Group items tagged

There is an understandable interest in deep-learning, after all, who wants their students to have a superficial understanding of the content. Read the marketing of almost any school and you are likely to find some statement about the deep-learning that is achieved as a result of their excellent teaching and learning platform. Likewise, ask any teach about their philosophy of teaching and you will hear how they engage their students with learning that promotes a deep-understanding.

"One of the biggest affordances of technology is towards the enhancement of the concept of personalized learning. Internet and more particularly web 2.0 technologies and mobile apps have provided learners with unprecedented opportunities to learn whenever, wherever, and however they want. At its core, personalized learning is all about tailoring the available resources in order to meet personal learning needs. On a macro educational scale, personalized learning addresses different teaching strategies and instructional methods that focus on the adjustment and leverage of the curricula and teaching materials to help meet a diverse set of students learning needs and interests."

"The single most important skill you will ever learn is in itself an oxymoron. It is dependent on your ability to vanquish procrastination and achieve something today with view to tackling the unknown that comes tomorrow. As I've written previously it requires the drive to tackle the modern world head on: doing nothing has never been so easy. Got a spare few hours? They can disappear as quickly as unlocking your smart phone. For me then this affords opportunity for those who have taught themselves the skill I allude to; to learn how to learn and have the desire to maniacally do so for the rest of your life. The ability to employ autodidacticism in your every day life is the single most valuable skill you can ever acquire and employ. Self-directed learning enables you to learn the skills that you are most passionate about and employ them in innovative way to achieve your goals and ambitions. We no longer need schools, universities or teachers to spoon feed us the information you are paying to acquire. Go out and try finding what interests you and expand your horizons through learning. Schools are broken, they teach you memory skills required to pass exams at the detriment of teaching you what it means to learn."

"We have designed a Mathematical Mindset Guide to help teachers create or strengthen a growth mindset culture. This guide contains five Mathematical Mindset Practices along with links to teaching videos.  The videos all show Jo and Cathy teaching middle school students. There are different stages described in each practice to help capture the journey of a mathematical mindset classroom and the evidence teachers may collect along the way for their own reflection or for discussion with colleagues.  The guide has been designed for teachers to use in the process of self-reflection, or for coaches or administrators to use to encourage a mindset teaching culture. In the interactive version of the guide on this web page, you can click on the arrow buttons in the Expanding descriptors to see a short extract of Jo/Cathy teaching in the ways described. Our goal for the guide is to support a mathematical mindset journey of learning and growth. Teachers can work with the guide individually or in collaboration with others. The guide is intended to be non-judgmental, non-evaluative, and iterative in nature. When using the guide consider the classroom community as a whole rather than the teacher alone. It is also important to note that while the goal of the guide is to communicate all aspects of a mathematical mindset classroom, it is not always possible to find evidence of all practices in one lesson. We encourage teachers, coaches, and administrators to use this guide, and our reflection suggestions iteratively over multiple lessons."

"As educators across the country continue to examine the best ways of teaching and learning, a new lexicon is beginning to emerge that describes one particular approach - deeper learning. The phrase implies a rich learning experience for students that allows them to really dig into a subject and understand it in a way that requires more than just memorizing facts. The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new - great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there's a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. So what defines deeper learning? This group has identified six competencies: mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets."

"Education in Social Studies is needed to achieve levels of civilization that the nation requires of its citizens. Teaching and learning in Social Studies is effective only when it is substantial, authentic, integrated and value-based. Its disciplines are diverse with an expanse of historical, geographical, political, civic and a lot more content. So, learners and educators of Social Studies should possess tools and resources to learn about it and acquire skills in it. Here are some worthy and free tools and resources for Teaching and learning Social Studies, available online:"

Hi impact, curated magazine of articles and professional resources for those interested in e-learning and online teaching. Published by Dennis O'Connor, Program Advisor for the University of Wisconsin Stout E-Learning and Online Teaching Graduate Certificate Program.

