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realserviceitak

Buy Square Accounts - 100% Safe Usa Uk Ca ... - 0 views

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    Why You Should Buy Square Accounts ? There are various justifications for purchasing a Square account. First of all, it is a trustworthy and simple-to-use platform that may assist you in managing your company's money and accepting payments. Second, a variety of services and connections that Square offers, such its inventory management system, business data, and customer interaction tools, can help your company. Third, Square is a reputable company with a long history that offers top-notch customer service. Using Square can also help you avoid paying transaction fees and other fees associated with processing credit cards. Buy Square Accounts How does Square Accounts work? Small businesses can manage their money using Square Accounts, a cloud-based accounting program. With a focus on assisting businesses in tracking their income and expenses, the program is created to be straightforward and simple to use. A few of the functions that Square Accounts offers are invoicing, tracking sales and spending, and producing financial reports. Buy Square Accounts Due to Square Accounts' subscription-based model, companies must pay a monthly or yearly charge to access the program. Both a free and a premium version of the software are offered, with the paid version including more features and support. What are the benefits of using Square Accounts? You can utilize the profile you create for your company when you create a Square account to accept credit and debit card payments. With a Square account, it's simple to track and manage your funds as well as collect payments from clients. Utilizing Square Accounts for your company has a number of advantages. The ease with which credit and debit card payments can be accepted may be the most evident advantage. When making a purchase, customers may effortlessly swipe their card or enter their card information, and you can easily and swiftly process the payment. Buy Square Accounts Utilizing Square Accounts also gives you access to
Brain Robinson

Get 364,000 Visitors A Day - 0 views

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    You often hear that the money is in the list. And while this isn't completely false, it isn't the whole truth either. The truth is, the money is in your ability to generate targeted traffic first… and funnel that traffic through your landing page (aka build your list). You see, it doesn't matter how great your offer is, if no one knows…
Leonard Miller

Education Week: Blended PD Emphasizes Differentiated Instruction - 0 views

  • If blended learning is one of the biggest trends in education, it should offer a way for teachers to practice the approach themselves.
  • Professional development for educational technology has to move away from its historical focus on technical training and toward a broader focus on what educational approaches work best.
  • In other words, teachers not only need to be proficient at integrating virtual experiences into the classroom, they must also be confident in why they're doing so.
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  • the certification program is split into two tiers. The first includes foundational courses aimed at helping teachers understand various strategies for online and blended learning and make decisions about how to use them to create engaging, differentiated classrooms. The second tier provides instruction in the tools and techniques for turning those ideas into reality
  • launched an online and blended certification program
  • No longer solely a teacher, "I am facilitator, fellow learner, and curator," added Ms. Canady. "I'm becoming more focused on giving my students more bang for their buck, more time. I don't want them to do anything they don't need in order to grow."
  • The team generally kicks off the design process anywhere from six to 12 months before the first day of school. The process includes identifying instructional objectives, choosing a classroom model, selecting curriculum providers, preparing infrastructure, and setting up teacher professional development.
  • the coach helped them implement blended-learning models to differentiate instruction, extend learning beyond the classroom, and engage families in the learning process.
Dennis OConnor

Views: Lessons of a Summer Teaching Online - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • As I faithfully attended the monthly training meetings for Just in Time Technology (ex: how to use Skype) and for Course Design (ex: what is the conversion of 14 weeks pacing into a 30 day class), it began to dawn on me that I had underestimated the time and preparation required for my online course.
  • Reducing the amount of content does not mean reducing rigor for students or work for me. Like many others who have never taught online, I had entered this experience thinking that online courses were a little bit “fluffy.” I have a newfound respect for my fellow online professors.
  • Although I am a relative novice in the teaching arena, I appreciated the chance to revive my teaching mojo. I was forced to be creative about how to present course material and ensure that my students had a solid understanding of the information. I also realized I needed to revise my opinion of online teaching and those who participate in it. I now know that online courses are not a pale and lifeless version of traditional courses or worse, a “pay for an A” scam in which everyone teaches him/herself and everyone gets a good grade. Online courses can be distinctive and worthwhile ways of teaching in their own right. Amy Overman is assistant professor of psychology at Elon University.
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    Reviewed by Nancy Chapko: n her article, Lessons of a Summer Teaching Online, Dr. Amy Overman describes how she revived her "teaching mojo" as a novice online instructor. An assistant professor of psychology at Elon University in North Carolina, Dr. Overman describes her personal experience as a first-time online instructor. Written for instructors who may have doubts about online teaching and learning as she did, her account is both thoughtful and humorous. Dr. Overman describes her decision to teach an online class and her preparation for the experience. She relates her somewhat unexpected positive experience facilitating the class. She offers comparisons between her face-to-face and online teaching experiences and draws some insightful conclusions. Among them is the realization that reducing the amount of content does not reduce the rigor of the course and online classes take a lot of time, but they're worth it. Whether you're a committed veteran of online teaching, or you are at the initial stage of considering its merits, you will find Dr. Overman's article perceptive and thought-provoking. As she states, "… online courses are not a pale and lifeless version of traditional courses."
Steve Ransom

