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garth nichols

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs184/1102752268498/archive/1122580804441.html - 1 views

archive.constantcontact.com/...1122580804441.html

feedback coaching PD cohort21

shared by garth nichols on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In my mind, a solid 4 rating means that your adult professional embraces feedback, both formal and informal and has strong systems and processes in place that encourage feedback - things like annual faculty,  parent, and board surveys, intentionally designed evaluation processes for students, faculty, staff and leadership that happen at minimum annually, but even better quarterly, regular audits of programs, curriculum, pedagogy, time and space.  Other good signs that your culture supports feedback might be meetings that end with questions like, "How are we working together as a team/department?" and "What can we do to get better at this work?"  and school leaders who ask their reports with genuine curiosity,  "What can I do to better support your work?"  "What do you think about this idea?" or "How did this meeting go for you?"
  • What if you spent a week "playing anthropologist" with the following question in mind: "What evidence do I see that our adult community has a strong culture of feedback?" 
    • garth nichols
      garth nichols on 23 Oct 15
       
      Love these questions of educators!
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • pend some time with colleagues. Ask them questions about their classes.  See how many times you hear someone ask questions like: "What do you think about this?"  "Will you come by my class and let me know what you think about this lesson I am teaching?"  "How can I/we do this better?"  Attend meetings with this question in mind.  How receptive are team members to feedback they get in meetings?
  • talk Feedback Without Frustration.  This 15 minute video offers some key habits and practices that designers (and educational leaders in their roles as experience designers) can adopt in order to make feedback more meaningful, especially when presenting a new idea or product and much of which can be applied to feedback - both formal and informal.  A few tips include:taking responsibility for the feedback you are gettinggoing after the kind of feedback you wanthaving a designated facilitator for more significant processeshaving goals for the project that you can use to make the feedback more helpfulnot confusing what you like/don't like with what is good/bad(most importantly) just getting better at talking to each other.
  • garth nichols on 23 Oct 15
     
    For those of us who lead teachers; for those of us who seek feedback from others; and for those of us who want to buid a culture of sharing and feedback, this is a great read!
garth nichols

The chasm between high school and university - 0 views

www.thespec.com/...een-high-school-and-university

designing high school university

shared by garth nichols on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Let's start with the secondary system. As this level of education becomes significantly student focused, there are many of us in the system who fear we are coddling students in the extreme and not preparing them at all for the realities of the work world or college/university. Here are samples of policies, largely instituted by the Ministry of Education, that added together, have lead to concerns re: coddling.
  • •Late work: Student work is not penalized for lateness. Late work is viewed as a behavioural issue, not an academic one. •Plagiarism: This is also seen as a behavioural issue, and usually does not result in any academic penalty, even in a grade 12 University level course. •Evaluation: Policies are moving away from grades being derived from an average of all student assignments in favour of a more general approach that reflects "most recent and/or most consistent" achievement. •Lower limits: Students getting failing grades are assessed by this policy which requires teachers to give a mark of 30 to students who are, on paper, achieving anywhere from 1-29 per cent. This is designed to 'give them hope' of success. •Credit rescue/recovery: A policy designed to give students who fail a course the opportunity to make up key missed work with the goal of achieving a passing grade. •Memorization: The idea of students actually memorizing material is viewed as "old fashioned" and is rejected in favour of "inquiry based learning'." The world of the university student is decidedly different, as evidenced by their policies. •Late work: Most courses do not accept late work. Period. •Plagiarism: This is viewed as academic dishonesty, and harsh academic penalties are in place. •Evaluation: Most courses feature few evaluations that are weighted heavily, and grades are based on the average of all assignments. •Evaluation: The move toward knowledge-based evaluation is epidemic. Exams, even in courses like literature studies and philosophy, are commonly multiple choice and short answer exams.
  • •If students are trained for the 14 years they attend school that there really are few consequences to academic problems, how will they fare in the much more rigorous world of post-secondary education? A history professor recently asked me what we (high school teachers) were doing to our kids.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The idea that we have largely abandoned 'knowledge based learning' in no way prepares students for the new reality of university
  • As for the world of work, students who have struggled to graduate by submitting work late, gaining credits through credit rescue, and who have not developed responsibility for their work may improve rates of graduation, but will not serve them in the work world, where the safety nets they have come to rely on do not exist.
  • garth nichols on 19 Jan 16
     
    Interesting perspective on how the MoE is/is not preparing our students for post-secondary and the work force
Derek Doucet

The Flipped Classroom Model: A Full Picture | User Generated Education - 2 views

usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/...classroom-model-a-full-picture