"One of the most important skills of the 21st century - web literacy - is often overlooked in the classroom. The ability to read, write and participate online is an indispensable skill for learners, but it's curiously absent from many educators' curricula. At Mozilla, we believe web literacy should be a cornerstone of education. When students can create their own content on the Web, tinker with HTML, and understand the basics of online privacy, they're empowered to do great things. We also believe web literacy is best taught through hands-on, interactive learning. We've just wrapped up Maker Party, Mozilla's annual celebration of teaching and learning the Web through hands-on activities. But Maker Parties can be held anywhere, anytime. And our resources for teaching web literacy are free and open source, always. To kickstart web literacy learning in your classroom - or outside of it - here are six tools and activities from Maker Party for teaching critical 21st-century skills:"

TeachMate.org is a service that helps people who wish to learn things find others who wish to teach them. You may think of it as of a dating service in education. We are also very fond of the idea of teaching for teaching: you can find people who'd love to teach you something in return for you teaching him another thing.

"This is part 2 of a 3-part series on Mobile Teaching. Part 1 was Making The Shift To Mobile-First Teaching.  Mobile teaching is about planning and executing learning through mobile devices. You might want to be notified when a student accesses a quiz or reading you uploaded, or leaves a comment on another student's blog, or shares a self-assessment. Or when a certain number of student's answer a question correctly or incorrectly. Or when a student reaches a goal. This is one approach to mobile teaching. There's also the star of mobile technology, social media. With access to real-time social streams like twitter, or even a closed Google+ Community page, teachers can ask other teachers for resources, facilitate school-to-school collaboration, monitor student-led and hashtag-based discussions, and more."

If you are a parent, teacher, or other adult working with children, this blog aims to help you learn, as much as possible, about helping digital kids grow into thoughtful, collaborative, and savvy digital citizens. The blog's mission is to provide context for adults - defining and clarifying digital world issues, 21st Century learning challenges, and those virtual environments and devices that children take for granted. It's not really about technology anymore. Instead it's about lifelong learning, collaboration, problem solving, and flexibility. Media! Tech! Parenting! examines or reviews three or four items of digital news and information each week, surveying newspapers, blogs, research, and magazines, as well as the media, safety, and educational websites. Blog posts, as often as possible, provide links pointing readers toward the sites or publications covered in blog posts. I am Marti Weston, the principal blogger on Media!Tech!Parenting! In my professional life I focus on learning in a K-12 environment along with all the digital world issues that challenge teachers, students, and parents. With more than 30 years of teaching experience I also support parents by teaching three-five digital education classes, leading question and answer sessions, and maintaining current resources on the school's website. My professional work centers on four areas: Coaching teachers and helping them develop learning environments that are rich with 21st Century collaboration and problem solving. Helping students learn to use digital tools appropriately, understand their digital dossiers, and move - carefully - along the digital citizenship highway. Providing teachers, students and their parents added context that helps them evaluate media and learn more about how media affect their world, Offering parents information about the always changing, fast-paced virtual world and suggesting effective parenting skills and strategies that will help children grow into stro

"Not all apps are created equal. Not all teacher planning and instructional design are created equal. Mash the two, and we're beginning to see the opportunity for some real disparity. In response, we've taken the popular SAMR model and use it as a framework to understand how to better teach with apps. This post started as a look at "app workflow"-the patterns of student and teacher interaction, the movement of learning artifacts, the visibility of quality criteria, assessment results, and so on, but we thought it might be better to start with some concrete examples of the movement from basic technology integration-in this case, apps-to that which redefines the learning process entirely. Below, then, are 21 ways apps can be used to teach-and learn-with varying degrees of ambition, from mere substitution of existing teaching practices, all the way to full-on redefinition of what's possible. (This post also presumes you're familiar with the SAMR model-if not, here's a good primer.)"

"Last Friday, we mentioned how Google's artificial intelligence software DeepMind has the ability to teach itself many things. It can teach itself how to walk, jump and run. Even take professional pictures. Or defeat the world's best player of the Chinese strategy game, Go. The science of teaching computers how to do things is called Deep Learning. And you can now immerse yourself in this world by taking a free, 3-month course on Deep Learning itself. Offered through Udacity, the course is taught by Vincent Vanhoucke, the technical lead in Google's Brain team."

