Group items tagged

"I cannot count the number of times I've heard a colleague advise a student to do what makes them happy. Yet I wonder often how many teachers are happy in their jobs. In a 2012 survey, job satisfaction was at a 25-year low, teacher turnover is alarmingly high and costly, and morale is constantly under assault by social and political commentary. But who needs statistics? Just look around during a staff meeting to see the weight educators carry. In an effort to counter these patterns, stakeholders need to build systems of support for each other. It's even better when those support systems are grassroots efforts instead of mandated. One way I've done this for the past several years is through what I call the Hump Day Bump, a compilation of staff-to-staff notes of gratitude and compliments (bumps) emailed to staff each Wednesday."

"Finally, science has given its approval to one of the literary world's most cherished ideas about the value of literature. Even though the study only measured short-term benefits, it was taken to stand for a wider truth about the morally improving effects of the stuff, the "Finally, science has given its approval to one of the literary world's most cherished ideas about the value of literature. Even though the study only measured short-term benefits, it was taken to stand for a wider truth about the morally improving effects of the stuff, the notion that it makes you a better, more empathic person."

"The call for mathematical play is beyond some desired learning objective. Combined with the rise of mental illness and anxiety among children/adolescents, and the championing of play by Pediatricians and Child Psychologists, play in mathematics must be seen as a moral imperative."

"It should be abundantly clear to anyone with experience around classrooms, teachers or students (which is to say almost all of us), that teaching is a highly emotional craft, loaded with possibility and expectation, importance and scale. It's troubling when the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future says that 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. And even worse, this turnover is also impacting the whole public education machine - learning, teacher education, teacher training, funding, public perception, and so on - in a dizzying cause-effect pattern stuck on repeat. Fixing this issue is an illusion, as it's not a single issue but rather a product of countless factors. However, there are six ways we can address it here and now."

""I'm going to practice radical empathy now," proclaimed Toshi, a 40-something male executive, to a small group at workshop offered by frog in partnership with Fast Company at SXSW this week.  "Hi, my name is Maddison and I'm a teenage girl," he says. From there he describes an experience of belonging that Maddison (a young professional woman sitting across from him) had felt at summer camp. The most compelling part of his narrative was not that he was retelling the story from her perspective, but the fact that she was sitting facing him, their knees touching while she smiled and nodded. Once he was done, it was her turn to do the same for him as a way to introduce each other to the others in the group. Maddison and Toshi had never met before this morning, but their connection even during those few minutes was undeniable. Ditto for the other two people in the group."

The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a 'moral panic'. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate 'digital natives' and their implications for education.

"I am back on my soapbox… …because I continue to see great things happening in classrooms, but get blank stares, when I ask, if these things are being shared beyond the school building. …because I watch as administrators feel the need to "protect" their faculty from "one more thing to do". …because I continue to hear fear of transparency, competition, privacy and technology skills and tech phobia.  Setting up my soapbox to raise awareness of the "moral imperative of sharing" for teachers (Dean Shareski) goes back to his keynote in 2010 at the K-12 Online Conference. Since then I have stepped on that soapbox via my blog and at conferences advocating for the IMPORTANCE and NECESSITY of sharing."

"This past Friday, my wife (@sfryer) and I facilitated a full-day, hands-on workshop about ways to use iPads in the classroom with students to "show what they know with media." 164 teachers participated in the workshop, which was held in two adjacent ballrooms of the Alumni Center at Kansas State University. The event, iCamp iPad Day, was hosted by the College of Education at Kansas State (@ksucollegeofed) and organized by Cyndi Danner Kuhn (@cyndidannerkuhn). The workshop included many elements of iPad Media Camp (@iPadMediaCamp), a 3 day workshop I've offered in the summertime the past four years. During the planning stages for "iCamp iPad Day," Shelly and I discussed the different sharing options we wanted to model for participants and encourage them to use. We decided to use the term "INSIDE SHARING" for the private sharing we'd do during the workshop using SeeSaw. We decided to use the term "OUTSIDE SHARING" for public sharing on Twitter using our #iCampKSU hashtag and other open websites. In this post, I'll explain why both inside and outside digital sharing are important, and how we can use these terms with students, teachers, parents and others to advocate for SHARING AS A MORAL IMPERATIVE (hat tip to Dean Shareski @shareski)."

"At the end of Lord of the Flies, there is a section titled "Notes on the Lord of the Flies," in which William Golding says, "The theme [of the novel] is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." I asked students to design a thematic art gallery that explored the truth about human nature. Because art often serves as a mirror reflecting people, society and life, I thought this would challenge students to confront the realities of human nature-the good and the bad. It also allowed students to contrast this theme in the text with this same theme in art. Although I used this project to explore the theme of human nature, it can be done to encourage students to think deeply about any theme they are studying."

"The good thing about my school is that we do have teacher leaders who will take ownership of initiatives and run with them with little more than moral and budgetary support from me. Our Beebots are used widely in our Early Years classes with a couple of teachers taking the lead - and we have had our kids use them for learning Vietnamese! But Spheros in our school has been my own journey. I have added to the original 15 Spheros that I bought in March, bringing two Sphero SPRKs and four Ollies in as additions. I just want to reflect on what else I have learned since the last post when I was still just working with my Digital Leaders. This term, I started to work with some classes within my own building. I am line manager for four classroom teachers and my office is based in that building. I am also the self appointed Sphero maintenance person - I keep them secure, charge them prior to use and kept tabs on the apps needed on the building's squad of 10 iPads. Just prior to starting with the first class, I saw a tweet about an app called Tickle that uses a Scratch style interface to program a number of connected robots including both Sphero and Ollie. It is easier to use than MacroLab and as I was about to introduce programming robots to Year 3 and 4 students, it was the perfect tool to use to set some simple programming challenges."

Can we measure happiness and should this be a standard for measuring our lives and countries?

"Describing yourself as 'a social media addict' doesn't usually inspire concern from other people. In fact, it's frequently included in bio descriptions on Twitter and Instagram. Decorate your LinkedIn profile with such a claim and you may even find yourself receiving interest from media and publishing companies searching for a savvy digital native. But imagine if, one day, it's not an accolade or joke at all - but a psychiatrist's diagnosis? Social media addiction has been a much-flouted term lately; maybe it's because it's January and users are looking to be more active and spend less time online, or maybe that's because social media can have a negative impact on our mental well-being. But a growing body of research is seriously considering whether problematic and excessive social media usage could be pathological and, in turn, designated as a mental health disorder. "