Group items tagged

what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties.

So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.

Between 1933-1941, thirty high schools in the country and over 300 universities and colleges joined the experiment sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.

A focus of ACTFL 2011 will be on how language educators can prepare students for living, working, and learning in a global environment.

While technology is embedded in all 21st century classroom activities, this strand focuses on specific cutting edge technologies that promote language development and cultural understanding including social networking and global communities.

Building the language capacity of the U.S. is an ongoing challenge that requires effective policies, local and national advocacy efforts, and matching U.S. student performance against international benchmarks. Developing effective teachers and effective teacher leaders and mentors is also a critical component of our profession.

Some adventurous professors have used Twitter as a teaching tool for at least a few years. At a presentation at Educause in 2009, W. Gardner Campbell, director of the academy of teaching and learning at Baylor University, extolled the virtues of allowing students to pose questions to the professor and each other — an important part of the thinking and learning process — without having to raise their hands to do so immediately and aloud. And in November, a group of professors published a scientific paper suggesting that bringing Twitter into the learning process might boost student engagement and performance.

But while Lomicka and her tech-forward peers are not advocating that every college go the way of Chapel Hill, they are finding out that some relatively novel teaching technologies that are used by academics of all stripes, such as Twitter and iTunes U, are particularly useful for teaching languages.

At Emory University, language instructional content is far and away the biggest export of its public repository on iTunes U, where visitors from around the world have downloaded more than 10 million files since Emory opened the site in 2007.

First and foremost, schools want our kids to be knowers, not learners. You can see that in nearly every aspect of our system, which remains content-driven both in pedagogy and assessment.

Arguably, if you have the skills to do it, you could literally build your own education by creating your own curriculum, your own classroom, and your own assessments.

Being able to design your own education, however, isn’t easy by any stretch. In fact, it’s a highly complex intellectual and emotional task.

for the most part, knowledge created by academics is placed mostly in outlets that can be accessed only by “the knowledge elite.”

I have become so used to publishing directly to the Web that I felt shackled by the constraints of the print medium.

open access and peer-review are NOT mutually exclusive

I have found that in both my traditional physical classrooms and online environments, the chances of successful outcomes are multiplied when every person in the group makes a commitment to active participation in helping others learn.

When a sufficient number of people jump in and start contributing and building on one another's contributions, it becomes clear to all that it's not just about the teacher's performance and the student's ability to complete assignments. It's about our joint effort to make the whole of our encounter more valuable than just the sum of our individual learning.

I type roles on the whiteboard and show how to use the whiteboard tools to enter, format and move around elements. Roles include searchers, chat summarizers, session summarizers, mindmap leaders, session bloggers. I ask co-learners to write their own names on the whiteboard next to the roles they want to take, show them how to create break-out rooms to coordinate their collaborations, and ask the summarizers to feed their output to the bloggers, who take responsibility for posting a reflective summary of the session later

Mr. Somade told me recently that "the general idea is that if I don't have to come to class, I don't want to come to class—and technology is giving students more and more reason not to come."

In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely—or seriously reshapes them—might produce a very effective new form of college.

much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do.

We promote educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions and fulfil their potential.

Nearly all of our undergraduate courses have no formal entry requirements, either prior qualifications or experience.

We believe that it is the qualifications with which our students leave, rather than those with which they enter, that count.

You can tag items of special interest

your students will be able to sort by those tags. They will also be able to add their own personal tags.

You can see how many times each reserve item was accessed and which student accessed it.

Teachers who respect students Understand the power of beliefs in shaping their practice. They rid themselves of any covert persuasion they may have that kids who are like them in race, economic status, language, beliefs, or motivation are somehow better or smarter than those who are unlike them. Believe their work can make previously unimpressive students shine—and can raise the ceilings of possibility for impressive students. Teach students how to grow academically and personally. Enlist students' partnership in creating a classroom that dignifies each person within it.

Teachers who respect students choose their words and tone carefully. They consciously Listen to students—and hear them. Use positive humor, not sarcasm. Provide corrective feedback in ways that foster student effort. Acknowledge student growth. Use their words to defuse difficult situations.

The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them. In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive:

Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall. Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own. 

Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) is an approach to teaching that consists of the proactive design and use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learners including students with disabilities.

One of the important aspects of UD is that its inclusive elements benefit all users, not just those with disabilities.

By providing faculty with a framework and tools for designing inclusive college instruction, the dialogue surrounding college students with disabilities changes from a focus on compliance, accommodations, and nondiscrimination to an emphasis on teaching and learning.

Offering learners choices can develop self-determination, pride in accomplishment, and increase the degree to which they feel connected to their learning. However, it is important to note that individuals differ in how much and what kind of choices they prefer to have. It is therefore not enough to simply provide choice. The right kind of choice and level of independence must be optimized to ensure engagement.

In an educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit interest is to highlight the utility and relevance, of learning and to demonstrate that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of course, to assume that all learners will find the same activities or information equally relevant or valuable to their goals. To recruit all learners equally, it is critical to provide options that optimize what is relevant, valuable, and meaningful to the learner.

Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be:  Personalized and contextualized to learners’ lives  Culturally relevant and responsive  Socially relevant Age and ability appropriate  Appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender groups