For schools the concept of a learning organisation should make perfect sense, after all learning is our core business, or it should be. Perhaps that almost three decades after Peter Senge identified the importance of learning within organisations the idea is only now gaining traction in schools tells us something about the approach taken to learning and teaching within schools. With an increased focus on the development of professional learning communities as a response to the complex challenges that emerge from a rapidly changing society, it is worth looking at what a learning organisation requires for success.

"Great teaching can be learned. This web site provides tools and resources that support ambitious science instruction at the middle school and high school levels. Ambitious teaching deliberately aims to get students of all racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds to understand science ideas, participate in the discourses of the discipline, and solve authentic problems. We describe 4 core instructional strategies that support this kind of teaching. These "high-leverage" practices make up the Science Learning Framework (below), and have been selected based on extensive research of how young people learn science, on authentic forms of science activity, and how teachers learn to appropriate new practices. "

"How many schools and how many classrooms allow student choice? And, in adult-centered spaces, how often do young people have the opportunity to make important decisions? Our mainstream educational machine is fueled by the idea that adults know best-that adults must impart their knowledge to prepare students for a demanding world. Our responsibility as teachers is to teach students for their own good…a "good" that more and more of us are having difficulty understanding. We teach students addition and multiplication facts because some day they will need to calculate very quickly…a tip at a restaurant or a bill at the grocery store in case their smartphone runs out of batteries. We teach them to write a five paragraph essay on the theme of a book because they will need those writing skills when…writing an argument to dispute a lawsuit. We teach them how to conjugate "to be" in Spanish because it might save their life…at a fruit stand in South America. While we are preparing them for possible situations, should these situations define the entirety of the direction of their education? I propose that we introduce some choice and some unknown into the situation of school. What if we allow students to make choices about what they learn, how they learn, and when they learn? In a way, 1:1 iPad programs are sparking choice whether we're OK with it or not."

"By now, saying that "the iPad is a great tool for customizing the classroom" wouldn't exactly be breaking news. But while this holds true for every student, each of whom learns in their own way, iPads are truly a lifeline for students with learning disabilities and the people who work hand-in-hand with them. For these students, iPads act as a translation, communication, and individualization tool with unrivaled effectiveness. In so doing, these devices reduce frustration, build confidence, and, well, just work in teaching students the skills they need to learn to thrive. Let's take a look at a few more ways iPads are altering the classroom landscape for students with learning disabilities."

"English grammar is a topic that actually frustrates a number of people. Irrespective of learning level or nationality, spelling and grammar error seems to confuse a lot of individuals. And in case anyone has a learning debility such as dyslexia, using accurate grammar looks like a terrible task. Using grammar correctly could be challenging may be not for those who are English native speaker, but surely for those who learn English from scratch. English language and its difficulties can be very much puzzling. Although, a dictionary or software can assist learners but it cannot give accurate answer. In fact, word processing programs are not very much effective in correcting grammar errors completely. Now, the question is how one can improve or nourish their English grammar skill? With the advancement in the technology, there are a number of tools that might help those struggling to improve their grammar. Web technology has actually contributed a lot in this through the ease of access. Today, you can find a number of tools, apps and websites available over the web that helps in learning and improving grammar from scratch. Here is a list of top ten websites for teaching or learning grammar lessons."

"During my early days of teaching coding to sixth graders, my immediate reaction was to feel apologetic for a lesson that was not going smoothly for students. I would rush over and show them exactly what they did wrong. They would fix it, the code would run and there would be satisfied smiles as they moved to the next part of the project. As you can guess, this is not a sustainable or a desirable approach to teach coding. A large part of learning to code is "debugging," fixing mistakes in the code written so that it runs as desired. Debugging is difficult. It requires patience, persistence and an almost scientific approach-skills that are not easy to teach in one class. Debugging is particularly challenging for young students who are driven by the end product, such as a game. They often do not perceive the intermediate debugging stage as a learning opportunity; they just want to fix the bug and move on! "