be heading off to college in the fall, and consider how we can incorporate those lessons into improving our own work to best enable, encourage, and ensure student learning."

"With the rise of MOOCs, Edupunks, and other radically transformative notations of school, I hear a lot of talk about building capacities for independent learning in our students. Where will this come from, I ask, if we do not re-awaken the desire and capacity for learning on our own within all of our teachers?"

"Thanks to Amy Mayer of FriEdTechnology for this fantastic comparison describing the key differences between "doing projects" and project-based learning! This, my friends, is exactly what I have been trying so ineptly to explain to educators at my own school. There's a BIG difference, and one that completely changes how the classroom is run and what students take out of it."

""Design your own shoe." That's what high school students thought they were signing up to do when they volunteered for an immersive experience in design thinking. Truth be told, the course description was not quite accurate. Shoe design "is really a Trojan horse for solving problems in a new way," acknowledged Chad Faber, director of the Knight Family Scholars Program at Catlin Gabel School, an independent K-12 school in Portland, Oregon. He facilitated the four-day, hands-on learning experience along with Greg Bamford (@gregbamford) from the Leading is Learning collaborative in Seattle. Several more Catlin Gabel staffers took part to learn by doing, building a cohort of teachers with design chops. "

"In the fall of 2006, Clarence R. Edwards Middle School ("the Edwards" as it is known locally within Boston Public Schools) became one of the first schools in the state of Massachusetts to implement the Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative. The reasons why were simple: we were not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and we wanted to make significant academic gains with our students. As it turned out, making our school day longer was one of the best things we could have done to help reform our school model and improve student outcomes. Our statewide exam scores, student enrollment, daily student attendance rate, community and family engagement, and time for team teaching/collaboration all improved as a result of ELT. "

"he Someday/Monday dichotomy captures one of the core challenges in teacher professional development around education technology. On the one hand, deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday). For technology to make a real difference in student learning, it can't just be an add-on. On the other hand, teachers need to start somewhere (Monday), and one of the easiest ways for teachers to get experience with emerging tools is to play and experiment in lightweight ways: to use technology as an add-on. Teachers need to imagine a new future-to build towards Someday-and teachers also need new activities and strategies to try out on Monday. Both pathways are important to teacher growth and meaningful, sustained changes in teaching and learning."

"In the spirt of practicing what we teach and learning what we practice, we at AmplifiEDUcation are committed to documenting our Twitter chats using a variety of tools and lenses. For the October 14, 2015 chat, "Documenting for Learning" we've chosen to use the lens of curation. As I shared last night, I have been practicing using infographics as a documentation tool, so I decided to use that tool to document the chat."

"This is how evaluation and reporting works in the student-centered classroom that I like to call a Results Only Learning Environment (ROLE). There is no room for numbers, percentages or letter grades in a ROLE. Instead, students collaborate with each other and with their teacher, in order to demonstrate mastery of various objectives contained in yearlong projects. Learning is a conversation built on a system of summary, explanation, redirection and resubmission - something all stakeholders in the classroom come to know simply as SE2R. If a report card is required, the student and teacher agree on what that final grade should be, based on how all feedback was handled throughout a grading period."

"At the end of a project-based learning (PBL) experience, students typically share what they have learned or discovered with an audience. Depending on the project, students might publish their work online, make presentations at a public event, or pitch their ideas to a panel of judges. For veteran PBL teacher Don Wettrick, "nothing is better than a project that gets community buy-in." Connecting students with an authentic audience is key, he says, to driving engagement and helping students relate what they are learning to the real world. "My top two goals are to help students find great opportunities [for real-world problem solving], and then cheerlead them to a great audience." "

"XW1W uses today's instant technologies to share answers to the same question across the world once a week. XW1W is a simple, social way for students to learn about real life in other cultures from real kids all across the world. By simply "hashtagging" Twitter or blog responses to a weekly question about daily life, students can share and learn about other cultures from their international peers."

"Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology - whether that's computers, television, mobile phones, or video games - and usually more than one at a time. That's a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours. But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week."

"The report argues "that for technology to reach its greatest potential it needs to be better integrated into an instructional system we call the 'closed loop.'" The closed loop system suggested in the report includes creating learning objectives, developing curricula and instructional strategies, delivering instruction, embedding ongoing assessment, providing appropriate interventions, tracking outcomes and learning, then feeding the results back into creating new learning objectives. Technology must be integrated into closed-loop instruction to reach its full potential, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum."

"3.Feelings of belonging help retention: Most students perform better and are more satisfied in their online learning experience if the institution cultivates positive working and social relations among learners, says the report. To build a stronger sense of belonging or relatedness to students part of online learning, the researchers recommend Thornberg's four metaphors enabling engagement in online spaces: 1) Caves, where distance learners can find time to reflect and come in to contact with themselves; 2) Campfires, or formal environments where students have the opportunity to listen to stories from which they construct knowledge from those with expertise and wisdom; 3) Watering Holes, or informal environments where students gather at a central source to discuss information and create meaning with their peers; and 4) Mountain Tops,"

Children in the Mehlville district may have the chance in two years to attend an elementary school with an alternative curriculum - one that uses real-world problems to help students learn and without the restraints grade levels sometimes place on learning. It would be a school that parents would choose, and there would be no admission requirements. If more children apply than there are seats available, the district would hold a lottery. That kind of competition for classroom seats has largely been limited regionally to the city of St. Louis. There, district magnet and choice schools, along with independent charter schools, offer language immersion education and schooling that focuses on science, engineering, technology and math. Mehlville Superintendent Chris Gaines received preliminary approval from the district's School Board last week to move ahead with a "Choice School of Innovation" that would be the only of its kind in St. Louis County.

"This year, most of my classes are maxed out at 34. When there are this many students in each class, the idea of conducting classroom conferences can be onerous and may even feel daunting at best. But there are ways to ensure class time is indeed spent talking to students about their learning with minimal out of class commitments. Much of how it will work is about planning. As with most important learning experiences in school, the organization has a lot to do with the success of the project and if we treat a round of conferences like a project, we can set up a timeline to efficiently speak with every child about his/her learning."