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Nigel Coutts

Learning to love teach meets - The Learner's Way - 10 views

  •  
    There is a growing momentum in education driven by a desire to share our practice and learn from our colleagues. Increasingly teachers are finding ways to break free of their classrooms and share their ideas. Collaborations in the interests of unlocking the collective potential of the profession are spreading within and importantly between schools. For many these collaborative endeavours and desires are satisfied by online communities but for many the possibility for a face to face conversation is more alluring.
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.
Paul Beaufait

Skype Announces Collaboration with Prominent Organizations to Further Empower Teachers with Educational Resources through Technology - Exec Digital - 21 views

  • Skype in the classroom strives to enrich students' learning experiences to discover new cultures, languages and ideas without leaving the classroom. 
  • Skype in the classroom strives to enrich students' learning experiences to discover new cultures, languages and ideas without leaving the classroom.  Skype in the classroom now features each individual organization's dynamic content, projects and available guest speakers
  • To join Skype in the classroom and view these exclusive resources, teachers should: Sign up at education.skype.com using their Skype account details Create a profile which includes their interests, location and the age groups they teach Once complete, teachers will have full range to explore the Skype in the classroom organization microsites, utilize vast content from these organizations and engage in conversations with select guest experts. For more information or to register for Skype in the classroom, please visit http://education.skype.com.
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    Press release about Skype in the classroom
Tero Toivanen

Times Higher Education - From where I sit - Everyone wins in this free-for-all - 11 views

  • The term open educational resources (OER) encapsulates the simple but powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good. The internet offers unprecedented opportunities to share, use and reuse knowledge. Sadly, most of the planet is underserved when it comes to post-secondary education.
  • But while in our research we have no problem with sharing and building on the ideas of others, in education the perception is that we must lock teaching materials behind restrictive copyright barriers that minimise sharing.
  • Sometimes universities justify this position on the grounds that the open licensing of courses will damage their advantage in the student recruitment market. These publicly funded institutions expect taxpayers to pay twice for learning materials.
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  • Individuals are free to learn from OER hosted on the open web. It is, therefore, plausible that we can design and develop an "OER university" that will provide free learning for all students worldwide.
  • Working with Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and Athabasca University in Canada as founding anchor partners, we aim to help provide flexible pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credentials and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit services under the community service mission of modern universities.
  • The OER Foundation will host an open planning meeting on 23 February to lay the foundations for this significant intervention. With support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the meeting will be streamed on the web, and we invite all educational leaders to join us at this meeting in planning for the mainstream adoption of OER in post-secondary institutions.
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    The term open educational resources (OER) encapsulates the simple but powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good. The internet offers unprecedented opportunities to share, use and reuse knowledge. Sadly, most of the planet is underserved when it comes to post-secondary education.
Nigel Coutts

Organisational Learning - The Learner's Way - 8 views

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    For schools the concept of a learning organisation should make perfect sense, after all learning is our core business, or it should be. Perhaps that almost three decades after Peter Senge identified the importance of learning within organisations the idea is only now gaining traction in schools tells us something about the approach taken to learning and teaching within schools. With an increased focus on the development of professional learning communities as a response to the complex challenges that emerge from a rapidly changing society, it is worth looking at what a learning organisation requires for success.
Nigel Coutts

Learning to learn with a MakerSpace - The Learner's Way - 15 views

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    Making, Maker Centred Learning and STEAM fit neatly alongside Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) for many schools. Commonly this approach includes a constructivist view of knowledge and teachers seek to establish conditions which allow students to explore questions and ideas with greater independence than may occur in the traditional classroom.  Learning becomes a collaborative partnership between teachers and students with a clear focus on a learner centric approach.
sadianazeer

Beyond Knowing Facts, How Do We Get to a Deeper Level of Learning? - 21 views

  • The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new — great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there’s a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation.
  • So what defines deeper learning? This group has identified six competencies: mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets.
  • “Before we assess, we need to know what we are assessing for,” said Marc Chun, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. What does effective collaboration look like? What does it really look like to be a critical thinker? These skill are more oriented towards process than content, making them difficult to assess in a standardized way.
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    Schwartz (2014.02.28) acknowledged that approaches fostering deeper learning are not new, and pointed out related competencies derived from a MOOC. She also highlighted challenges of assessing such competencies.
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    Schwartz (2014.02.28) acknowledged that approaches fostering deeper learning are not new, and pointed out related competencies derived from a MOOC. She also highlighted challenges of assessing such competencies.
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    .
Nigel Coutts

