“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,”
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Accessible Books and Periodicals for Readers with Print Disabilities - Bookshare - Acce... - 0 views
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A library of books and periodical for many different ages, for people with print disabilities. Free to educators, students, and schools.
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W&M School of Education - Effective Teaching Practices for Students in Inclus... - 1 views
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This is a good, very short article on how to co-teach with learners with disabilities. But the advice is good on creating groups and managing your classroom, regardless of whether you have students with disabilites. Article by S. Land.
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shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 05 Sep 12
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@Ignatia Webs: Designing #mLearning for people with #disabilities or learning difficulties - 1 views
ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/...mlearning-for-people-with.html
assistive_devices handicapped disability wikis teachers pedagogy teacher-training VSL
shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 05 Sep 12
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Ignatia suggests using a private wiki because of text-to-speech options, and secure social media-driven learning locations, such as a movie archive on Facebook. Subtitle options may be difficult with, e.g., YouTube, if you have an accent, but it can be done with an audio recorder (though it is labor intensive). This might be a good blog to follow further.
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Accessibility - Chrome Toolbox - 0 views
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This is a list of links with very brief notes on what the various applications do for those with learning disabilities or other accessibility issues.
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shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 23 Jul 11
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How to Use MakeBeliefsComix.com to help Children with Special Needs - 0 views
www.makebeliefscomix.com/Special-Needs
accessibility digital_images online_lessons young_learners very_young_learners teachers VSL
shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 23 Jul 11
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This site for creating your own comics now has a disabled students section.
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shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 28 Aug 11
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Study Guides and Strategies - 3 views
www.studygs.net
study_skills critical_thinking reading writing pedagogy foreign_language adult_learners VSL
shared by TESOL CALL-IS on 28 Aug 11
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100s of guides to learning and studying in dozens of languages. Especially good for writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. Also has some materials for students with learning disabilities, e.g., ADHD. Mainly native-speaker oriented.
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Through Your Child's Eyes Tool | Learning Disabilities - 1 views
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"It's one thing to read about learning and attention issues. It's another thing to see them through your child's eyes. Experience firsthand how frustrating it is when your hand won't write what your brain is telling it to. Or how hard it is to complete a simple task when you have trouble focusing. Use these unique simulations and videos to better understand your child's world." Simulations for teachers and parents to experience learning difficulties.
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Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: “It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”
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schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward
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tough financial choices. In Kyrene, for example, even as technology spending has grown, the rest of the district’s budget has shrunk, leading to bigger classes and fewer periods of music, art and physical education.
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The district leaders’ position is that technology has inspired students and helped them grow, but that there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again. “My gut is telling me we’ve had growth,” said David K. Schauer, the superintendent here. “But we have to have some measure that is valid, and we don’t have that.”
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Since then, the ambitions of those who champion educational technology have grown — from merely equipping schools with computers and instructional software, to putting technology at the center of the classroom and building the teaching around it.
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. The district’s pitch was based not on the idea that test scores would rise, but that technology represented the future.
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For instance, in the Maine math study, it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training.
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“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
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Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the research did not justify big investments by districts. “There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period,” he said. “There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.”
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“In places where we’ve had a large implementing of technology and scores are flat, I see that as great,” she said. “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
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It was something Ms. Furman doubted would have happened if the students had been using computers. “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.” But, she said, computers play an important role in helping students get their ideas down more easily, edit their work so they can see instant improvement, and share it with the class. She uses a document camera to display a student’s paper at the front of the room for others to dissect. Ms. Furman said the creative and editing tools, by inspiring students to make quick improvements to their writing, pay dividends in the form of higher-quality work. Last year, 14 of her students were chosen as finalists in a statewide essay contest that asked them how literature had affected their lives. “I was running down the hall, weeping, saying, ‘Get these students together. We need to tell them they’ve won!’ ”
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For him, the best educational uses of computers are those that have no good digital equivalent. As examples, he suggests using digital sensors in a science class to help students observe chemical or physical changes, or using multimedia tools to reach disabled children.
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engagement is a “fluffy term” that can slide past critical analysis. And Professor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty,
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Engagement can also mean sustained interest over a long term, e.g., Tiny Zoo.
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“There is very little valid and reliable research that shows the engagement causes or leads to higher academic achievement,” he said.
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computers can distract and not instruct.
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Student learns the game, not the concept. But this is "skills-based," not a thinking game. Technology mis-applied?
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t Xavier is just shooting every target in sight. Over and over. Periodically, the game gives him a message: “Try again.” He tries again. “Even if he doesn’t get it right, it’s getting him to think quicker,” says the teacher, Ms. Asta. She leans down next to him: “Six plus one is seven. Click here.” She helps him shoot the right target. “See, you shot him.”