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 9 views

  • Critics counter that, absent clear proof, 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 when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      A valid criticism when technology implementation is decoupled from meaningful and effective pedagogy. You can't buy measurable change/improvement.
  • district was innovating
  • how the district was innovating.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Again, this is very different than how TEACHERS are innovating their PRACTICES. It's much more challenging than making a slick brochure that communicates how much technology your district has.
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  • there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
  • “We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      There's a confidence building statement for you....
  • $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly... and how much was spent on equipping teachers to change their practices to effectively leverage this new infrastructure?
  • If we know something works
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And what is that "something"? New technology? If so, you missed the boat.
  • it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training
  • The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Why does the argument for making schools relevant and using current cultural tools need to be backed with performance data? Give politicians and superintendents horses instead of cars and see how long that lasts.
  • 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Finally, a valid point.
  • “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.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly. But somehow, "value" has been equated with test scores alone. Do we have a strong body of research on pencil effectiveness or clay effectiveness or chair effectiveness?
  • “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
  • “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
  • “They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And you expect them to always engage enthusiastically with tools that are no longer relevant in their culture?
  • The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Okay... and you follow up with a totally trivial example of the power of technology in learning.
  • term” that can slide past critical analysis.
  • engagement is a “fluffy
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Very true
  • rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      If that is so, why not back up your claim by linking to the source here. I have a feeling he has been misquoted and taken out of context here.
  • that computers can distract and not instruct.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Computers don't really "instruct". That's why we have teachers who are supposed to know what they are doing and why they are doing it... and monitoring kids while keeping learning meaningful.
  • guide on the side.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      But many teachers are simply not prepared for how to do this effectively. To ignore this fact is just naive.
  • Professor Cuban at Stanford
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Are they in love with Cuban or something? Perhaps they should actually look at the research... or interview other authorities. Isn't that what reporting is all about? I think this reporter must be a product of too much Google, right?
  • But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Again, the fact that any supporter is happy that their kids are learning PowerPoint illustrates the degree of naiveté in their understanding of technology's role in learning.
  • creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
  • Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said 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.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Herein lies another huge problem. Mr. Director of Technology seems to base no decisions on what the learning and technology literature have to say... nor does he consult those who would be considered authorities on technology infused learning (emphasis on learning here)
  • This is big business.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      No kidding.
  • “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Anyone who asks that should volunteer to have their home and work computer confiscated. After all, it's just a distraction, right?
hurryupcabsindia

Thiruvananthapuram, also popular as Trivandrum is the capital and the largest city in t... - 1 views

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    Thiruvananthapuram, also popular as Trivandrum is the capital and the largest city in the state of Kerala. This evergreen city is known for its ancient temples, museums, institutions, seaport, art galleries, beaches, backwaters, and Ayurvedic treatments. Asia's first space university, the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology and Technopark Thiruvananthapuram is located in the city. Also, India's first deep-water trans-shipment port, the Vizhinjam International Seaport located in Thiruvananthapuram. Such an important city demands a reliable taxi service in Thiruvananthapuram to ensure a hassle-free travel experience. Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, known as the richest temple in the world, brings glory to the city. Thiruvananthapuram is where India's space program started, with the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre located here. You need a premium taxi service in Trivandrum to visit all the iconic places of the family comfortably with their family or friends.
Stephanie Greer

