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
1More
Create Free Interactive Timelines - Stories Displayed on Maps | myHistro - 0 views
-
"Watch and read thousands of fascinating timelines, or create your own. Complete with text, video and pictures to create a dynamic timeline mashup. Using myHistro, you can combine maps and timelines seamlessly into one great presentation, convert any public timeline into a personal pdf file, or export it into Google Earth format for offline storage. All completed timelines can be embedded into your blog and websites for maximum exposure."
39More
The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views
-
“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.”
-
“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.
- ...36 more annotations...
-
“This requires slowing down, checking to be sure we understand correctly, and sharing back what we hear.”
-
A key value she worked to communicated was about listening to dissent and changing course if necessary.
-
Fiarman found that making quick visits to classrooms every day communicated respect and made her far more knowledgeable about instruction.
-
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.
-
Here are their ideas on making feedback less threatening and more productive: • Separate coaching from evaluation.
-
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.”
-
When feedback rubs you the wrong way, it’s also important to dig deeper to understand what’s really going.
-
Be noisy about the importance of improving your school’s feedback culture – for students, for teachers, for parents, and for yourself.”
-
In this article in All Things PLC, consultant/author Douglas Reeves confronts these widely espoused misconceptions about grading:
-
if grades were effective motivators, homework completion, classroom engagement, and overall diligence would be sky-high. Not so!
-
“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.”
-
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.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
Averaging grades through a semester punishes students for early failures versus rewarding them for using early problems to improve final performance.
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
“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.”
-
“[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.”
-
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.”
-
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.”
-
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.
-
“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.”
17More
50 Plus Ideas for Using Document Cameras in the Classroom - 0 views
-
Visual learners will benefit from the use of a classroom document camera by seeing small items, text, demonstrations in a much bigger way. Hands-on learners can also benefit from the use of a document camera by allowing them to be the ones placing objects or items under the document camera and explaining what they are showing.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
Save an image of what you did in class on the document camera to place on classroom websites. Parents can "see" what their children are learning throughout the day.
-
Saved images can also be incorporated into PowerPoint Presentations and Windows Movie Maker to use in activities such as end of year programs, classroom review and back to school nights.
SMS Generator - 0 views
5More
Don't Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. It's Your Fault | Wired Opinion | Wi... - 0 views
-
Lots of work offers the opposite conclusion, such as Pew surveys finding that kids who text the most also socialize the most in person.
-
If kids can’t socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd.
-
a metronomic diet of horrifying but rare child-abduction stories, and parents shortened the leash on their kids
- ...1 more annotation...
-
increased competition to get into college meant well-off parents began heavily scheduling their kids’ after-school lives.
13More
Age of Distraction: Why It's Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus | MindShift - 0 views
-
“The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,”
-
If young students don’t build up the neural circuitry that focused attention requires, they could have problems controlling their emotions and being empathetic.
-
“The circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressing emotion,”
- ...9 more annotations...
-
He advocates for a “digital sabbath” everyday, some time when kids aren’t being distracted by devices at all. He’d also like to see schools building exercises that strengthen attention, like mindfulness practices, into the curriculum.
-
Perhaps the most well known study on concentration is a longitudinal study conducted with over 1,000 children in New Zealand by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, psychology and neuroscience professors at Duke University.
-
“The attentional circuitry needs to have the experience of sustained episodes of concentration — reading the text, understanding and listening to what the teacher is saying — in order to build the mental models that create someone who is well educated,” Goleman said.
-
“This ability is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health,” Goleman said.
-
These are signs that educators may need to start paying attention to the act of attention itself. Digital natives may need help cultivating what was once an innate part of growing up.
-
“There’s a need now to teach kids concentration abilities as part of the school curriculum,” Goleman said. “The more children and teens are natural focusers, the better able they’ll be to use the digital tool for what they have to get done and then to use it in ways that they enjoy.”
-
the idea of multitasking is a myth, Goleman said. When people say they’re “multitasking,” what they are really doing is something called “continuous partial attention,” where the brain switches back and forth quickly between tasks.
