To name a few, the national curriculum now includes coding, schools should now be teaching character, or ‘grit’ alongside subjects,
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4 Big EdTech Trends Spotted At BETT 2014 - Edudemic - 0 views
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social learning - the use of peer review through social-media like sites where students can learn from and help each other through peer-review.
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Find, Filter, Apply – Students no longer need to know everything, just how to find it, how to filter to get the most relevant info, and to apply it.
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Sonic Pi teaches coding through music. Students basically build a synthesiser, thus accidentally learn concepts such as logic, sequencing, iteration and conditionals while doing something creative and imaginative.
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These social learning activities do not just aid learning through student motivation, they can also help to build the social skills or ‘grit’ that UK schools are now compelled to teach. When interacting online students learn that it is important to emphasise positives, celebrate success, to be constructive and also learn how to take criticism thus they learn conscientiousness, teamwork and resilience.
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How Does Project-Based Learning Work? | Edutopia - 0 views
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Have in mind what materials and resources will be accessible to the students. Next, students will need assistance in managing their time -- a definite life skill. Finally, have multiple means for assessing your students' completion of the project: Did the students master the content? Were they able to apply their new knowledge and skills? Many educators involve their students in developing these rubrics
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Here are steps for implementing PBL, which are detailed below: Start with the Essential Question Design a Plan for the Project Create a Schedule Monitor the Students and the Progress of the Project Assess the Outcome Evaluate the Experience
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Involve the students in planning; they will feel ownership of the project when they are actively involved in decision making.
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What time allotment will be given to the project? Will this project be conducted during the entire school day or during dedicated blocks of time? How many days will be devoted to the project?
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Also, allow students to go in new directions, but guide them when they appear to digress from the project.
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Facilitate the process and the love of learning. Teach the students how to work collaboratively. Designate fluid roles for group members. Have students choose their primary roles, but assume responsibility and interactivity for all group roles. Remind them that every part of the process belongs to each individual and needs each student's total involvement. Provide resources and guidance. Assess the process by creating team and project rubrics.
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Team rubrics state the expectations of each team member: Watch the group dynamics. How well are the members participating? How engaged are they in the process? Assess the outcome. Project rubrics, on the other hand, ask these questions: What is required for project completion? What is the final product: A document? A multimedia presentation? A poster? A combination of products? What does a good report, multimedia presentation, poster, or other product look like? Make the requirements clear to the students so they can all meet with success.
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Discovery Education (13) offers a great resource; a collection of assessment rubrics and graphic organizers (14) that may be helpful to you as you create your own.
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When a student's assessment and the teacher's assessment don't agree, schedule a student-teacher conference to let the student explain in more detail his or her understanding of the content and justify the outcome.
Create and Share Multimedia Lessons - Educreations Interactive Whiteboard - 0 views
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Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia - 0 views
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A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
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Great projects, on the other hand, are opportunities for learners and teachers to collaborate with those around them.
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Making loves the process and allows the teacher to move fluidly between levels and subjects. When I designed a middle school level Forces and Motion unit, NGSS MS-PS2 dovetails nicely with CCSS Mathmatical Practice.
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As such, my students and I might spend weeks asking ourselves inquiry-driven questions and checking out online resources (such as those listed below) as brain fodder. Collaboratively, we narrow down our choices. I use my voice in the process as sparingly as possible, but I do guide my learners to projects which reflect our subject area, my own expertise, and my strengths as an educator to projects which can be completed in the time allotted. Lastly, we determine if we have the right resources and tools. It's a messy process, but the results can be incredible.
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If you're looking for more about Making, check out these resources: Makerspace.com Makered.org DesignMakeTeach.com Makezine.com Instructables.com #makered & #STEM on Twitter Inventtolearn.com
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shared by Jill Bergeron on 26 Mar 15
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Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding | Edutopia - 0 views
www.edutopia.org/...-for-understanding-todd-finley
formative assessment differentiation assessment understanding
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What strategy can double student learning gains? According to 250 empirical studies, the answer is formative assessment, defined by Bill Younglove as "the frequent, interactive checking of student progress and understanding in order to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately."
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Alternative formative assessment (AFA) strategies can be as simple (and important) as checking the oil in your car -- hence the name "dipsticks." They're especially effective when students are given tactical feedback, immediately followed by time to practice the skill.