GCPD on the Air: PLN 101 - 0 views

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    I wanted to share this link to my new podcast which will feature "podcourses" for professional development purposes. I have just published the first course: PLN 101. It features a series of podcasts and activities designed to take a teacher from knowing absolutely nothing about a PLN, to having a PLN with at least 5 tools. It also contains tips for managing a PLN. Although it was designed with beginners in mind, it may also be a useful resource for those charged with helping teachers develop their PLNs. The podcourse can be accessed online or via a handheld device at www.missgreer.podbean/mobile. I hope you will pass this along and check it out! Please feel free to use it with your staff or to share it with colleagues. I'd love feedback. The next podcourse I'm planning is "20 Days of 2.0" which will feature a short podcast featuring a different 2.0 tool over the course of 20 days. I hope to publish it starting in November. If you'd like a heads up when it comes out, be sure to subscribe. Thanks!
Ted Curran

[Must Read!] Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process | e-Literate - 0 views

  • Migration is inevitable:
  • Migration can be an opportunity:
  • All of these systems are pretty good: It’s easy to get worried about making a “wrong” decision and picking the “inferior” product. The truth of the matter is that, given the needs of your institution (both present and foreseeable future), any of the major systems available in the US that I have some familiarity with (ANGEL, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Sakai) will provide you with adequate functionality.
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  • Accept the possibility that you may have Stockholm Syndrome:
  • If you are an LMS support person, then it is likely that you are too close to the day-to-day operations to have good perspective on all aspects of how well your current system is meeting your school’s needs. Make sure you get input from people with a broad range of experiences, roles, and perspectives.
  • All of these systems are pretty bad:
  • all of these systems will probably fare pretty well. But part of that is because our expectations are low. The state of the art in LMS design is frankly not great.
  • Having a system with 39,000 seldom-used features that require a course to learn how to use is not as valuable to you as having a system with 39 features that most people will find useful and can figure out how to use on their own.
  • You may not be a good judge of usability:
  • a system seems easy to use once you know how to use it.
  • Your current faculty LMS heroes may be the worst judges of usability: There is nobody on your campus more likely to have Stockholm Syndrome than the faculty member who taught her first online class using your current LMS, has never used anything different, and has devoted literally hundreds of hours to optimising her course—squeezing every ounce of value out your current system by exploiting every weird little feature and even figuring out how to turn a couple of a couple of bugs to her advantage. There are ways in which her perspective will be extremely valuable to you (which I’ll get to shortly), but judging usability is not one of them.
  • Somebody who has taught using multiple LMS’s could be a good judge of usability: Faculty members who have taught using 2 or 3 (or more) LMS’s generally have some sense of what differences between platforms really matter and what differences don’t in a practical sense.
  • The quality of the support vendor is almost certainly more important than the quality of the software:
  • Don’t assume that you know what the deal is with open source:
  • Your relationship with your LMS is not that different than your relationship with GMail or Yahoo! Mail. It’s hosted on somebody else’s servers; you don’t know anything about the details of the software—the programming langauge it’s written in, how much of it is open source, what the architecture is, what hardware it runs on, etc.—and you don’t care.
  • What matters to you is that the thing that appears in your web browser works reliably and does what you need it to do. Go to the open source LMS support vendors. Tell them what your requirements and capabilities are. Either they will be able to meet your needs or they won’t. Don’t decide in advance of getting the facts.
  • Don’t worry too much about the long-term financial viability of the vendors:
Kelly Faulkner

50+ Killer Apps for Your New Chromebook | Nettuts+ - 8 views

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    In celebration of the first wave of Chromebooks being released today, now is a great time to start looking for replacements for the tools you can't live without on a day to day basis. Code editors, image editors, games? All of these can be replaced! I'll show you the best choices today.
dsatkins1981

The Forgotten Childhood: Why Early Memories Fade : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • "What we found was that even as young as the second year of life, children had very robust memories for these specific past events,"
  • "Why is it that as adults we have difficulty remembering that period of our lives?"
  • More studies provided evidence that at some point in childhood, people lose access to their early memories.
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  • children as old as 7 could still recall more than 60 percent of those early events
  • children who were 8 or 9 recalled less than 40 percent.
  • we observed was actually the onset of childhood amnesia,"
  • still not entirely clear why early memories are so fragile
  • Some early memories are more likely than others to survive childhood amnesia
  • One example, she says, is a memory that carries a lot of emotion.
  • "They want to be cooperative," she says, "so you have to be very careful not to put words in their mouth."
    • dsatkins1981
       
