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Nigel Coutts

The rewards of highly collaborative teams - The Learner's Way - 0 views

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    Not that long ago I was a writer of interesting and engaging educational programmes. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. The programmes that I wrote and shared with a team of teachers were generally well accepted and the feedback offered was always politely positive. I enjoyed writing these programmes but in recent times I have enjoyed even more stepping away from this process and in doing so empowering the team of teachers that I learn with. The programmes that this team produces far exceed the quality I could ever have hoped to produce but more importantly the students are benefiting from their experience of highly engaged and thus engaging teachers.
Mike McIlveen

21centuryedtech - home - 0 views

  • First they promote "a new instructional approach that engages learners". New Tech incorporates project-based learning (PBL) as the center of the instructional approach. PBL is facilitated by technology and student inquiry to engage learners with issues and questions that are relevant. Teachers design rigorous projects tied to state standards and customized to local community and student interests. Students collaborate in teams to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to solve problems. Next, " New Tech builds "a culture that empowers students and teachers". It is trust, respect, and responsibility that become the center of the learning culture. Students are put in charge of their own learning, becoming self-directed learners, while teachers are given the administrative support and resources to assist students in this realization. Last, New Tech maintains that "integrated use of technology" is essential for 21st Century education.
    • Mike McIlveen
       
      Trust, respect, responsibility - putting Character Ed. into practice, with admin. support - that's a new paradigm in my district.
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    New Tech incoporates three key concepts. First they promote "a new instructional approach that engages learners". New Tech incorporates project-based learning (PBL) as the center of the instructional approach. PBL is facilitated by technology and student inquiry to engage learners with issues and questions that are relevant. Teachers design rigorous projects tied to state standards and customized to local community and student interests. Students collaborate in teams to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to solve problems. Next, " New Tech builds "a culture that empowers students and teachers". It is trust, respect, and responsibility that become the center of the learning culture. Students are put in charge of their own learning, becoming self-directed learners, while teachers are given the administrative support and resources to assist students in this realization. Last, New Tech maintains that "integrated use of technology" is essential for 21st Century education
Wendy Windust

WIDE World - Program Overview - 14 views

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    Our goal is to transform school systems by developing professional communities of teachers and school leaders with interactive online courses and on-site support programs that enable schools to cultivate the critical learning students need for the 21st century world. Research-Based. WIDE World professional development programs are based on Teaching for Understanding, a classroom-tested framework developed through research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Online. WIDE World courses are conducted online and are asynchronous. This allows for flexible, adaptive, and convenient learning for all participants, regardless of location or schedule. Job-embedded. Through our courses, WIDE World learners integrate research-based strategies in their own workplace. Online coaches support cycles of learning, applying, and reflecting as teams of educators improve lesson plans, instruction, and data-driven action projects. Team-Based with Coaching. Systemic change requires coordinated effort from all stakeholders. Expert coaches help teachers, leaders, and specialists work in teams to develop a common language for defining and achieving shared goals. Tailored for Local Impact. WIDE World works with you to design professional development programs adapted precisely to address the needs of your school, program, district, or system and build local capacity for continuous improvement. Global Learning. In the online environment, participants collaborate with innovative educators from across the US and around the globe.
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.
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    Mark Pesce: Digital Citizenship and the future of Education.
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