Reflections from The Future of Education Conference - The Learner's Way - 5 views

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    The Future of Education is a topic often discussed, and at the recent gathering of educators in Florence, it was the title and theme for the conference. Now in its ninth year, The Future of Education is an international conference that attracts educators from around the world and across all domains touched by education. The conference is an inspiring two days of discussion and sharing, with the city of Florence, the centre of the Renaissance, providing a constant reminder of what might be possible when creativity and critical thinking combine. Here are my key takeaways from this event.
Maggie Tsai

Online Teaching and Learning: Makin' Whuffie - 0 views

  • A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.
  • Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.
  • Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.
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  • Social capital is a natural and logical consequence/reward of a student's (or anyone's) online behavior and contributions, and as such, it is a powerful tool for educators to include in their online courses to ensure student engagement and retention.
    • Maggie Tsai
       
      Good points. On Group bookmarks we have votes now. Will be adding more meaningful (ie. taken anti-spam into consideration) contribution attributes to reward user participation!
  • A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.
  • If you want to truly learn something, there is nothing like teaching it, so allowing, in fact encouraging, students to help one another solve problems, to teach each other, increases learning for both the helper and the helped.
  • A group can gain social capital by being proud of what it creates and getting positive feedback from other groups. A chance for students, whether working as individuals or in collaborative groups, to give feedback to each other is a valuable tool for creating a greater sense of community and engagement toward common goals.
  • Bookmarking, Sharing, Highlighting, and Annotating Online Resources:Diigo is a great tool for Educators, because you can form a group, and share bookmarks, which each member can highlight and comment on. Diigo is a fantastic tool for sharing resources and collaborating. Now, they have come out with Diigo for Educators, to make it even better!
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    Thoughtful article on "social capital" Educator Tools and Links for Creating Community (and opportunities for students to develop social capital):
Roland Gesthuizen

Paula Smith: Education 2020 -- An Emerging Consensus About Learning - 0 views

  • we need to add a truly human dimension to our educational benchmarks
  • First, an increasing number of people have concluded that we need to add a truly human dimension to our educational benchmarks.
  • if a lower school subject area like hands-on science is taught in a way that students understand, they go on to high school and college and explore biology, chemistry and physics with greater enthusiasm
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  • the new key metrics must be whether students find school interesting; whether the material challenges them; and whether they actually like school enough to continue their studies.
  • there are no limitations on what children can learn
  • children are preparing themselves to become lifelong learners when they question, analyze, compare, collaborate and listen in the classroom
  • teaching must be individualized and responsive to each student's talents, way of thinking and level of understanding
  • teachers act as coaches who model thinking, planning, risk-taking and reflection for children
  • Technology is transforming how we think about education today.
  • practice over time, plus motivation and mentoring, yields excellence and mastery
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    "as we contemplate 2020, I'm certain that there won't be one model, one benchmark, one standard, one curriculum, or one teacher training program that ultimately helps us reach our educational goals. But I strongly believe that a decade from now we'll be able to look back and know that we made learning more interesting for each and every child in our country"
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    How to make learning interesting for everybody.
anonymous

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • ess important for students to know, memorize, or recall information
  • more important
  • to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information
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  • move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able
  • “information revolution”
  • new ways of relating
  • discourse,
  • social revolution, not a technological one
  • new forms of
  • Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking
  • nspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.
  • important
  • “spirit” of Web 2.0
  • new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating.
  • technology is secondary.
  • empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship
  • dea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.
  • mportance of the form of learning over the content of learning
  • teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world.
  • We can't “teach” them. We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
    • anonymous
       
      Einstein - I don't each my pupils. I just create the environment in which they can learn
  • love and respect your students and they will love and respect you back. With the underlying feeling of trust and respect this provides, students quickly realize the importance of their role as co-creators of the learning environment and they begin to take responsibility for their own education.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. The beauty of the current moment is that new media has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment. There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the questions that drive us on.
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?
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.
Tero Toivanen

Study on the Effective Use of Social Software by UK FE & HE to Support Student Learning & Engagement : JISC - 0 views