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New to Alternative Formative Assessment? Start Slow
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having learners use their own vernacular to articulate why they are stuck can be profoundly useful for identifying where to target support.
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The biggest benefit of integrating AFAs into your practice is that students will internalize the habit of monitoring their understanding and adjusting accordingly.
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shared by Jill Bergeron on 22 Jan 13
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Why Integrate Technology into the Curriculum?: The Reasons Are Many | Edutopia - 0 views
www.edutopia.org/ology-integration-introduction
technology_integration edutopia technology integration
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Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. In particular, it must support four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts.
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Effective technology integration is achieved when the use of technology is routine and transparent and when technology supports curricular goals.
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Through projects, students acquire and refine their analysis and problem-solving skills as they work individually and in teams to find, process, and synthesize information they've found online.
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And, as an added benefit, with technology tools and a project-learning approach, students are more likely to stay engaged and on task, reducing behavioral problems in the classroom.
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Technology also changes the way teachers teach, offering educators effective ways to reach different types of learners and assess student understanding through multiple means. It also enhances the relationship between teacher and student. When technology is effectively integrated into subject areas, teachers grow into roles of adviser, content expert, and coach. Technology helps make teaching and learning more meaningful and fun.
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"Focus on Kids, Not Ourselves": Guiding Principle At Design 39 Campus | The Future of K... - 3 views
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Mornings are for “Integrated Learning Time”; no rigid boundaries of subject, time, or space. The pod teachers decide when and how the students will move, and the teams focus relentlessly on how students will learn content through big, cross-disciplinary themes. The afternoons are split between “Deep Dives”, physical activity-based “Minds in Motion”, “Exploration” opportunities for students to follow their passions, and some dedicated time for mathematics in the upper grade levels. Within each of these broad areas, the teachers are expected to amplify the process of inquiry and to embed the skills of design thinking.
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How might we further dissolve rigidity by allowing students to re-arrange classroom furniture on a very frequent (more than daily) basis to meet the learning objectives of the moment? How often can we get students up to the writing walls to collaborate on work rather than taking individual notes or keying into their individual devices? How might we constantly defuse the “teacher-centrism” of the room? If the teacher is not using a fixed projector or other device that requires a “front of the room”, why set the podium there, or stand there? How might we empower students to ask the questions that guide discussion? How might we allow students to find the best ways to interact within learning teams, rather than giving them a strict methodology to follow? When have we given them enough instruction on how to learn, and when is it best for them to find this out for themselves and with their peers?
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This article showcases a school that focuses on integrated learning, interdisciplinary studies, collaboration and design thinking...all at the elementary school level.
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Love this article thinking about the UCLA school that mounts the projector to the ceiling projecting onto the floor as an alternative. Students sit around the projection instead of at desks
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What research says about technology integration - 0 views
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Technology is tempting to embed in the classroom en masse. It piques kids’ interests and it is fun to explore. But does it lead to achievement and help students grow as learners? We need to ask ourselves these types of questions if we want to realize the impact that connected education can have on students
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When words are on a screen, we tend to not stick with content as long as we might when compared to paper.
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Reasons include more distractions on a screen, such as multimedia enhancements and advertisements, and the “difficulty to see any one passage in the context of the entire text” (Jabr, 2013). These factors can lead to decreased comprehension and understanding.
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dedicated e-readers with e-ink technology are equivalent to print, as far as the mind is concerned. “
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So should reading on tablets and laptops be avoided in classrooms? Not if a digital reading experience offers options for learners who need more support.
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In a recent study, teenagers originally from Mexico living in the US saw improvement in acquiring English skills through interacting within Facebook communities (Stewart, 2014). These adolescents also felt more supported and connected when they were able to communicate with others using their native language.
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Sherry Turkle, a scientist from MIT, found that empathy can be reduced by up to 40% in college students when they prioritize online relationships over in person conversations (Turkle, 2015).
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What we allow at school needs to be balanced with an awareness of the often unrestricted access students have at home and the community.
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Integrating digital devices into the classroom tends to accentuate current instruction but does not improve poor practice (Toyoma, 2015)
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college students who do not use a digital device during class show better understanding of the content taught compared to students who did (Shirkey, 2014)
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In fact, the mere presence of a laptop or tablet was distracting to those around the student using technology.