-
“I don’t think the enemy is digital devices,” Goleman said. “What we need to do is be sure that the current generation of children has the attentional capacities that other generations had naturally before the distractions of digital devices. It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”
10More
4 Free Web Tools to Boost Student Engagement | Edutopia - 0 views
-
myBrainshark (1) is a superb tool that allows students to add a voiceover to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, videos, and photo albums -- or to simply produce podcasts
-
myBrainshark (1) is a superb tool that allows students to add a voiceover to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, videos, and photo albums -- or to simply produce podcasts
-
If you are looking for a tool that also allows for video narratives along with PowerPoint presentations (instead of basic audio), I would suggest Present.me (3).
- ...6 more annotations...
-
PosterMyWall (4) is a fantastic tool for creating artistic, high-quality posters (5), collages, photo calendars and/or photo cards that can either be shared online or printed out and inexpensively shipped home.
-
PosterMyWall is slightly restricted in terms of the amount of options available for customization (mostly pictures and text), but other services, such as Glogster (6), offer a wider range of options.
-
Screencast-o-matic (7) is a powerful screen recorder that allows users to capture anything (8) happening on their screen, as well as voice and video from the webcam for up to 15 minutes in the recorder's free version.
-
Some high-quality alternatives to Screencast-o-matic are Jing (9) and Ezvid (10), both of which are very powerful and offer unique features.
-
Padlet (11) is another free program that facilitates the creation of virtual walls (12) where students and teachers can post sticky notes with almost anything they want.
21More
Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History - 0 views
-
Gertrude Himmelfarb offered what she called a “neo-Luddite” dissent about “the new technology’s impact on learning and scholarship.” “Like postmodernism,” she complained, “the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”
-
“A dismal new era of higher education has dawned,” he wrote in a paper called “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” “In future years we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen.”3
-
In the past two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. Almost every historian regards a computer as basic equipment; colleagues view those who write their books and articles without the assistance of word processing software as objects of curiosity.
- ...18 more annotations...
-
Just ten years ago, we would not have imagined the need for “a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.” Indeed, few of us knew the web existed. Even the editors of Wired ignored it in their inaugural issue.4 Ten years ago, we would have been objects of curiosity, if not derision, if we had proposed such a project.
-
The first advantage of digital media for historians is storage capacity—digital media can condense unparalleled amounts of data into small spaces.
-
The most profound effect, however, may be on tomorrow’s historians. The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, “there will be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people write, say, perform, or photograph.” In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?
-
Our web server at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) gets about three-quarters of a million hits a day, but on September 11, 2002 (when people looking to commemorate the attacks of the previous year descended in droves on the September 11 Digital Archive that we organized in collaboration with the American Social History Project), we handled eight million hits—a more than ten-fold increase with no additional costs
-
But the flexibility of digital data lies not just in the ability to encompass different media. It also resides in the ability of the same data to assume multiple guises instantaneously. Although language translation software is still primitive, we are moving toward a time when words in one tongue can be automatically translated into another—perhaps not perfectly but effectively enough.
-
Flexibility transforms the experience of consuming history, but digital media—because of their openness and diversity—also alters the conditions and circumstances of producing history. The computer networks that have come together in the World Wide Web are not only more open to a global audience of history readers than any other previous medium, they are also more open to history authors. A 2004 study found that almost half of the Internet users in the United States have created online content by building websites, creating blogs, and posting and sharing files.
-
quantitative advantages—we can do more, reach more people, store more data, give readers more varied sources; we can get more historical materials into classrooms, give students more access to formerly cloistered documents, hear from more perspectives.
-
o consider these “expressive” qualities we need to think, for example, about the manipulability of digital media—the possibility of manipulating historical data with electronic tools as a way of finding things that were not previously evident. At the moment, the most powerful of those tools for historians is the simplest—the ability to search through vast quantities of text for particular strings of words. The word search capabilities of JSTOR, the online database of 460 scholarly periodicals, makes possible a kind of intellectual history that cannot be done as readily in print sources.
-
Digital media also differ from many other older media in their interactivity—a product of the web being, unlike broadcast television, a two-way medium, in which every point of consumption can also be a point of production. This interactivity enables multiple forms of historical dialogue—among professionals, between professionals and nonprofessionals, between teachers and students, among students, among people reminiscing about the past—that were possible before but which are not only simpler but potentially richer and more intensive in the digital medium. Many history websites offer opportunities for dialogue and feedback. The level of response has varied widely, but the experience so far suggests how we might transform historical practice—the web becomes a place for new forms of collaboration, new modes of debate, and new modes of collecting evidence about the past. At least potentially, digital media transform the traditional, one-way reader/writer, producer/consumer relationship. Public historians, in particular, have long sought for ways to “share authority” with their audiences; the web offers an ideal medium for that sharing and collaboration.16
-
inally, we note the hypertextuality, or nonlinearity, of digital media—the ease of moving through narratives or data in undirected and multiple ways.
