Group items tagged

"In Portland, you can put a bird on something and just call it art." -- Portlandia, Episode 2 Social media usage at the K-12 level has exploded over recent years, with some 40% of teachers saying they use blogs or wikis in the classroom.

Australian research confirms teacher knowledge re parent participation influencing student outcomes

Flipped classroom

Great concept. His idea that publishing is a higher order thinking skill even than creating and that if students are publishing products and ideas, this will demand great rigour and learning makes a great deal of sense. Highly informative and short and sweet learning video.

Insight: While one can be present in a traditional classroom by sitting there, online courses require some kind of action that involves thinking.

Hi Brainy. Good post on lurking. I "lurk" when I listen to radio, download podcasts, watch TV, and read the newspaper. Works for me. A live session where "presence" and group dynamics is central to the activity is a bit different (if the name of everyone "in the room" is displayed, lurkers are visible to others, even if they say nothing). In live MOOC sessions, most people lurk most of the time. That doesn't mean they are not engaged, they may simply feel that sitting at the back of the room suits them better. Mark McGuire

Hello Brainy Smurf, Guess I've been lurking in #cck12, but I don't see it as much different from face-to-face classrom behaviour. Not everyone comments no matter what the forum--eliciting participation is part of the "dark art" of facilitation, no?

Hi, Sandra, thanks for weighing in. I agree that lurking online is essentially the same as a classroom, it just might not be as obvious since the online facilitator (if there is one) can't see body language or eye contact. The more I play around in moocs (currently in my 3rd, 4th and 5th at the moment), the more the idea of eliciting participation (or 'engaging' participants) is starting to make me cringe. I'm becoming more confident that learning doesn't need to invite engagement as explicitly as we think it does. Participants will decide how much/little to interact for a million different reasons on any given day (e.g., fatigue, boredom, illness, distraction, reflection, synthesizing, doodling) and I think we should let them own those choices.

Muammar Ghaddafi. Saddam Hussain. Barak Obama. Fukishima. Sub-Prime Lending. What do these topics have in common? They are all important subjects that our students should be learning about, yet they probably don't appear in most textbooks in our classrooms. The moment a textbook rolls off the printing press, it begins to morph into a useless paperweight.

Great article. E-books have so much potential - for increased accessibility, lower costs, portability, currency, etc. etc.

I tried to leave this on the site , not intended for the group.....In order to reach our students, we need to think like "Digital Natives", not "Digital Immigrants" (thank you Marc Prensky). ...i think you have valid points and this can be a useful tool but why use these terms, Natives and Immigrants. I often find these terms can be used negatively and could be percieved as such. Although this may not be your intention saying you are now a Digital Native vs a Digital Immigrant to me sounds , negative. Its just a thought , but i do appreciate your take on text books and the usefulness of utilizing this tool to keep up to date.

Learning management systems such as Moodle have many advantages over classroom and email based writing programmes. One such area is in corrective feedback and in this article I'm going to explore some of the possibilities for providing written corrective feedback for EFL and ESL learners.