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Keep it simple. If the digital devices lack a natural point for integration, don’t shoehorn it in for the sake of making instruction “connected.” Pedagogy trumps technology.
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Group Work That Works | Edutopia - 0 views
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The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction, and conversation... [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain,
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a handful of practices that educators use to promote equal participation. These involve setting out clear expectations for group work, increasing accountability among participants, and nurturing a productive group work dynamic.
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Rich tasks: Making sure that a project is challenging and compelling is critical. A rich task is a problem that has multiple pathways to the solution and that one person would have difficulty solving on their own.
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if you want to grade group work, he recommends making all academic assessments within group work individual assessments.
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words th... - 0 views
World Population | An Interactive Experience - World Population - 0 views
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views
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A principal remembers how she built trust 2. Giving and receiving feedback with grace and skill 3. A Georgia district works to improve classroom observations 4. Douglas Reeves takes on five myths about grading 5. Enlisting students to comment helpfully on each others’ work 6. Unintended consequences from New York City’s discipline policies 7. The minefield that girls and young women must traverse 8. Thomas Friedman on what the new era portends for young people 9. Short item: An online social-emotional survey
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“When schools dig in on the underlying reasons why kids violate norms, rather than reflexively and automatically punishing and sending kids away, outcomes can change quickly and dramatically. It’s especially important for everyone in a school to dig deep to decrease head-to-head conflict and understand behaviors that are often quickly labeled insubordination or disrespect.”
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“Trust happens through thousands of small, purposeful interactions over time,” says Sarah Fiarman in this article in Principal. “[L]eaders earn trust when they keep promises, respond when teachers ask for help, and have difficult conversations with adults to ensure high-quality teaching for everyone.” Integral to all this is listening well, speaking wisely, and acknowledging one’s own biases.
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“This requires slowing down, checking to be sure we understand correctly, and sharing back what we hear.”
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A key value she worked to communicated was about listening to dissent and changing course if necessary.
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Fiarman found that making quick visits to classrooms every day communicated respect and made her far more knowledgeable about instruction.
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for practice to be an effective tool for improvement, students need to be pushing the limits of current performance and getting continuous feedback – very difficult to orchestrate for 30 students working in their bedrooms. Second, as soon as teachers give grades for practice work, the incentive is for students to play it safe and not push into challenging or unknown territory.
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Here are their ideas on making feedback less threatening and more productive: • Separate coaching from evaluation.
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Be thoughtful about receiving criticism. “The person getting the feedback has the power to decide whether it’s on target, fair, or helpful,” say the authors, “and to decide whether to use the feedback or dismiss it.”
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When feedback rubs you the wrong way, it’s also important to dig deeper to understand what’s really going.
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Be noisy about the importance of improving your school’s feedback culture – for students, for teachers, for parents, and for yourself.”
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In this article in All Things PLC, consultant/author Douglas Reeves confronts these widely espoused misconceptions about grading:
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if grades were effective motivators, homework completion, classroom engagement, and overall diligence would be sky-high. Not so!
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“Asking such questions helps me counteract my unconscious bias,” says Fiarman. “Recognizing the pervasiveness of bias is an important first step. Acknowledging that I might make mistakes because of this bias – then actively working to counter it – builds trust.”
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Myth #3: Grades drive future performance. True, there’s a correlation between good grades and college success, and between poor grades and dropping out of school, but Reeves questions whether grades cause success and failure.
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While it is possible that intelligence and work ethic forge the path from kindergarten to Ivy League and Wall Street, it is also possible that zip code, tutors, and connections – all artifacts of family socioeconomic status – are the underlying causes.”
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Teachers giving zeros for missed assignments and refusing to accept late work lets students off the hook – and starts a spiral of doom with their final grades.
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Averaging grades through a semester punishes students for early failures versus rewarding them for using early problems to improve final performance.
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“Rather than using the last two months of the semester to build momentum and finish strong,” says Reeves, “because of a punitive grading system, they are doomed to failure well before the semester is over. There is nothing left for them to do except cut class, be disruptive, or ultimately, quit school.”