-
Consider, for example, the famous “photograph” of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby playing rock music together in a Dallas basement. Such fake photographs have a long history; Stalin’s photo retouchers, for example, spent considerable time airbrushing Trotsky out of the historical record. But the transformation of the original Bob Jackson photo of Ruby shooting Oswald into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald” did not require a skilled craftsman. George Mahlberg created it with Photoshop in forty minutes and it quickly spread across the World Wide Web, popping up in multiple contexts that erase the credit of the “original” counterfeiter.20
-
Is there some way to police the boundaries of historical quality and authenticity on the web? Could we stop a thousand historical flowers—amateur, professional, commercial, crackpot—from blooming on the web? Would we want to? Of course, issues of quality, authenticity, and authority pre-date the Internet. But digital media undercut an existing structure of trust and authority and we, as historians and citizens, have yet to establish a new structure of historical legitimation and authority. When you move your history online, you are entering a less structured and controlled environment than the history monograph, the scholarly journal, the history museum, or the history classroom. That can have both positive and unsettling implications.
-
Digital enthusiasts assume that the online environment is intrinsically more “interactive” than one-way, passive media like television. But digital technology could, in fact, foster a new couch potatoÐlike passivity. Efforts to create nuanced interactive history projects sometimes become quixotic when the producers confront the fact that computers are good at yes and no and right and wrong, whereas historians prefer words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “it is more complicated than that.” Thus the most common form of historical interactivity on the web is the multiple-choice test. But the high-budget version is little better. Take, for example, the History Channel’s website Modern Marvel’s Boys’ Toys, which is a combination of watching the cable channel and playing a video game. The true interactivity here comes when you click on the “shop” button. As legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has written pessimistically: “There are two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it.” At the same time, some wonder whether we really want to foster “interactivity” at all, arguing that it fails to provide the critical experience of understanding, of getting inside the thoughts and experiences of others. The literary critic Harold Bloom, for example, argues that whereas linear fiction allows us to experience more by granting us access to the lives and thoughts of those different from ourselves, interactivity only permits us to experience more of ourselves.25
-
Another concern stems more from the production than the consumption side. Will amateur and academic historians be able to compete with well-funded commercial operators—like the History Channel—for attention on the Net?
8More
shared by Jill Bergeron on 27 May 14
- No Cached
The Backchannel: Giving Every Student a Voice in the Blended Mobile Classroom | Edutopia - 0 views
www.edutopia.org/...blended-classroom-beth-holland
differentiation backchannel edutopia blended learning
![](/images/link.gif)
-
A backchannel (3) -- a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face-to-face activity -- provides students with an outlet to engage in conversation.
-
TodaysMeet (4) would have let teachers create private chat rooms so that students could ask questions or leave comments during class. A Padlet (5) wall might have fueled students to share their ideas as text, images, videos, and links posted to a digital bulletin board. The open response questions available in a student response system like Socrative (6) or InfuseLearning (7) could have become discussion prompts to give each student an opportunity to share his or her ideas before engaging in class discussion.
-
To inspire questioning and wondering, Meghan Zigmond (10) put her first grade students in groups and allowed them to use a Padlet wall (11) to capture their questions as they read Douglas Florian's Comets, Stars, The Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings
- ...4 more annotations...
-
They create a blended environment where teachers and students engage in both physical and online conversations so that learning is no longer confined to a single means of communication or even an arbitrary class period. Backchannels don't replace class discussions -- they extend them.
-
She used Socrative to capture her fifth graders' questions and answers throughout the presentation, giving them an immediate channel for their thoughts.
-
The backchannel gave every student an opportunity to express his or her views and to listen to voices that otherwise may not have been heard.
-
A backchannel creates ubiquitous opportunities (18). In a blended environment, students and teachers can communicate through multiple modalities, allow their thoughts to develop over time, and engage in authentic learning.
