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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
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  • “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.
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    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

Study: Texting Erodes Writing Skills? RU Kidding Me? - Pacific Standard: The Science of... - 0 views

  • Regarding classwork, text-speak was considered moderately appropriate for use in lecture notes, but strictly off limits for assignments or exams.
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    "the current study provides real-world evidence to address past media concerns that textism use is somehow damaging English literacy." At least among university students, they found, it's just not happening. So NTW (not to worry).
Steve Ransom

Slicereader - Easy reading for Mac - 0 views

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    A great, free text chunking app for those who need textual information processing accommodations or those with short attention spans or distractability... Mac-only
Steve Ransom

talking word processor | Free Resources from the Net for EVERY Learner - 0 views

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    WordTalk is a powerful free tool that ought to be on every computer in every school where Microsoft Word is installed on a Windows computer! This is a tool that has the potential to benefit ALL learners, especially any who struggle with reading or writing. I'm adding WordTalk to my list of Extra Special Learning Resourses.  WordTalk is a high quality free add-in that provides convenient, versatile and customizable text-to-speech for any document written or opened in Microsoft Word. It works in every version of MS Word, from Word 97 through Word 2010; and it's available to run on every version of Windows from Windows 98 through Windows 7.
Steve Ransom

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

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    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

Rewordify.com: Understand what you read - 1 views

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    An interesting "converter" to simplify reading level of a passage that is pasted in to the text box. It doesn't always do an accurate job of simplifying, but it could still be a useful tool for those who may need such an accommodation.
Steve Ransom

Challenging 'Internet safety' as a subject to be taught - NetFamilyNews.org |... - 0 views

  • The Internet is embedded in and encompasses virtually all of human life, positive, negative and neutral.
  • All that happens online is much more symptomatic (sometimes an early warning system) than a cause of social problems that we’ve been working on addressing since long before we had the Internet.
  • Internet safety education teaches kids to hide negative or deviant behavior rather than correct it. Do you see a problem with that? I do.
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  • What needs to be taught is skills, not just information, and certainly not all the inaccurate information so much “Internet safety education” has disseminated over nearly two decades.
  • “properties” (“persistence,” “searchability,” “replicability,” and “scalability”) and “dynamics” (“invisible audiences,” “collapsed contexts,” and “the blurring of public and private”) – and now some of those, e.g., “persistence,” are changing with the arrival of “ephemeral,” or disappearing, digital media in services
  • media is both social and digital.
  • full, healthy participation in participatory media, culture and society.
  • what protects children online is what protects them offline.
  • life skills, literacies and safeguards that are both internal – respect for self and others, resilience, empathy, and a strong inner guidance system (sometimes called a moral compass) – and external, such as good modeling, parenting and teaching by caring adults, peer mentoring, instruction in digital and media literacy, social-emotional learning, protective technology used thoughtfully, family and school rules, well-designed digital environments, and well-established laws against discrimination, sexual harassment, bullying, and crime.
  • teach the skills of today’s very social digital media: digital literacy, media literacy and social literacy, which together address both media-specific risk reduction and proficiency in participatory media use.
  • ACCESS
  • ANALYZE
  • CREATE
  • REFLECT
  • “ACT:
  • These are the competencies that students need to navigate participatory media and culture.
  • providing access and opportunities to analyze, create, reflect and act as much with digital media as with older media right in core academic classes, schools are affording them the skills, community, and self-actualization that increase safety (resilience) as well as efficacy in and out of media. This is the real “Internet safety [or competency]” that needs to be taught in schools.
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    We need to get this and push back against the flawed Internet Safety/Danger narrative if we are truly going to prepare students as healthy and wise citizens. "what protects children online is what protects them offline."
Steve Ransom

Blendspace - Create lessons with digital content in 5 minutes - 0 views

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    A great and easy tool to organize/package learning content for students. Allows adding all sorts of content, including your own text and simply quizzes. You can create "classes", too.
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