Group items tagged

"Teaching with video games is not what you think. Unless you recognize video games as an increasingly engaging, compelling, and interactive narrative form that is seeking to leapfrog film as the medium of choice not just for teenage boys who like Call of Duty, but, well, you too. And that teaching with them means taking as close a look at the creation and design of the stories and play mechanics and the interaction between story and player as you do the narrative itself. Which can act as a kind of schema to inform how you teach novels, poetry, government or science-as-inquiry."

"Assessing background knowledge is an often misunderstood idea, and subsequently fumbled as a process. Background knowledge is a product of the experiences-academic and otherwise-that a student brings to a lesson. These provide both knowledge in terms of content, as well as schema in terms of analogs students can use to make sense of new ideas."

"It just might be that in a society where information is abundant, thinking habits are more important than knowledge. Somewhere beneath wisdom and above the "things" a student knows. Laws of economics say that scarcity increases value. It's no longer information that's scarce, but rather meaningful response to that information. Thought. And thought has a source-a complex set of processes, background knowledge, and schema that we can, as educators think of as cognitive habits. And if they're habits, well, that means they're probably something we can practice at, doesn't it?"

"There is a difference between personalized learning and differentiation. Differentiation is a kind of personalized instruction, where teachers adjust process, & product, according to a student's readiness, interest, & learning style. Planning of the learning starts with the content, and the content remains the same for all students. This is a school and curriculum-centered approach that attempts to amend the delivery of the content to match the student's needs, strengths, and general readiness. Personalized learning starts with the learner and asks the question, "What does this student need to understand, and how best can that happen?" This is a student-centered approach, and is built around the idea of recognizing the vast differences in students-not just in terms of literacy or schema, but an authentic need to know."