      It seems that any role that an adult plays in helping to re-tell, frame, and contextualize a memory in order to bring it to the surface or to make it last must be gentle and organic. We're not talking about rote memorization of past events - can you imagine the trauma from that at home or school let alone in a court room? Some things you wouldn't want to remember.
  • Another powerful determinant of whether an early memory sticks is whether a child fashions it into a good story, with a time and place and a coherent sequence of events, Peterson says. "Those are the kinds of memories that are going to last," she says.
  • And it turns out parents play a big role in what a child remembers, Peterson says. Research shows that when a parent helps a child give shape and structure and context to a memory, it's less likely to fade away.
  • At first, he just talked about it with her.
    • dsatkins1981
       
      Talking through and eventually encouraging writing about past events - preferably pleasant memories - seems like a great way to help students build a repository of lasting childhood remembrances. I can recall my Mom and Dad saying things like, "We had a great day today didn't we? We got up so early! Didn't Dad make an excellent breakfast? Eggs and bacon. That bacon was so crispy. Don't you think that the smell of a good breakfast cooking makes it easier to get up?" Just an example, and I included the kind of leading questions a lawyer would want to avoid if this was about more than breakfast, but my folks were inviting we the children to enter the conversation as a valued part of the kind of reminiscing that adults may do after a nice day. It was just conversation but I can remember loads of them. And there was plenty of time for us to respond and share.
  • school writing assignments.
  • when our own memories start to fail, Peterson says, we rely on family members, photo albums and videos to restore them.
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    How studying childhood amnesia is leading to changes in the way we think about brain development, learning, and memory --- this article mentions implications in the home and in the courts but it also seems relevant to the classroom
zebrians

People who spea - 0 views

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started by zebrians on 05 Feb 22 no follow-up yet
Charles Fowler

Why I Gave Up Flipped Instruction - 42 views

  • It has nothing to do with videos, or homework, or the latest fad in education. It has everything to do with who owns the learning.
  • No. The thing that I didn’t expect was that my students created flexible groups, depending on what they were working on. They found peers who were working on the same concept they were, so that they could help each other. Sometimes they realized who they couldn’t work with on a particular day, and found a different group of peers to work with instead. And to solidify what my students were learning, we engaged in hands-on activities and labs that actually used the Chemistry concepts they were studying.
  • When I first encountered the flip, it seemed like a viable way to help deal with the large and sometimes burdensome amount of content
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  • I imagined the flip as a stepping stone to a fully realized inquiry/PBL classroom
  • Lest anyone think we were able to do this because we learn in a high-tech school, that’s not the case. We weren’t a 1:1 classroom. We used whatever devices my students had, which often was a couple of iPads, a few computers, and student cell phones.
  • Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth
  • Learning isn’t simply a matter of passively absorbing new information while watching a lecture on video; new knowledge should be actively constructed.
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    Great post by Shelly Wright. It's not about the videos.
mlnviets mlnvietss

Gucci's Favorite New Model Has a Secret Side Job - 0 views

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ao khoac nu

started by mlnviets mlnvietss on 10 Jun 15 no follow-up yet
Tero Toivanen

Digital Citizenship | the human network - 0 views

  • The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system.
  • While some may be content to sit on the sidelines and wait until this cultural reorganization plays itself out, as educators you have no such luxury. Everything hits you first, and with full force. You are embedded within this change, as much so as this generation of students.
  • We make much of the difference between “digital immigrants”, such as ourselves, and “digital natives”, such as these children. These kids are entirely comfortable within the digital world, having never known anything else. We casually assume that this difference is merely a quantitative facility. In fact, the difference is almost entirely qualitative. The schema upon which their world-views are based, the literal ‘rules of their world’, are completely different.
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  • The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.
  • We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.
  • As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village.
  • The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.
  • Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.
  • We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.
  • We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins.
  • A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.
  • before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.
  • Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK.
  • Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.
  • As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.
  • Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent.
  •  
    Mark Pesce: Digital Citizenship and the future of Education.
Fabian Aguilar

Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Orchestrating the Media Collage - 0 views

