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Great examples for KSC - Open for Learning Challenges Try one and share your response for others to learn from!

"A Pinterest for Learning" Welcome to the future of learning. Learnist is organizing all of the wisdom of mankind in text, images, video and audio, curated by fellow humans for your learning convenience. Enjoy

Cognitive psychologists use the term metacognition to describe our ability to assess our own skills, knowledge, or learning. That ability affects how well and how long students study-which, of course, affects how much and how deeply they learn.

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.

Power to the People! Jennifer Ditkoff, Keene State College Give students the power to guide their own education. Using Wallwisher an instructor gains insight on student needs and opens up a classroom discussion. After library instruction short tutorials are posted on Voicethread. Students experiment with the concepts, actively participating in assessing their own research efforts, as well as their classmates. Students have control over their own learning experience and can revisit the course materials throughout the semester to add content, ask questions, and receive feedback. Diigo is used rather than a static handout. Students provide links to helpful materials for their peers, highlighting the community aspect of ongoing education. Jennifer Ditkoff has worked in academic, public and medical libraries, learning every type of classification system, including the elusive Cutter system. When she is not troubleshooting electronic resources, she teaches information literacy, staffs the reference desk, and shows up early to committee meetings. She enjoys learning about new technologies.

boyd, danah. 2009. "Living and Learning with Social Media." Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. State College, PA: April 18.

The Truth about Learning Styles (Linda Nilson, Clemson University)

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.

Based upon proven research and informed by practical experience, this Blended Learning Toolkit will offer guidance, examples, professional development, and other resources to help you prepare your own blended learning courses and programs.

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.

The mission of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship - and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed - by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats. We are committed first and foremost to teaching and learning, and intend that the journal itself - both in process and in product - provide opportunities to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practice.

He says 'effect sizes' are much the best way of answering the question 'what has the greatest influence on student learning'. An effect-size of 1.0 is typically associated with: * advancing learner's achievement by one year, or improving the rate of learning by 50%, * a correlation between some variable (e.g., amount of homework) and achievement of approximately .50. * average students receiving that treatment exceeding 84% of students not receiving that treatment. * A two grade leap in GCSE, e.g. from a C to an A grade. An effect size of 1.0 is clearly enormous! (It is defined as an increase of one standard deviation)

"The important point here is that investment in new or adapted physical classroom space should be driven by decisions to change pedagogy/teaching methods. This will mean bringing together academics, IT support staff, instructional designers and staff from facilities, as well as architects and furniture suppliers. Second, I strongly believe in the statement that we shape our environments, and our environments shape us. Providing instructors with a flexible, well-designed learning environment is likely to encourage major changes in their teaching; stuffing them into rectangular boxes with rows of desks will do the opposite."

Introverts. Who are they and how do we ensure they thrive in active learning classrooms? If you have ever come to the midterm point of the semester and graded a stellar paper of a student whose name you don't recognize and who has never raised her hand in class, you may have just identified an introvert in your classroom. In every classroom there are a significant proportion of students who would identify themselves as introverts, if they understood what that term meant. Originally conceived by Carl Jung, the concepts of introversion and extroversion have been helpful ways of understanding basic differences in human temperament (Jung, 1970). Often confused with shyness, introversion is an aspect of personality which affects how we engage in social activity and our preferences for learning. Unlike extroverts, who typically are energized by social interaction, introverts can find connecting with large groups of unfamiliar people exhausting. They may have excellent social skills and enjoy meaningful friendships, but are quite happy in their own company.

Supported Web Browsers Blackboard is committed to supporting the two most recent versions of client software for each major release of Blackboard Learn™ when possible. These levels of support may change depending on contractual obligations or lack of support from vendors. The following tables list the supported operating systems and browsers for use with Blackboard Learn Release 9.

"Simply putting traditional courses online could have negative consequences, especially for lower-performing and language minority students."

Next Generation Learning Challenges means to Dramatically increase college readiness and completion by fostering the development and adoption of technologies that enable more flexible, high-quality learning experiences for all students.

Web 2.0 has been, during the last years, one of the most fashionable words for a whole range of evolutions regarding the Internet.Although it was identified by the current analysts as the key technology for the next decade, the actors from the educational fielddo not really know what Web 2.0 means. Since the author started to explore and use Web 2.0 technologies in her owndevelopment/improvement, she has been intrigued by their potential and, especially, by the possibility of integrating them ineducation and in particular in the teaching activity.The purpose of this paper is both to promote scholarly inquiry about the need of a new type a pedagogy (Web 2.0 based) and thedevelopment / adoption of best practice in teaching and learning with web 2.0 in higher education (HE).The article main objectives are: * to introduce theoretical aspects of using Web 2.0 technologies in higher education* to present models of integrating Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, learning and assessment* to identify the potential benefits of these technologies as well as to highlight some of the problematic issues /barriers encountered, surrounding the pedagogical use of Web 2.0 in higher education* to propose an agenda for future research, and to develop pedagogy 2.0 scenarios for HE sector. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

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.