Skip to main content

Home/ NYSCATE/ Group items tagged effective

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Steve Ransom

When kids are skilled navigators of our networked world | NetFamilyNews.org - 1 views

  • Even when we talk about “digital citizenship,” we talk more about behavior or “Netiquette” than agency, which is essential to the participation of any citizen in participatory democracy.
  • I think that, as a society, we’ve been entirely too focused on taking agency away from children, representing them more as potential victims and passive consumers than as stakeholders in their own wellbeing and that of their peers and communities and active participants in user-driven media
  • as we stop focusing on blocking media and monitoring and controlling children and start helping them develop the skills of effective navigation and participation – they will not only be safer now, while still children, they will also be safer, more effective participants in participatory media and culture all their lives, long after they’ve left home and high school.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the goal is helping them develop the skills of effective participation in this connected world
  •  
    Yes!!! "...the goal is helping them develop the skills of effective participation in this connected world..."
Steve Ransom

The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools | P... - 0 views

  •  
    Asked to assess their students' performance on nine specific writing skills, teachers tended to rate their students "good" or "fair" as opposed to "excellent" or "very good." Students received the best ratings on their ability to "effectively organize and structure writing assignments" and their ability to "understand and consider multiple viewpoints on a particular topic or issue." Teachers gave students the lowest ratings when it comes to "navigating issues of fair use and copyright in composition" and "reading and digesting long or complicated texts."
Steve Ransom

Peter T. Coleman, PhD: The Consequences of Our Games - 0 views

  • "At a time when games are becoming ever more realistic, reality is becoming more gamelike."
  • The problem is not that games are inconsistent with many aspects of our lives; it is that they provide a limited and skewed lens on the world
  • It stresses the strategic interdependent interests of humans and assumes that in games there is always a rational choice which is the best counter-choice to your opponent's.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Seeing more and more aspects of our lives as games to win through maximization has a sort of self-perpetuating effect with perverse consequences, not the least of which is the impairment of what Diesing terms social rationality; the cherishing of unique relationships, personal connectedness, cooperative functioning, solidarity and sentiment.
  • If winning efficiently is the goal, then the rules (ethical, moral, legal, and spiritual), are essentially obstacles to game.
  • In our schools, competition for access to elite preschools, for grades, for social status, in sports, over positions of leadership, and for admission to exclusive colleges transforms one of our most basic institutions for fostering community, ethics and learning into competitive, individualistic corporate training-grounds. In these settings, the importance of competitive sports becomes paramount, for both financial and training purposes, and the artistry of cheating (see this year's Stuyvesant High School cheating scandal) and rule-bending (see Joe Paterno) revered. Such intense competition encourages the professionalization of parenting -- through tutors, highly-educated nannies, prep courses, and professional training camps (such as investment camps). You can imagine the deleterious effects these trends have on the ethos of care and moral responsibility in our families and schools, a critical buffer against bullying and violence in the lives of our children.
  • We become hyper-connected through technologies, boasting our number of "friends" on Facebook, and have less and less intimacy.
  • We choose friends with benefits or Internet porn over romantic relationships as they are less messy, more efficient.
  • Life is a race and we are losing.
  •  
    A great piece worth the time to reflect on. Mindfulness needs to be practiced frequently.
Steve Ransom

5 websites to find amazing historic and vintage photographs - 2 views

  •  
    Sometimes it's much more effective providing students with sites like these than have them wallow through the default Google search to find similar images.
Steve Ransom

Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learnin... - 0 views

  • It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential downside
  • 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15 percent say they send 11 or more texts in a single class period.
  • Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake while learnin
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once
  • “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources.
  • They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”
  • the assignment takes longer to complete
  • The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention
  • memory of what they’re working on will be impaired if their attention is divided
  • This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated,
  • “even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.”
  • leads to more mistakes
  • texting and using Facebook—in class and while doing homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs.
  • “There’s a definite possibility that we are raising a generation that is learning more shallowly than young people in the past,” he says. “The depth of their processing of information is considerably less, because of all the distractions available to them as they learn.”
  • academic and even professional achievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital temptations while learning
  • kids who were better able to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and test scores but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.
  • hose who were interrupted more often scored worse on a test of the lecture’s content; more interestingly, those who responded to the experimenters’ texts right away scored significantly worse than those participants who waited to reply until the lecture was over.
  • students who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation period had lower grade-point averages than those who didn’t go on the site
  • “Young people’s technology use is really about quelling anxiety,” he contends. “They don’t want to miss out.
  • Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that must be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their best.
  • ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”
  • Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cellphones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.
  •  
    Great piece on the deleterious effects of multitasking on learning and the importance of teaching mindfulness and attention literacy in a highly digital and connected landscape.
Steve Ransom

as the school year begins: a better way to handle homework - 0 views

  • “Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning.
  • Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate
  • “retrieval practice,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.
  • When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency
  • interleaving
Steve Ransom

http://www.alfiekohn.org/f_news/fullnews.php?fn_id=8 - 1 views

  • or even call for more rigorous or competitive grading and testing.
  • The point may not have been to produce a better outcome for students at all but to make sure they don’t “get away with” something.  If you do something bad, something bad must be done to you -- regardless of the effect.
  •  
    I don't often tweet a "MUST READ", but this is one of them. Easy to read... harder to self-assess and implement.
Steve Ransom

Facebook Makes Us Sadder And Less Satisfied, Study Finds : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

  • social comparison.
  • "When you're on a site like Facebook, you get lots of posts about what people are doing. That sets up social comparison — you maybe feel your life is not as full and rich as those people you see on Facebook," he says.
  • "It suggests that when you are engaging in social interactions a lot, you're more aware of what others are doing and, consequently, you might be more sensitized about what's happening on Facebook and comparing that to your own life,"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The prescription for Facebook despair is less Facebook. Researchers found that face-to-face or phone interaction — those outmoded, analog ways of communication — had the opposite effect. Direct interactions with other human beings led people to feel better.
  •  
    Facebook Makes Us Sadder And Less Satisfied, Study Finds
Steve Ransom

Presentation Zen: How to make a good (or bad) presentation - 0 views

  •  
    Great lesson idea for students of all ages...
Steve Ransom

Net safety's '3 alarmist assumptions': Researcher - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org - 0 views

  • The problems that turn up in the digital environment are not unique to it but rather “extensions of social interactions or media consumption problems that cut across environments” and are better understood in the context of a child’s life as a whole. He points to “several strands of research” that show support for this counter hypothesis and poses this question for further investigation: “Should we define problems as being unique to a technology, like cyber-bullying or cyber-stalking?”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Digitally dualistic perspective critique
  • most ISE is not evidence-based and “not based on established effectiveness principles
  •  
    This series of posts (follow the links) is really worth your time. The current fear and danger narrative impedes adults and leaders from really empowering kids in a new, digitally-augmented reality.
1 - 10 of 10
Showing 20 items per page