  • Public narrative embraces a number of specialty literacies, including math literacy, research literacy, and even citizenship literacy, to name a few. Understanding the evolving nature of literacy is important because it enables us to understand the emerging nature of illiteracy as well. After all, regardless of the literacy under consideration, the illiterate get left out.
  • Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient.
  • The act of creating original media forces students to lift the hood, so to speak, and see media's intricate workings that conspire to do one thing above all others: make the final media product appear smooth, effortless, and natural. "Writing media" compels reflection about reading media, which is crucial in an era in which professional media makers view young people largely in terms of market share.
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  • As part of their own intellectual retooling in the era of the media collage, teachers can begin by experimenting with a wide range of new media to determine how they best serve their own and their students' educational interests. A simple video can demonstrate a science process; a blog can generate an organic, integrated discussion about a piece of literature; new media in the form of games, documentaries, and digital stories can inform the study of complex social issues; and so on. Thus, a corollary to this guideline is simply, "Experiment fearlessly." Although experts may claim to understand the pedagogical implications of media, the reality is that media are evolving so quickly that teachers should trust their instincts as they explore what works. We are all learning together.
  • Both essay writing and blog writing are important, and for that reason, they should support rather than conflict with each other. Essays, such as the one you are reading right now, are suited for detailed argument development, whereas blog writing helps with prioritization, brevity, and clarity. The underlying shift here is one of audience: Only a small portion of readers read essays, whereas a large portion of the public reads Web material. Thus, the pressure is on for students to think and write clearly and precisely if they are to be effective contributors to the collective narrative of the Web.
  • The demands of digital literacy make clear that both research reports and stories represent important approaches to thinking and communicating; students need to be able to understand and use both forms. One of the more exciting pedagogical frontiers that awaits us is learning how to combine the two, blending the critical thinking of the former with the engagement of the latter. The report–story continuum is rich with opportunity to blend research and storytelling in interesting, effective ways within the domain of new media.
  • The new media collage depends on a combination of individual and collective thinking and creative endeavor. It requires all of us to express ourselves clearly as individuals, while merging our expression into the domain of public narrative. This can include everything from expecting students to craft a collaborative media collage project in language arts classes to requiring them to contribute to international wikis and collective research projects about global warming with colleagues they have never seen. What is key here is that these are now "normal" kinds of expression that carry over into the world of work and creative personal expression beyond school.
  • Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.
  • Fluency is the ability to practice literacy at the advanced levels required for sophisticated communication within social and workplace environments. Digital fluency facilitates the language of leadership and innovation that enables us to translate our ideas into compelling professional practice. The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.
  • Digital fluency is much more of a perspective than a technical skill set. Teachers who are truly digitally fluent will blend creativity and innovation into lesson plans, assignments, and projects and understand the role that digital tools can play in creating academic expectations that are authentically connected, both locally and globally, to their students' lives.
  • Focus on expression first and technology second—and everything will fall into place.
Tero Toivanen