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“grading policies are matters of equity, with disparate impacts on students, particularly based on ethnicity and gender. Boys and minority males receive lower grades just as they are more likely to be more severely disciplined for an infraction. Girls receive higher grades for the same level of proficiency. If racial and gender disparities of this sort took place in any other area of public life, the consequences would be swift and sure.”
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Instead, he suggests replacing each statement of fact – Punishment deters unwanted behavior – with a testable hypothesis – If I penalize students for late, incomplete, and absent homework, then student achievement will improve – and conducting real-time experiments within the school.
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Teaching sentence stems can be helpful: I’m not sure I understand the opening of this piece… I’m not sure why you did this; can you explain it more?
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Prior to peer feedback, the teacher should introduce a rubric and lead the class in a group critique of an exemplar paper, focusing on suggestions that will make a difference.
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The teacher might also display samples of feedback statements and have students break into groups and rank them from helpful to unhelpful, taking note of sentence starters and phrases they can use in their own feedback conversations.
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Be timely. One of the greatest advantages of well-orchestrated peer feedback is that students can get comments on their work immediately, rather than waiting days, perhaps weeks, for the teacher to wade through piles of papers.
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“Unfortunately,” Eden concludes, “by second-guessing teachers’ judgments about how to maintain order, policymakers and district administrators are likely harming the education of many millions of well-behaved students in an effort to help the misbehaving few.”
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“[T]hey are encouraged more than ever to present themselves as ‘sexy’ – not about being attractive or beautiful, but a very narrow, commercialized idea of sexy. What’s particularly complicated is they’re sold that idea [of sexiness] as being a source of personal power. There is a complete disconnect between that image of sexiness and an understanding of their bodies, their own wants, needs, desires, and limits, what those might be, having those respected.”
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young women “are almost conditioned, starting in middle school, to have their bodies publicly commented on by young men, [and] they don’t think they have any power to really stop it.” In schools, she says, the “everyday chipping away of girls’ self-worth by reducing them to their bodies is completely ignored.”
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We tend to silo conversations about sex as if it is not about the same values of compassion, kindness, respect, mutuality, and caring that we want our children to embody in every other aspect of their lives.”
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The Internet – “Unfortunately,” says Orenstein, “the first thing kids Google is porn. The average age that kids today are exposed to porn, either intentionally or not, is 11. We have to ask what it means that kids are learning about sex from that realm before they’ve even had their first kiss and how that’s shaping them, their attitudes toward sexuality, and their expectations of sex.” Parents and schools need to explicitly teach kids to apply a critical lens to what they’re seeing, and shape values that will help them safely and wisely navigate this very challenging era.
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“If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.” He quotes education-to-work expert Heather McGowan: “Stop asking a young person WHAT you want to be when you grow up. It freezes their identity into a job that may not be there. Ask them HOW you want to be when you grow up. Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century.”
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How to Tap Memory Systems to Deepen Learning - MindShift - 0 views
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When teachers have a better understanding of the brain’s memory systems, they can help students develop stronger study habits and engage them in deep learning.
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In classrooms, some students absorb and master these skills faster than others. Oakley calls these “race car learners” who zoom to the finish line. In contrast “other students have hiker brains,” says Oakley. “They get to the finish line, but more slowly.”
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It’s also why many students struggle at following multi-step directions. It’s not a lack of focus. Their working memory simply does not have the capacity to “keep in mind” something like a five-step process – unless they’ve practiced those steps so many times that it has become a routine that doesn’t require active thought. That’s why skilled teachers spend so much time at the beginning of the year establishing classroom procedures and thinking routines. These practiced routines can free up working memory space for students to learn novel material.
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Because many students don’t understand their working memory, they study ineffectively, she says. They read over their notes or stare at a list of vocabulary words and think “I’ve got it.” And they do have it in their brain – while they have their notes in front of them. But working memory is short term. Hiker students, in particular, need concrete strategies for moving material into long-term storage.
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Active learning is when “the student themself is grappling with the material,” says Oakley. “This really builds our procedural links in long-term memory. While you can be actively learning while you are staring at the professor, you can’t do that for very long.”
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Offering brain breaks: Breaks are crucial to long-term memory formation. When students relax mentally, even for a minute or two, it gives their brain time to consolidate new learning.
