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Bradford Saron

Cognitive Interfund Transfer: The Critical Vocabulary of Web 2.0 Technology - 1 views

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    New blog post
Bradford Saron

Alan Gershenfeld: Game-Based Learning: Hype Vs. Reality - 0 views

  • Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.
  • Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.
  • 24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).
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  • Peer-to-peer learning: Games are increasingly social. Whether they involve guilds or teams jointly accomplishing missions, asynchronous collaboration over social networks or sourcing advice from interest-driven communities to help solve tricky challenges, games naturally drive peer-to-peer and peer-to-mentor social interactions.
  • 21st Century skill development: Games are complex. Whether it is a 5-year-old parsing a Pokemon card or a 15-year-old optimizing a city in SimCity, games can foster critical skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking, digital media literacy, creativity and collaboration. Given that many of the jobs that will emerge in 21st century have not yet been invented, these 'portable' skills are particularly important.
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    Although some of the stats may be uncharacteristic of most of Wisconsin, this seems well presented-especially the bold points of strength for gaming. 
Bradford Saron

A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals (Par... - 1 views

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    Break through article! Great for the vocabulary and greater conversation of reflection.
Bradford Saron

Why Schools Must Move Beyond One-to-One Computing | November Learning - 4 views

  • Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement. Unless clear goals across the curriculum—such as the use of math to solve real problems—are articulated at the outset, one-to-one computing becomes “spray and pray.”
  • Let’s drop the phrase “one-to-one” and refer instead to “one-to- world.”
  • The more important questions revolve around the design of the culture of teaching and learning. For example, how much responsibility of learning can we shift to our students (see Who Owns the Learning by Alan November)? How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world? How can we engage parents in new ways? (See @livefromroom5 on Twitter.) How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?
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  • it’s essential to craft a vision that giving every student a digital device must lead to achievements beyond what we can accomplish with paper.
  • it’s essential to craft a vision that giving every student a digital device must lead to achievements beyond what we can accomplish with paper.
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    A must read for anyone critically thinking about tech integration. 
Bradford Saron

The Innovative Educator - 0 views

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    Lots of dialogue right now on BYOD. Here is another thoughtful rebuttal to the critics of the movement. 
Bradford Saron

Professional Learning Communities: A Popular Reform of Little Consequence? « ... - 0 views

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    You don't often see criticism of PLCs. Especially from such high profile bloggers. 
Bradford Saron

Infographic: How Do Teachers Think We Should Measure Student Achievement? -... - Stumbl... - 0 views

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    Click into the "Launch Infographic" and take a look at this survey. I'm big on looking for subscript and reading beyond the lines. I wonder what this says of rigor, engagement, and mastery essential skills or critical thinking. Suggested further reading to find out about engagement and assessment? Marzano's new book on student engagement. Awesome. My copy actually has real highlighted text all over the pages. 
Bradford Saron

The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

  • The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.
  • How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?
  • social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.
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  • New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before.
  • Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic.
  • THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
  • Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
  • This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called "the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.
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    The power of being digitally social, this is an example in the political arena. This is also what Clay Shirky is talking about in a Cognitive Surplus. This is the power of people collaborating and sharing without consideration of cost, distance, time, copyright, law, etc. Do we want to teach children how to ethically participate in this type of environment? Or, just let them go without any skills or discipline?
Robert Slane

Understanding student weaknesses | Harvard Gazette - 1 views

  • If teachers are to help students change their incorrect beliefs, they first need to know what those are.
  • Knowledge of student misconceptions is a critical tool for science teachers. It can help teachers to decide which demonstration to do in class, and to start the lesson by asking students to predict what’s going to happen. If a teacher doesn’t have this special kind of knowledge, though, it’s nearly impossible to change students’ ideas.
Curt Rees

Donald Clark Plan B - 0 views

  • My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults.
  • Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways.
  • Teaching and lecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution.
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  • Beware of big, abstract nouns.
  • When it comes to creativity, my own view is that the music, drama and other creative skills my own offspring have gained, have mostly been acquired outside of school.
  • Universities were failing badly on the three skills they studied; critical thinking, complex reasoning and communications
  • Across the Arab world young people have collaborated on Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to bring down entire regimes. Not one of them has been on a digital literacy course.
  • Pushing rounded, sophisticated, informal skills into a square, subject-defined environment is not the answer.
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    This is very thought-provoking, especially the section on collaboration. 
Bradford Saron

Chris Hedges: Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System - Chris Hedges' ... - 0 views

  • A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
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    Via @mcleod
Robert Slane

Caitlin Barry: Defining 'Media Literacy' - 1 views

  • The problem is not with the teachers, but with the very definition of 'media literacy' itself. What is it, really? Can we swap the term out with 'digital learning' or 'ed tech' or 'culturally relevant education'? If so, all these terms are essentially meaningless. A student learning how to use an iPad in the classroom is not the same as a student asking critical questions of the messages in television. One is about using the media; the other is about analyzing it. These skills are as different as reading and writing. Before we can take any steps toward a national media curriculum (like the UK has had for a long time), we need to come to a consensus about the meaning of these words. If the average American can easily articulate the difference between reading and writing, he should also be able to quickly explain why we need media in the classroom. Only then can our students get the forward-thinking education that they deserve.
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    How do we define "media literacy". Without a clear definition, teachers may have a hard time knowing how to best to teach its use. 
Bradford Saron

Steven Rattner and the rescue of General Motors : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    The New Yorker just allows Gladwell's current articles to be available without subscription for two or three weeks, so this is only temporarily available. For all you huge Gladwell fans out there, imbibe! 
Bradford Saron

Teaching for America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.
  • There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
  • they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes.
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  • They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.
  • Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher.
  • How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
  • All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that will truly ensure our national security.
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    Here, Friedman analyzes Duncan's new approaches to federally initiated school reform. His last point, however, is very thought provoking. 
Bradford Saron

Educational Leadership:Teaching Screenagers:Three Schools for the 21st - 0 views

  • That future is here, and with it a demand for new essential skills.
  • The school planned its approach and curriculum carefully before it opened, in a way that reflected its core values of inquiry, collaboration, and reflection
  • he students are learning essential skills in communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. They have also learned that social media is not only about socializing, but also about learning from and with their peers—and that their peer group is far broader than they could have imagined.
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  • Several features common to these learning sites can guide other schools interested in transforming teaching and learning with technology as a component. Each of these schools Erased content area boundaries. Units and projects focus on integrating and applying skills. Set up methods to teach and assess students through projects, with the emphasis on doing, not remembering content. Continued to address state standards and perform well on state-assessments. Gave students freedom and responsibility to use digital tools as they see fit, rather than predefining how technology should be used for learning.
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    Three schools, one rural, on tech integration. 
Bradford Saron

A Theory of Everything (Sort Of) - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • It starts with the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. This is the single most important trend in the world today. And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.
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    Must read!
Bradford Saron

Four Hopeful Questions for the Future of Learning - 0 views

  • 1. What if… a community received quarterly dashboard updates correlating the number of community mentoring hours, internships or even online parental homework assistance with critical student success factors such as student attendance, school climate and academic performance?
  • 2. What if… doing something that is good for you, such as enrolling in a spinning class, could offset the electricity costs for schools?
  • 3. What if… we replaced conventional currencies with other value exchanges that made it possible for parents and community members to contribute subject matter expertise or other resources to schools in exchange for extended hour care for their children or use of school facilities?
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  • 4. What if …the more than 55 million K-12 students currently in the US were considered viable partners to crowdsource answers and opportunities to challenges we face?
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    Utilizing technology to communicate better, putting energy onto the grid, and crowdsourcing! 
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