"It is a short TED Talk video from 2012 by Peter Norvig about his journey of designing and delivering an online course. The aim was to create a learning environment that felt like one on one tuition despite the fact they had over 160 000 enrolments."
"We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture-all good things, without a doubt-made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like.
But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?
School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what "openness" means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video.
These free courses start March 18 (sign up by clicking the "start course" button by Sunday, March 17):
Copyright 4 Educators (US)
Copyright 4 Educators (AUS)
Creative Commons for K-12 Educators
Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond
These free courses are open for you to take at any time:
Get a CC license. Put it on your website
Open Science: An Introduction
Open data for GLAMs
Intro to Openness in Education
A Look at Open Video
Contributing to Wikimedia Commons
Open Detective
"
Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it.
This is how I have always used them with my students. The are amazing creation tools once you get the workflow right.
Most of the apps on the iPads for the lower grades are aimed at creating and expressing ideas. In addition to Explain Everything, they include MyStory, iMovie, Animation HD, Google Earth, Book Creator, Show Me, Brushes, and Comic Life.
"In order to help educators integrate technology effectively, we have compiled a list of technology tools focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. Unlike other lists that promote "cool tools," yet leave teachers wondering about purposeful educational integration, our list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and community-mindedness. We hope you will find our list useful."
Collaboration
Our primary goal at this point is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of puzzles as a learning strategy.
If you are a teacher who would like to experiment with these ideas in your classroom please contact us. We'd love to work with you.
In fact, regardless of who you are, if these ideas seem promising and you'd like to help or try them out, please contact us. We're very open with our work and are interested in collaborating with anyone we can, within the constraints of our very limited resources.
You can reach us at info@puzzleschool.com
Our Mission
The Puzzle School was started with the mission of creating educational environments that will inspire a greater love of learning. We strongly believe that learning is something people truly love to do when it is presented in a way that gives the learner a sense of progress toward their learning goals.
We focus on puzzles as they provide one of the most effective ways of creating a learning environment that is interactive, giving students an immediate sense of progress as they try to "figure out" the material they are learning.
The methods we use at The Puzzle School mimic the learning environments that children thrive in while learning how to walk and talk. This model can best be summed up as hypothesis and error driven learning, where students develop a hypothesis toward solving a problem and are able to test that hypothesis using feedback loops, learning from a success or failure as they move closer to a solution.
This model has been used successfully in thousands of schools around the world, most notably Montessori Schools. We simply want to highlight this method and make it so that all students have access to environments where they can learn in this way. We believe this will encourage a love of learning in all students.
"Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software."