  • This study provides insights about
  • educational goals of using social software tools; enablers or drivers within the institution, or from external sources which positively influence the adoption of social software; benefits to the students, educators and institutions; challenges that may influence a social software initiative; and issues that need to be considered in a social software initiative.
  • social software tools support a variety of ways of learning: sharing of resources (eg bookmarks, photographs), collaborative learning, problem-based and inquiry-based learning, reflective learning, and peer-to-peer learning.
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  • The educator’s role is changing from being a provider of information to a facilitator or moderator
  • adjusting to a ‘new’ way of teaching.
  • The results highlight the different pedagogical roles of social software: communication, nurturing creativity and innovation, and collaborative learning.
  •  
    Study on the Effective Use of Social Software by UK FE & HE to Support Student Learning & Engagement
Nigel Coutts

Collaboration & Connectedness the Key to Quality Teaching - 25 views

  •  
    Most teachers recognise the potential for collaboration between students and the importance of it as a component of a 21st Century education and yet many do not take full advantage of the opportunities they have for collaboration as teachers.
  •  
    goodby 2015 welcome 2016 to all friends
Peter Shanks

21st Century Skills are so last century! - 64 views

  • Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes – it’s an obsession. They text, MSN, BBM, Myspace, Facebook, Facebook message, Facebook chat and Skype. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there’s Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in parties when playing games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. Then along comes someone who wants to teach them this so called 21st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned.
  •  
    "I'm always amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we even have the skills we claim we want to teach. There is no area of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education."
Philippe Scheimann

A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

  • It has taken years of acclimatizing our youth to stale artificial environments, piles of propaganda convincing them that what goes on inside these environments is of immense importance, and a steady hand of discipline should they ever start to question it.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      There is a huge investment in resources, time, and tradition from the teacher, the instutions, the society, and--importantly--the students. Students have invested much more time (proportional to their short lives) in learning how to be skillful at the education game. Many don't like teachers changing the rules of the game just when they've become proficient at it.
  • Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      So we (teachers and students) are willing to endure a little (or a lot) of uncomfortableness in order to pursue that love of learning.
  • They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed.
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  • While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
  • And that’s what has been wrong all along. Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”
  • We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
  • At the root of your question is a much more interesting observation that many of the styles of self-directed learning now enabled through technology are in conflict with the traditional teacher-student relationship. I don’t think the answer is to annihilate that relationship, but to rethink it.
  • Personally, I increasingly position myself as the manager of a learning environment in which I also take part in the learning. This can only happen by addressing real and relevant problems and questions for which I do not know the answers. That’s the fun of it. We become collaborators, with me exploring the world right along with my students.
  • our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.
  •  
    useful article , I need to finish it and look at this 'famous clip' that had 1 million viewers
Richard Fanning

The Educator's PLN - The personal learning network for educators - 31 views

  • This is a ning site dedicated to the support of a Personal Learning Network for Educators
  •  
    This is a ning site dedicated to the support of a Personal Learning Network for Educators.
Cheska Lorena

Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office - Essentials: Tools for Teachers - 0 views

  •  
    "Learning Essentials has been designed with teachers for teachers to help make best use of precious planning time, create top-quality learning experiences and speed through every-day administrative tasks. With more than 117 templates and 38 tutorials developed in collaboration with leading education publishers, Learning Essentials helps you get the most out of your Office applications. "
lawagner

Writing Center Staff | Wilk - 0 views

  • delightful
  • gut-wrenching descent
    • lawagner
       
      Thesis: understanding the differences and cultural factors will help with some guidelines for communicating with ESL students/tutees, thus leading to more beneficial tutoring sessions.
  • ...56 more annotations...
    • lawagner
       
      Introduction
  • severe
  • ittle headway
  • communications gap.
  • made in the paper.
  • struggled
  • in my explanations
    • lawagner
       
      Since the first paragraph identified the problem and stated the solution, the reader needs to understand what is causing the probelm
  • cultural factors plague important aspects of ESL communications in the writing center.
  • ack of a shared linguistic knowledge base,
  • ifferences in the educational, rhetorical, and cultural contexts of their language
  • acquisition
  • learning
  • subconsciously incorporating of linguistic forms through reading and listening.
  • consciously assimilating rules and forms through study and instruction.
    • lawagner
       