Flipped flipped classroom edtech SAMR cohort21

shared by Derek Doucet on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating.
  • compiled resource page of the Flipped Classroom (with videos and links) can be found at http://www.scoop.it/t/the-flipped-classroom
  • Cisco in a recent white paper, Video: How Interactivity and Rich Media Change Teaching and Learning, presents the benefits of video in the classroom: Establishes dialogue and idea exchange between students, educators, and subject matter experts regardless of locations. Lectures become homework and class time is used for collaborative student work, experiential exercises, debate, and lab work. Extends access to scarce resources, such as specialized teachers and courses, to more students, allowing them to learn from the best sources and maintain access to challenging curriculum. Enables students to access courses at higher-level institutions, allowing them to progress at their own pace. Prepares students for a future as global citizens. Allows them to meet students and teachers from around the world to experience their culture, language, ideas, and shared experiences. Allows students with multiple learning styles and abilities to learn at their own pace and through traditional models.
    • Derek Doucet
      Derek Doucet on 17 Oct 14
       
      Students need to be shown how to make connections to these experts... 
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Experiential Engagement: The Activity
  • he Flipped Classroom Model
  • The cycle often begins with an experiential exercise.  This is an authentic, often hands-on learning activity that fully engages the student. 
  • They explore what the experts have to say about the topic.  Information is presented via video lecture, content-rich websites and simulations like PHET and/or online text/readings.
  • Conceptual Connections: The What
  • Meaning Making: The So What
  • Learners reflect on their understanding of what was discovered during the previous phases.  It is a phase of deep reflection on what was experienced during the first phase and what was learned via the experts during the second phase.
  • Demonstration and Application: The Now What
  • During this phase, learners get to demonstrate what they learned and apply the material in a way that makes sense to them. This goes beyond reflection and personal understanding in that learners have to create something that is individualized and extends beyond the lesson with applicability to the learners’ everyday lives.  This is in line with the highest level of learning within Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Learning – Creating - whereby the learner creates a new product or point of view. In essence, they become the storytellers of their learning (See Narratives in the 21st Century: Narratives in Search of Contexts).  A list of technology-enhanced ideas/options for the celebration of learning can be found at: http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/a-technology-enhanced-celebration-of-learning/
l5johnso

The Other 21st Century Skills | User Generated Education - 0 views

usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/...the-other-21st-century-skills

cohort21

shared by l5johnso on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Education as it should be – passion-based. The Other 21st Century Skills with 19 comments Many have attempted to identify the skills important for a learner today in this era of the 21st century (I know it is an overused phrase).  I have an affinity towards the skills identified by Tony Wagner: Critical thinking and problem-solving Collaboration across networks and leading by influence Agility and adaptability Initiative and entrepreneurialism Effective oral and written communication Accessing and analyzing information Curiosity and imagination   http://www.tonywagner.com/7-survival-skills Today I viewed a slideshow created by Gallup entitled, The Economics of Human Development: The Path to Winning Again in Education. Here are some slides from this presentation. This
  • presentation sparked my thinking about what other skills and attributes would serve the learners (of all ages) in this era of learning.  Some other ones that I believe important based on what I hear at conferences, read via blogs and other social networks include: Grit Resilience Hope and Optimism Vision Self-Regulation Empathy and Global Stewardship
  • Self-regulation is a complex process involving numerous motivational, affective, cognitive, physiological and behavioral factors that individuals proactively direct and manage in order to attain self-set goals (Zeidner, Boekaerts, & Pintrich, 2000). It is a broad construct incorporating behaviors and strategies utilized by individuals across their lifespan to modulate or control their own emotional and behavioral responses. Students who self-regulate believe that they are responsible for their own learning and are more adept at dictating what, where, and how their learning occurs (Bandura, 2006). These students often persist longer through academic tasks and display higher levels of motivation and achievement (Schunk & Ertmer, 2000; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001)
Justin Medved

Comics in Education: Interview with Dr. Glen Downey - 0 views

editingeverything.com/...-interview-with-dr-glen-downey

comics

shared by Justin Medved on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Justin Medved on 03 Apr 14
     
