Group items tagged

"Blended Learning: Personalizing Education for Students"

Over time buildings are getting smarter with innovative new material. Traditional partitioning methods like Aluminium, Wooden, Brick or cement are not able to cope up with demanding requirement for new modern spaces. There is a growing need for a new material to create trendy looking partitions with high strength and quick installation time. Pronto's walls and partitions panels is an answer to such demanding material.

The time between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next is a season for reflection and renewal. It's important to celebrate student successes and recall challenging times when things just didn't go as planned. This season between school years is an opportunity to plan for new and modified instructional approaches to increase learner success. What follows are suggested readings and resources for developing and deepening your practice to meet the diverse needs of all learners. The readings are grouped from easy starts to deeper complex implementation. Like Steve Jobs, feel free to choose what captures your passion.

"Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite. There were the neurosurgeons who worried about the "cut-and-paste chart mentality" that their students exhibited, missing crucial details because they failed to delve deeply enough into any one case. And there were, of course, the English teachers who lamented that no one wanted to read Henry James anymore. As the letters continued to pour in, Wolf experienced a growing realization: in the seven years it had taken her to research and write her account, reading had changed profoundly-and the ramifications could be felt far beyond English departments and libraries. She called the rude awakening her "Rip van Winkle moment," and decided that it was important enough to warrant another book. What was going on with these students and professionals? Was the digital format to blame for their superficial approaches, or was something else at work?"

Really interesting information on being a better online reader. The author suggests the following: "Maybe the decline of deep reading isn't due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)"

In a time where much of the debate around education is linked to performance on national and international assessments such as PISA, TIMMS, PIRLS and in Australia, NAPLAN combined with calls for market-driven reforms there is a danger that a climate of competition between schools and systems will grow.

"Managing Reputations on Social Sites"

Introduce your young students to ICT and research skills via a WebQuest on Garbage - which is a growing concern for our planet.

"The five elements of a perfect blog post "

March/April 2009 Learning & Leading with Technology

Learning & Leading with Technology | March/April 2009

Points to ponder