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Use the Jot-Recall Technique: Pause while teaching and help students check whether they’ve moved the material from working into long-term memory. Take one minute and have them jot down important ideas from class, jot down a sketch to visually represent their learning, or jot down key ideas from previous classes that relates to the topic at hand.
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Teach Students How to Engage in Active Recall: Remember the student who looks at the vocabulary list and thinks they have it memorized? Teach students to regularly put away their notes or shut their book and see what they can recall.
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Engage in Think-Pair-Share: Activities such as think-pair-share ask students to engage individually, engage with a partner and then engage with the class. In effect, they are interacting with the information three times in quick succession, helping strengthen their neural pathways.
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Practice Interleaving: Interleaving involves mixing up practice problems instead of working on nearly identical activities over and over again. This builds in active recall practice and cognitive flexibility as students have to consciously decide what information or procedure to apply to a given problem.
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“The best way to make rapid progress is to make things tougher on yourself,” says Oakley, drawing on the concept of “desirable difficulties”,
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And for those students who already feel like learning is a constant struggle? Remind them that speed isn’t smarts.
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The first time I realized I was black - CNN.com - 0 views
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Coronavirus: Close the bars. Reopen the schools. - Vox - 0 views
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Reopening is a community-wide project. Whether a school can reopen safely, for example, doesn’t just depend on capacity, personal protective equipment, or individual actions. It depends on how widespread the coronavirus is in the community outside the school’s walls.
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But if a community is flooded with infections, the chances are much higher that those infections will creep in no matter how many protective steps are embraced.
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If you want to reopen schools this fall, then you need to get the spread of Covid-19 down, as close to zero as possible, this summer. And that means opting not to reopen — possibly at all and definitely not at full capacity — restaurants, bars, nightclubs, or other places that will lead to significantly more coronavirus spread but have less value to society than schools.
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The goal is to keep the basic reproduction number in a community below 1. That would mean that every person who gets coronavirus transmits it to, on average, fewer than one other person. Over time, that would lead to coronavirus cases falling closer and closer to zero. This number is typically calculated as the R0 or Rt, depending on the methods used. (Some websites, like Rt.live, calculate this figure for all states, and it’s at 1 or more in most states.)
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schools likely carry some risk of Covid-19 transmission, as an indoor environment in which students, teachers, and other school staff interact for hours. But schools are also really important for day-to-day life — not just for kids’ education, but also for food, shelter, and child care while parents are at work. Knowing that, a community may decide to fit schools into its reopening budget. The trade-off would be that other places, such as restaurants, bars, or gyms, more likely have to remain closed.
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Students Are Making a 'Surprising' Rebound From Pandemic Closures. But Some May Never C... - 0 views
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Elementary and middle-school students have made up significant ground since pandemic school closings in 2020 — but they are nowhere close to being fully caught up, according to the first detailed national study of how much U.S. students are recovering.
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Overall in math, a subject where learning loss has been greatest, students have made up about a third of what they lost. In reading, they have made up a quarter, according to the new analysis of standardized test score data led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard.
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Still, the gap between students from rich and poor communities — already huge before the pandemic — has widened.
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because poor districts had lost more ground, their progress was not nearly enough to outpace wealthier districts, widening the gulf between them.
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“We seemed to have lost the urgency in this crisis,” said Karyn Lewis, who has studied pandemic learning declines for NWEA, a research and student assessment group. “It is problematic for the average kid.
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“But it’s an unevenly felt recovery,” Professor Reardon said, “so the worry there is that means inequality is getting baked in.”
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When looking at data available in 15 states, researchers found that in a given district — poor or rich — children across backgrounds lost similar ground, but students from richer families recovered faster.
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Even when schools offered interventions to help students catch up, lower-income families might have been less able to rearrange schedules or transportation to ensure their children attended. (This is one reason experts advise scheduling tutoring during the school day, not after.)
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Take Massachusetts, which has some of the nation’s best math and reading scores, but wide inequality. The recovery there was led by wealthier districts. Test scores for students in poor districts have shown little improvement, and in some cases, kept falling, leaving Massachusetts with one of the largest increases in the achievement gap.
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In states like Kentucky and Tennessee that have traditionally had more middling test scores, but with less inequality, poor students have recovered remarkably well.