      What causes the communication gap/ differences between what the ESL learner wrote and what the tutor is trying communicate as errors
  • Understanding those differences helps in formulating beneficial principles of communication
  • rhetorical models are quite diverse
  • In some cultures, one would be considered rude or abrupt to announce one's point immediately.
    • lawagner
       
      Socratic dialogue vs didactic context (lecture and passive learning)
  • Socratic dialogue
    • lawagner
       
      The tutor takes on the role of collaborator and is an authoritative figure based on didactic tutoring. Tutors don't need to know all the answers, but it seems this paragraph is saying start by using didactic tutoring and move towards Socratic dialogue.
  • didactic context
    • lawagner
       
      So we have a communications gap, how do we begin to communicate with the ESL learner. What tutoring style should we use? Didactic context and communicate collaboratively, but realize that tutor is more of an authoritative figure, telling/informing the tutee of what he/she must do.
  • shared assumptions and patterns of language
  • apply a principle they have learned to a grammar error.
  • communicate collaboratively
  • ole as cultural/rhetorical informants as well as collaborators.
  • Cultural differences in body language
  • attitudes and preferences
  • The acceptability of degrees of physical proximity and eye contact differ between cultures.
    • lawagner
       
      Cultural differences in body language (speaking without speaking), attitudes and preferences need to be known so that the tutor and tutee may communicate effectively. Examples of these cultural differences are given: Latin American, Arabic, Asian, and Chinese.
    • lawagner
       
      When I have gone to a new country, such as Zambia and Mexico, I looked up the ways in which to communicate with folks there, forbidden hand gesture, is shaking hands okay. In some culture they kiss each other on the cheek as a greeting. Ignorance towards body language, attitudes, and preferences may drive an eternal wedge between the tutor and tutee. This is a huge part of understanding cultural differences.
  • it down first and allow the student to establish comfortable body positioning
  • ake body language cues from the writer
  • encouraging the student to speak up or ask questions
    • lawagner
       
      This paragraph answers a question Writing Centers, directors and tutors may wonder: Do I have to know everything about every culture in order to communicate effectively? When writing essays it's important to keep in mind questions that may arise from the intended audience.
    • lawagner
       
      The tutor does not need to know everything about every culture, rather keenly observe the tutee, and modify behavior when appropriate.
  • utor can foster discourse through slightly modified behavior.
  • temptation to address too many issues in one session
    • lawagner
       
      Another issue with tutoring ESL learners: trying to fix everything at once. They are not the same as a native English speaker and cannot be expected to eat, chew and digest everything put in front of them. You need to pick up the steak knife and cut up the steak into manageable pieces. 
    • lawagner
       
      Native English speaker vs ESL learner; don't tutor them the same Although this paragraph seems slightly out of place and doesn't move the argument forward, it is a reminder that ESL students are tackling the foreign language and cannot be expected to handle the same workload as native speakers.
  • effective communications is best achieved by limiting the topics covered within the session
  • English is not the primary language.
    • lawagner
       
      Going back to ESL learners, a part of understanding cultural differences is understanding that they are coming to me for help with their writing-writing which is in a foreign language to them. Understanding prioritizing is part of the solution when tutoring ESL learner, and all learners consequently.
  • The driving force behind limiting is prioritizing.
  • the primary cultural barrier to communication
    • lawagner
       
      Explaining the differences in mechanics seen in varying languages spoken by other cultures. Patience is key nevertheless.
    • lawagner
       
      So how do tutors not overwhelm the tutees? By prioritizing-what is causing the most issues and go from there.
    • lawagner
       
      Communication barriers lie in the language itself and its attached conversational dialect, transcending into how the ESL learner communicates in their native tongue. * I think this paragraph could be two.
  • ack of fluency in conversational dialect
  • Close observation is a key to interpreting and dispelling cultural interference.
    • lawagner
       
      Summarizing the last several paragraphs; close observation is the key as well as other possible modifications.
    • lawagner
       
      Summarizing the main points is like the Therefore since we know all of this we can understand  the cultural differences between the tutor and ESL tutee and thus eliminate or at least reduce the cultural barriers.
    • lawagner
       
      Conclusion
    • lawagner
       
      A continuance of the last paragraph. All of this information presented  may help or it may not.
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