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building a blog to write about Shakespeare’
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These are activities tat can't be measured with a standardized test. Can standardized tests encompass thinking skills beyond the most modest level?
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classmates used a video camera to film a skit about Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point speech during World War I
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Professor Cuban at Stanford said research showed that student performance did not improve significantly until classes fell under roughly 15 students, and did not get much worse unless they rose above 30. At the same time, he says bigger classes can frustrate teachers, making it hard to attract and retain talented ones.
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How much incremental improvement is made by having one student more or less? Ed research can't determine that, but it can be felt palpably in a classroom.
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he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
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. Sales of computer software to schools for classroom use were $1.89 billion in 2010. Spending on hardware is more difficult to measure, researchers say, but some put the figure at five times that amount.
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“Do we really need technology to learn?”
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10 Things I've Learned (So Far) from Making a Meta-MOOC - 0 views
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Technology has a way of making people lose their marbles — both the hype and the hysteria we saw a year ago were ridiculous. It is good that society in general is hitting the pause button. Is there a need for online education? Absolutely. Are MOOCs the best way? Probably not in most situations, but possibly in some, and, potentially, in a future iteration, massive learning possibilities well might offer something to those otherwise excluded from higher education (by reasons of cost, time, location, disability, or other impediments).
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Also, in the flipped classroom model, there is no cost saving; in fact, there is more individual attention. The MOOC video doesn’t save money since, we know, it requires all the human and technological apparatus beyond the video in order to be effective. A professor has many functions in a university beyond giving a lecture — including research, training future graduate students, advising, and running the university, teaching specialized advance courses, and moving fields of knowledge forward.
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My face-to-face students will learn about the history and future of higher education partly by serving as “community wranglers” each week in the MOOC, their main effort being to transform the static videos into participatory conversations.
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I’ve been humbled all over again by the innovation, ingenuity, and dedication of teachers — to their field, to their subject matter, and to anonymous students worldwide. My favorite is Professor Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania who teaches ModPo (Modern and Contemporary American Poetry) as a seminar. Each week students, onsite and online, discuss a poem in real time. There are abundant office hours, discussion leaders, and even a phone number you can call to discuss your interpretations of the week’s poem. ModPo students are so loyal that, when Al gave a talk at Duke, several of his students drove in from two and three states away to be able to testify to how much they cherished the opportunity to talk about poetry together online. Difficult contemporary poets who had maybe 200 readers before now have thousands of passionate fans worldwide.
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Interestingly, MOOCs turn out to be a great advertisement for the humanities too. There was a time when people assumed MOOC participants would only be interested in technical or vocational training. Surprise! It turns out people want to learn about culture, history, philosophy, social issues of all kinds. Even in those non-US countries where there is no tradition of liberal arts or general education, people are clamoring to both general and highly specialized liberal arts courses.
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First let’s talk about the MOOC makers, the professors. Once the glamor goes away, why would anyone make a MOOC? I cannot speak for anyone else — since it is clear that there is wide variation in how profs are paid to design MOOCs — so let me just tell you my arrangement. I was offered $10,000 to create and teach a MOOC. Given the amount of time I’ve spent over the last seven months and that I anticipate once the MOOC begins, that’s less than minimum wage. I do this as an overload; it in no way changes my Duke salary or job requirement. More to the point, I will not be seeing a penny of that stipend. It’s in a special account that goes to the TAs for salary, to travel for the assistants to go to conferences for their own professional development, for travel to make parts of the MOOC that we’ve filmed at other locations, for equipment, and so forth. If I weren’t learning so much and enjoying it so much or if it weren’t entirely voluntary (no one put me up to this!), it would be a rip off. I have control over whether my course is run again or whether anyone else could use it.
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Interestingly, since MOOCs, I have heard more faculty members — senior and junior — talking about the quality of teaching and learning than I have ever heard before in my career.
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9. The best use of MOOCs may not be to deliver uniform content massively but to create communities and networks of passionate learners galvanized around a particular topic of shared interest. To my mind, the potential for thousands of people to work together in local and distributed learning communities is very exciting. In a world where news has devolved into grandstanding, badgering, hyperbole, accusation, and sometimes even falsehood, I love the greater public good of intelligent, thoughtful, accurate, reliable content on deep and important subjects — whether algebra, genomics, Buddhist scripture, ethics, cryptography, classical music composition, or parallel programming (to list just a few offerings coming up on the Coursera platform). It is a huge public good when millions and millions of people worldwide want to be more informed, educated, trained, or simply inspired.
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The “In our meta-MOOC” seems to me to be an over complication, and is in fact describing the original MOOC (now referred to as cMOOC) based around concepts of Connectivism (Downes & Siemens) itself drawing on Communities of Practice theory of learning (Wenger). This work was underway in 2008 http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/mooc-resurgence-of-community-in-online.html