Group items tagged

For example, Mel Riddile points out that when one conditions on various measures of poverty, instead of trailing other nations, the U.S. actually comes out on top! He concludes that "when it comes to school improvement, it's poverty not stupid." Poverty causes educational deficiency.

or example, Mel Riddile points out that when one conditions on various measures of poverty, instead of trailing other nations, the U.S. actually comes out on top! He concludes that "when it comes to school improvement, it's poverty not stupid." Poverty causes educational deficienc

It's bad writing.  It's always been bad writing.  With the Common Core Standards designed to shift the way we teach students to think, read, and write, this outdated writing tradition must end.  If you're teaching it--stop it.  If your son, daughter, niece, or nephew (or a young person you care about) is learning it--prepare to engage with the teacher to end  it.

the majority of studies pertaining to learning styles involved participants in secondary or post-secondary education

helping teachers recognize the incredibly diverse needs students bring into the classroom

Students write 4 statements; 3 of the statements are truths about themselves or some aspect of their lives, and 1 of the statements is a lie. Students read their list out loud in class and the rest of the class try to guess the lie. This activity ALWAYS works and is a great way for you to get a glimpse of your students as individuals. The process works both ways, i.e., you should also participate in the activity.

This can be used in two different ways. In my classes, I have students list 10 books they would take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. Students share their lists with each other. (I sometimes use this as one of the first posts to my online class blog instead of in the classroom.) As a group activity, I ask students to gather in groups of 4 or 5 and come up with a list of 5 items they would take with them if they were marooned (the group as a whole can only bring 5 items). Groups read their lists out loud and justify their choices.

by its nature informal, emotional, full of humorous quips, and in a word, "chatty" (see Exhibit 5 for examples of chats). Given the one-line limits to chat text, interruptions abound. Chatters move on while someone else responds to something said a few lines back. Although the chat is hardly recognizable as an academic discussion, it can help generate a vital engagement with the text that students then transfer to the message board

  E-Pedagogy: Does e-learning require a new pedagogy?  5 The emergence of e-learning  As part of the technological revolution, the use of e-learning, or blended learning, isincreasing. This is particularly true of Higher Education, which offers most programmespartly or wholly online. In the future, e-learning is likely to be more widely used in thetertiary and school sectors. Another driver for e-learning is life-long learning, whichrequires on-going training and re-training of the adult workforce.In many cases, e-learning is delivered through a virtual learning environment (VLE),which is a custom built environment designed for online learning. VLEs, such as  Blackboard and Moodle , typically provide all of the software tools required for onlinelearning such as communication and file sharing facilities. These environments are oftenmodelled around the traditional campus, providing ‘virtual staff rooms’ and ‘onlinecommon rooms’. E-portfolios provide the digital equivalent to the traditional paperportfolio; these typically provide online storage for a range of media types (such asdrawings, photos and videos). Dedicated e-assessment systems, such as Questionmark ,facilitate large-scale online testing, providing many of the question types that arefamiliar to teachers.Some academics have pointed out the potential of e-learning to improve current practice.Garrison and Anderson (2003) write:“E-learning has significantpotential to alter the nature of theteaching and learning transaction.In fact, it has caused us to face upto some of the current deficienciesof higher education, such as largelecturers, while providing somepossible solutions or ways tomitigate these shortcomings. Seenas part of pedagogical solution, e-learning becomes an opportunity toexamine and live up to the ideals of the educational transactiondescribed previously.” New learning opportunities The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionallyfocussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learningmaterial to be their prime role. But it has been argued that the traditional skill of contentcreation is redundant in the information-rich learning environment. Some of this contentis very high quality, even world class, and certainly superior to a hurriedly producedhandout of the type often used by busy teachers.It has been suggested that the contemporary teacher should be more “guide on the side”than “sage on the stage”. The ready availability of information makes  facilitation moreimportant than direction . The pedagogic issue is not too little information but too much:the contempora

changing learning landscape poses fundamental epistemological questions about thenature of knowledge and how it is acquired. Dede (2008) writes: “In the Classicalperspective, knowledge consists of accurate interrelationships among facts, based onunbiased research that produces compelling evidence about systematic causes […]Epistemologically, a single right answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon […]The epistemology that leads to validity of knowledge in Web 2.0 media such as Wikipedia  is peer review from people seen, by the community of contributors, as having unbiasedperspectives. Expertise involves understanding disputes in detail and proposingsyntheses that are widely accepted by the community

hatever new theory of learning emerges in thenext decade, it will likelybuild upon thesepedagogie