14More
What research says about technology integration - 0 views
-
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
-
When words are on a screen, we tend to not stick with content as long as we might when compared to paper.
-
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.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
dedicated e-readers with e-ink technology are equivalent to print, as far as the mind is concerned. “
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
What we allow at school needs to be balanced with an awareness of the often unrestricted access students have at home and the community.
-
Integrating digital devices into the classroom tends to accentuate current instruction but does not improve poor practice (Toyoma, 2015)
-
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)
-
In fact, the mere presence of a laptop or tablet was distracting to those around the student using technology.
-
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.
16More
shared by Jill Bergeron on 15 Sep 17
- No Cached
Why Daydreaming is Critical to Effective Learning | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views
ww2.kqed.org/...critical-to-effective-learning
daydreaming creativity brain breaks multitasking learning
![](/images/link.gif)
-
It’s never too early to learn smart strategies to focus in on priorities and tune out what’s not immediately necessary.
-
Neuroscience has shown that multitasking — the process of doing more than one thing at the same time — doesn’t exist.
-
Multitasking is also stressful for the body. When people try to do several things at once, like drive and text, the brain uses up oxygenated glucose at a much faster rate and releases the stress hormone cortisol.
- ...12 more annotations...
-
Rather than trying to do everything at the same time, the most productive people prioritize and block off their schedules to focus on one task at a time.
-
“When they’re doing something, they’re really doing it,” Levitin said. “They get more done because their brain isn’t half somewhere else.”
-
“People who take regular breaks — and naps even — end up being more productive and more creative in their work,” Levitin said.
-
“You need to give your brain time to consolidate all the information that’s come in, to toss it and turn it.”
-
The brain has a natural way of giving itself a break — it’s called daydreaming. “It allows you to refresh and release all those neural circuits that get all bound up when you’re focused,”
-
“Children shouldn’t be overly scheduled,” Levitin said. “They should have blocks of time to promote spontaneity and creativity.”
-
Daydreaming and playing are crucial to develop the kind of creativity many say should be a focal point of a modern education system.
-
The world has changed much more quickly than the genome can keep up with, which means schools have a responsibility to help kids develop the skills to sift through the overwhelming stimuli.
-
It can be hard to focus on one thing when there’s a long, nagging list of things that need to get done in a day, both personal and professional. Levitin recommends writing all those things down on notecards, externalizing the memories into digestible bits that can be shuffled as priorities change. “My brain knows I’ve written it down and it stops nagging me,” Levitin said of his method.
-
he hyperactive child might be able to help develop a more creative set of ideas, while the more focused child knows how to take that idea
8More
Finland Education System Is Very Laid Back, And Totally Working - 1 views
EduTip 7: Stop popcorn reading. - 0 views
9More
shared by Scott Nancarrow on 20 Jan 23
- No Cached
Telling Your Child They Have a Learning Disability Is Critical - 0 views
www.additudemag.com/hey-have-a-learning-disability
explanation learning differences disabilities parenting
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Many parents are afraid that “labeling” a child as having a learning disability will make him feel broken, left out, or less willing to try. In fact, the opposite is true: giving your child an understanding of the nature of his learning disabilities will comfort him — and motivate him to push through his challenges.
-
The knowledge that he has an identifiable, common, measurable, and treatable condition often comes as great comfort to the youngster. Without this information, the child is likely to believe the taunts of his classmates and feel that he indeed is a dummy.
-
If a child does not have a basic understanding of the nature of his learning challenges, it is unlikely that he will be able to sustain his motivation in the classroom.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
During these discussions, emphasize her strengths and affinities, and do not simply focus on her weaknesses and difficulties. Express optimism about her development and her future.
-
Remind your child that she can indeed learn, but that she learns in a unique way that requires her to work hard and participate in classes and activities that are different from those of her peers and siblings.
-
Print Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest A parent once called my special education school to request an admissions visit for her and her son, who was struggling mightily in school. She asked a strange question in her initial phone call: “Does the school have any signs or posters displayed that identify the program as a school for kids with learning disabilities?” I asked her why she wished to know this. She replied, “My son doesn’t know that he has a learning disability, and we don’t want him to know.” He knows, Mom. Believe me, he knows.
‹ Previous
21 - 38 of 38