Music and the Brain - 0 views

  • A little known fact about Einstein is that when he was young he did extremely poor in school. His grade school teachers told his parents to take him out of school because he was "too stupid to learn" and it would be a waste of resources for the school to invest time and energy in his education. The school suggested that his parents get Albert an easy, manual labor job as soon as they could.
  • Instead of following the school's advice, Albert's parents bought him a violin. Albert became good at the violin. Music was the key that helped Albert Einstein become one of the smartest men who has ever lived. Einstein himself says that the reason he was so smart is because he played the violin. He loved the music of Mozart and Bach the most. A friend of Einstein, G.J. Withrow, said that the way Einstein figured out his problems and equations was by improvising on the violin.
  • Another example of how rhythm orders movement is an autistic boy who could not tie his shoes. He learned how on the second try when the task of tying his shoes was put to a song. The rhythm helped organize his physical movements in time.
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  • Classical music from the baroque period causes the heart beat and pulse rate to relax to the beat of the music. As the body becomes relaxed and alert, the mind is able to concentrate more easily. Furthermore, baroque music decreases blood pressure and enhances the ability to learn. Music affects the amplitude and frequency of brain waves, which can be measured by an electro-encephalogram. Music also affects breathing rate and electrical resistance of the skin. It has been observed to cause the pupils to dilate, increase blood pressure, and increase the heart rate.
  • Mozart's music and baroque music, with a 60 beats per minute beat pattern, activate the left and right brain. The simultaneous left and right brain action maximizes learning and retention of information. The information being studied activates the left brain while the music activates the right brain. Also, activities which engage both sides of the brain at the same time, such as playing an instrument or singing, causes the brain to be more capable of processing information.
  • According to The Center for New Discoveries in Learning, learning potential can be increased a minimum of five times by using this 60 beats per minute music.
  • Dr. Lozanov's system involved using certain classical music pieces from the baroque period which have around a 60 beats per minute pattern. He has proven that foreign languages can be learned with 85-100% efficiency in only thirty days by using these baroque pieces. His students had a recall accuracy rate of almost 100% even after not reviewing the material for four years.
  • Group 1 was read the words with Handel's Water Music in the background. They were also asked to imagine the words. Group 2 was read the same words also with Handel's Water Music in the background. Group 2 was not asked to imagine the words. Group 3 was only read the words, was not given any background music, and was also not asked to imagine the words. The results from the first two tests showed that groups 1 and 2 had much better scores than group 3. The results from the third test, a week later, showed that group 1 performed much better than groups 2 or 3.
  • One simple way students can improve test scores is by listening to certain types of music such as Mozart's Sonata for Two Piano's in D Major before taking a test. This type of music releases neurons in the brain which help the body to relax.
  • William Balach, Kelly Bowman, and Lauri Mohler, all from Pennsylvania State University, studied the effects of music genre and tempo on memory retention. They had four groups learn vocabulary words using one of four instrumental pieces - slow classical, slow jazz, fast classical, and fast jazz.
  • Surprisingly, the results showed that changing the genre had no effect on recall but changing the tempo decreased recall.
  • One key ingredient to the order of music from the baroque and classical periods is math. This is realized by the body and the human mind performs better when listening to this ordered music.
  • George recognized that Saul overcame his problems by using special music. With this story in mind King George asked George Frederick Handel to write some special music for him that would help him in the same way that music helped Saul. Handel wrote his Water Music for this purpose.
  • Dr. Ballam goes on to say that, "The human mind shuts down after three or four repetitions of a rhythm, or a melody, or a harmonic progression."
  • Bob Larson, a Christian minister and former rock musician, remembers that in the 70's teens would bring raw eggs to a rock concert and put them on the front of the stage. The eggs would be hard boiled by the music before the end of the concert and could be eaten. Dr. Earl W. Flosdorf and Dr. Leslie A. Chambers showed that proteins in a liquid medium were coagulated when subjected to piercing high-pitched sounds
  • Rock music was played in one of the boxes while Bach's music was played in the other box. The rats could choose to switch boxes through a tunnel that connected both boxes. Almost all of the rats chose to go into the box with the Bach music even after the type of music was switched from one box to the other.
  • She found that the plants grew well for almost every type of music except rock and acid rock. Jazz, classical, and Ravi Shankar turned out to be the most helpful to the plants. However, the plants tested with the rock music withered and died. The acid rock music also had negative effects on the plant growth.
  • One cannot deny the power of music. High school students who study music have higher grade point averages that those who don't. These students also develop faster physically. Student listening skills are also improved through music education. The top three schools in America all place a great emphasis on music and the arts. Hungary, Japan, and the Netherlands, the top three academic countries in the world, all place a great emphasis on music education and participation in music. The top engineers from Silicon Valley are all musicians. Napoleon understood the enormous power of music. He summed it up by saying, "Give me control over he who shapes the music of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws" .
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    Mozart's music and baroque music, with a 60 beats per minute beat pattern, activate the left and right brain. The simultaneous left and right brain action maximizes learning and retention of information. The information being studied activates the left brain while the music activates the right brain. Also, activities which engage both sides of the brain at the same time, such as playing an instrument or singing, causes the brain to be more capable of processing information.
Dennis OConnor

John Quincy Adams, Twitterer? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • They may be two centuries old, but, written with staccato-like brevity, entries from one of Adams’s diaries resemble tweets sufficiently that they began appearing Wednesday on Twitter.
  • The diary, which Adams maintained until April 1836, is a rarity among the many he kept, in that the description for each day is no more than one line long. Historians believe he used the descriptions as references to longer entries in other journals.
  • The posts will link to maps that, using the latitude and longitude coordinates from his entries, pinpoint his progress across the ocean. There will also be links to the longer entries of other Adams diaries, which can be found on the society’s Web site, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/.
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  • Word spread, and the society decided to tweet the entries. They average 110 to 120 characters, below the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, and there is nary an LOL or BFF among them.
  • The idea appears to be working. As of Wednesday evening, only nine hours after the first entry was Twittered, the post had more than 4,800 followers, and Mr. Dibbell said the number was climbing.
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    Clever use of social networking tech. The initial take on twitter was that it just broadcast mindless sort personal observations. This use turns that idea around. Interesting way to teach a bit of history. What if we started tweeting Basho & Issa, the great Japanese haiku poets? Hmmm sounds like a fun lit project doesn't it?
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