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Randy Rodgers

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Busine... - 0 views

  • Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones
  • And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else.
  • We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.
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  • In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills
  • Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside
  • “schools in the cloud,”
  • There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.”
  • as the kids blasted through the questions, they couldn’t help noticing that it felt easy, as if they were being asked to do something very basic.
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    Must. Read. Such a valuable lesson and another example of how we are doing it wrong.
Paul Beaufait

TESOL Connections: A Sequence of Critical Thinking Task - 31 views

  • Scriven and Paul begin to define critical thinking as ‘‘the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action’’ (quoted in Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2009, para. 2).
  • Bloom (1956) offered one of the first comprehensive elaborations of these important skills. Since the conception of Bloom’s Taxonomy, his colleagues (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) have carried on his work and developed a two-dimensional taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing student learning outcomes. The Knowledge Dimension identifies four types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. The second aspect of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the Cognitive Process Dimension, outlines six ways of thinking (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) and their many subprocesses.
  • For the purposes of this article, critical thinking is defined as the practice and development of an active, conscious, purposeful awareness of what one encounters both in the classroom and in the outside world. It is a kind of thinking and learning that demands an investment in personal and communal learning on the part of the student and teacher. Critical thinking does not discount the emotional or gut responses that everyone has. Rather, it complements and enters into dialogue with them so that reasoned judgments are possible.
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  • Observing is the basic starting point of the sequence—so basic, in fact, that some teachers may not immediately consider it to be critical thinking at all. However, observing is critical thinking because it involves a fundamental level of analysis.
  • To read the rest of the article, download the PDF
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    "This article [by John Beaumont] is from Volume 1, Issue 4 of TESOL Journal" (TESOL Connections [website], Features, December 2010).
J Black

Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom - 0 views

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    online version of this book
Dennis OConnor

e-Learning Online: Website Investigator: See you at NECC 2009! - 0 views

  • Website Investigator: Information Forensics Goes to School
  • The purpose of this session is to provide participants with an understanding of efficient methods for evaluating online information and to demonstrate effective ways to teach these information fluency skills in classrooms.The new generation of NETS standards for students (ISTE, 2007), is based on the premise that efficacy and productivity depends on students’ abilities to conduct research and manage digital information fluently. An essential skill is the ability to evaluate information from a variety of sources and media.This session directly addresses this information fluency standard by helping participants…1. Understand the role of investigation (information forensics) in evaluating information:• Two types of searching: how investigation differs from speculation;• Determining when investigative searching is necessary and when it is not;• Effective means of finding critical information with limited clues;• Using specialized search engines and browsing techniques to track down information;• Analyzing results to determine credibility of the source and content.2. Observe effective methods for helping students exercise speculative search skills:• Off-line 'readiness' activities;• Group and individual Search Challenges;• Interactive tutorial games;• Think-aloud searches;• Evaluation reporting;• Group discussion about credibility.
Fabian Aguilar

Internet Evolution - Rob Salkowitz - Schoolkid Laptops: How Portugal's Doing It Right - 0 views

  • In June, Portugal completed the major phase of the largest deployment of laptops for education in the world to date, equipping nearly a million secondary school students throughout the entire country with high-performance computers and mobile Internet connectivity.
  • The government authorized the use of the 3G auction proceeds to subsidize the distribution of nearly a million laptops before the end of the decade. This pleased the telecom providers, because it amounted to a direct investment in market development: All those students and their families would become mobile broadband customers.
  • it instantly leapfrogged the country’s education system to the forefront of the global effort to integrate the Internet into the classroom, and it promised a quantum leap forward for the country’s next generation of citizens, workers, and leaders.
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  • With the subsidies, the end-cost to students’ families is only €50 to €150 for laptops that would otherwise sell for more than four times that amount. Qualified low-income families receive theirs for free. The Escola computers come with a one-year mobile broadband contract for €17 a month (discounted from the normal €23), and other plans are negotiable depending on the providers.
  • “It is most important to have scale,” says Grilo. “It can’t be just a pilot project confined to a small community. It must be everyone at once. That way, you have maximum cultural impact. Everyone feels part of the mainstream, not an anomaly or a test subject.”
  • Perhaps the most important lesson for countries seeking to emulate Portugal’s success is to design a policy that aligns the interests of all the major stakeholders: telecom providers, local OEMs, multinational partners, government ministries, local communities, schools, and the public.
Don Lourcey

Education Week: Filtering Fixes - 0 views

  • So what teachers and students in Trussville, Ala., are doing on the Internet might be considered illicit activity in other districts across the country. Lessons in the 4,100-student district near Birmingham include YouTube videos and film trailers, Internet chats with peers in Nigeria or award-winning children’s authors, even blogging sessions and Web research on open search engines such as Google.
  • Attempting to use online social-networking tools, read blogs, or see multimedia presentations on a classroom computer can generate a message that’s become all too familiar in many American schools: Access Denied.
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