Group items tagged

"I used to think that I needed to help teachers to use tools, but now I think I need to help teachers meet learning goals." "I used to think that I needed to guide teachers through new technologies, but now I think I need to create safe spaces for them to play and explore." "I used to think that my workshops should be named after new technologies, but now I think they should be named after learning goals." "I used to think that I needed to keep my teachers up to date on new technologies, but I now I think I need to give them a framework to think about how to use technology in their teaching that can adapt to new technologies."

Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. What is Think, Pair, Share? Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. Rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response, Think-Pair-Share encourages a high degree of pupil response and can help keep students on task. What is its purpose? * Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses. * Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson. * Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained. * When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage. * Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class. * Think-Pair-Share is easy to use on the spur of the moment. * Easy to use in large classes. How can I do it? * With students seated in teams of 4, have them number them from 1 to 4. * Announce a discussion topic or problem to solve. (Example: Which room in our school is larg

One of the best, most concise explanations of why the antipathy to technology in education.~JB The conflict between computers and schools is really a conflict between educational paradigms. The traditional and dominant paradigm is rooted in the book and the pedagogy is one of transmission. Teachers, who have presumably read more books than their students and listened to more scholarly lectures, transmit what they've learned to their students in a similar fashion. The students who do best within this system are those who can capture the transmission - as unfiltered as possible - and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. Within this model, digital technology can provide improvements, but they are cosmetic. Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don't understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction. Within this system of learning, (Inquiry based and student centered) there is real value in having the widest range of technological tools for not only consuming information in all its multimodal forms, but for creatively demonstrating what one has learned.

Reasons for blogging. "There seems to be a growing divide between teachers who share their content, and teachers who don't. In a recent blog post, I gave seven reasons why teachers should blog. It was subsequently expanded to 10 good reasons by the contributions from readers - which is actually an eleventh reason why teachers should blog - you get back such great comments, suggestions, arguments and advice, "

Video that might appeal to K-12 teachers. Teachers talk about how it gives the students control over what they are doing. With access from any computer, students are able to work on their assignments virtually anywhere. Whether they are out from school, on vacation or working from home, they can stay up-to-date with assignments and group projects.

For the teacher who wants to create a website, here are ten good platforms to try.

"If you are a teacher interested in checking your students' work for copied material, you can use the list below where you can find the Top 10 FREE Plagiarism Detection Tools for Teachers."

Jaron Lanier's article in the NY times. --- Adding to an already rich life, my father decided in middle age to become an elementary-school teacher in a working-class neighborhood in New Mexico. To this day, people who run grocery stores and work on construction sites, and who are now in late middle age themselves, come out when I'm visiting to tell me how Mr. Lanier changed their lives. Go up to any adult with a good life, no matter what his or her station, and ask if a teacher made a difference, and you'll always see a face light up. The human element, a magical connection, is at the heart of successful education, and you can't bottle it.

video of teacher drawing as he explains US constitution

it is misleading to suggests that all, or even most, aspects of providing an education should, or could, be placed into the hands of [teachers] Historically, it has been impractical to break up the roles of the teacher. You need a certain scale even to have a separate person assigned as a librarian or an audio-visual coordinator. You need a much greater scale, not to mention much better coordination, to have separate people assigned as lecturers, coaches, theorizers and evaluators. Yet relatively few of these roles need to be performed in person, and most of them scale pretty well. This means that with improved information and communications technologies we can begin to rethink how we've organized labor in education. This is in fact what is happening online, at least, outside the circles of formal education

provides a solution to a problem that a lot of teachers run into when they want their students to use a new web tool. Let's say there's a new service that I want my students to use but my students don't have email addresses that they can use to register for that service. In that case I can quickly generate Gmail addresses for my students by using the Gmail+1 hack.

While I was revisiting the topic of the 21st century pedagogy which I have covered in several posts here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, I come across this awesome graph created by our colleague Andrew Churches. I couldn't find better and more comprehensive graphic than the one below. Andrew did a fantastic work in capturing most of the concepts that make 21st century pedagogy. I know it could have been richer in information if  definitions or explanatory snippets  were added to some concepts ( like for instance information literacy, media fluency, technology fluency ) but still that does not lesson from its importance as a starting point to ponder on the topic of 21st century pedagogy. For those of you who are not familiar with the terminology included in this graphic please refer back to the posts I have published here a while ago particularly : 14 technology concepts every teacher should know about, and 6 Learning concepts for the 21st century teacher.

"Nearpod enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students' devices. It combines presentation, engagement and real-time assessment tools into one integrated solution."

Education both online and hybridized has benefited greatly from the contributions of the course management system Blackboard (and, more recently, Angel). No matter the subject, teachers have found ways to use the program to make their classes run so much smoother. But maneuvering the interface can seem a little intimidating at first, and that's where advice from several different educational institutions comes in handy! Beyond the basics, they illustrate some of the best streamlining tips and tricks that Blackboard has to offer. However, please keep in mind that such an ever-changing technology may render many of these tidbits obsolete - or only viable in certain versions. Should any of the ideas presented here prove incompatible, contact the school in question's tech support/computer services center for more personalized instruction.

Why Collaborate? The most important (and most obvious) reason for the facilitator and teacher to collaborate is to improve student learning. Collaboration allows the two teachers to combine strengths, share responsibilities, and learn from each other, bringing the best of both their experiences together to create an improved student learning environment.

Many teachers go to school each day, teach their students and leave. If they're struggling with how to teach a lesson that will engage their students, they might ask for advice from the teacher down the hall, but a lot of times, they struggle alone.  That's not the case for educators who have built a network of people who share resources, advice and techniques, whether they call it a personal learning network or something else. Here's why educators should start a personal learning network, or PLN.

PBS LearningMedia is a dynamic platform offering the best of public media content and produced specifically for PreK-16 teachers. With free access to over 14,000 high-quality resources tied to national standards, teachers can download, save and share exactly what they need for an inspired classroom experience

Dean Shareski talked about this in his article entitled, "How to Make Better Teachers", and the one word he used for his answer was "blogging". 

10 ways to use youtube in the classroom. YouTube channel for teachers.

Feature of the software include: The ability to import PowerPoint slide shows; Interactive questions, which lets students answer inquiries by the teacher via laptop or mobile device; A variety of question types; Teacher previews of interactive activity results in real time; Bookmarking of slides to be reviewed later; Recording and archiving of student activity during class;