    "Comics began to take a foothold in the classroom about a decade ago when educators realized that visual narrative could be used to engage reluctant and struggling readers. Because comics and graphic novels marry the textual with the visual, they help those who find reading challenging by allowing them to see what the vocabulary they are reading looks like. As well, comics and graphic novels break language up into far more manageable units than a traditional text-based novel. At the same time, visual narratives can be just as complex and engaging, so the student gets the benefit of seeing the story unfold, having the text divided into more manageable units, and making connections between new vocabulary words and the images that represent them."
garth nichols

great technology requires an understanding of the humans who use it - 0 views

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edtech cohort21

shared by garth nichols on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Clearly, MIT BLOSSOMS (the name stands for Blended Learning Open Source Science Or Math Studies) isn’t gaining fans by virtue of its whiz-bang technology. Rather, it exerts its appeal through an unassuming but remarkably sophisticated understanding of what it is that students and teachers actually need. It’s an understanding that is directly at odds with the assumptions of most of the edtech universe.
  • For example: BLOSSOMS is not “student-centered.” In its Twitter profile, the program is described as “teacher-centric”—heresy at a moment when teachers are supposed to be the “guide on the side,” not the “sage on the stage.” The attention of students engaged in a BLOSSOMS lesson, it’s expected, will be directed at the “guest teacher” on the video or at the classroom teacher leading the interactive session.
  • All this is blasphemy in view of the hardening orthodoxy of the edtech establishment. And all this is perfectly aligned with what research in psychology and cognitive science tells us about how students learn. We know that students do not make optimal choices when directing their own learning; especially when they’re new to a subject, they need guidance from an experienced teacher. We know that students do not learn deeply or lastingly when they have a world of distractions at their fingertips. And we know that students learn best not as isolated units but as part of a socially connected group. Modest as it is from a technological perspective, MIT BLOSSOMS is ideally designed for learning—a reminder that more and better technology does not always lead to more and better education.
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  • The creators of BLOSSOMS also candidly acknowledge that many teachers are threatened by the technology moving into their classrooms—and that they have reason to feel that way. Champions of educational technology often predict (with barely disguised glee) that computers will soon replace teachers, and school districts are already looking to edtech as a way to reduce teaching costs. The message to teachers from the advocates of technology is often heard as: Move aside, or get left behind.
  • Should the creators of educational technology care so much about the tender feelings of teachers, especially those inclined to stand in the way of technological progress? Yes—because it’s teachers who determine how well and how often technology is used.
  • Edtech proponents who think that technology can “disrupt” or “transform” education on its own would do well to take a lesson from the creators of BLOSSOM, who call their program’s blend of computers and people a “teaching duet.” Their enthusiasm for the possibilities of technology is matched by an awareness of the limits of human nature. 
  • garth nichols on 17 Jul 14
     
    A very important message to all who are trying to integrate Tech into their school...
Justin Medved

Thinking Skills Club - Home - 0 views

www.thinkingskillsclub.com

executive functions

shared by Justin Medved on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Brain Puzzle The Thinking Skills Club organizes fun, cognitively enriching games into a curriculum disguised as a brain puzzle. The puzzle pieces fill with colour as games are passed in all 6 areas of the site: Executive Function, Problem Solving, Memory, Processing Speed, Social Skills and Attention.
garth nichols

Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learnin... - 2 views

www.slate.com/...and_technological_gadgets.html

multitasking edtech

shared by garth nichols on 05 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.
  • tudents’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.
  • The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.
  • garth nichols on 05 Jan 15
     
    Why digital multitasking is inhibiting our learning
garth nichols

Do girls learn differently? - 2 views

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girls coeducation STEM

shared by garth nichols on 11 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • To hear some ed tech enthusiasts tell it, online learning is sweeping aside the barriers that have in the past prevented access to education. But such pronouncements are premature. As it turns out, students often carry these barriers right along with them, from the real world into the virtual one.
  • These dismally low numbers provide a reminder that “access” to education is more complicated than simply throwing open the digital doors to whoever wants to sign up. So how can we turn the mere availability of online instruction in STEM into true access for female students?
  • One potential solution to this information-age problem comes from an old-fashioned source: single-sex education. The Online School for Girls, founded in 2009, provides an all-female e-learning experience.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But evidence is weak that there is such a thing as “girls’ learning,” online or offline, if what is meant by that is that each gender has cognitive differences that should be accommodated by different instructional methods. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot has argued persuasively that, while small inherent differences in aptitude between males and females do exist (even as infants, for example, boys seem to have an edge in spatial cognition), society takes these small differences and makes them much bigger—by supporting boys in math and science, and by discouraging girls who study these subjects.
  • These same dynamics play out online, as Cheryan demonstrated in a subsequent study. Changing the design of a virtual classroom—from one that conveyed computer science stereotypes to one that did not —“significantly increased women’s interest and anticipated success in computer science,” Cheryan and her colleagues reported.
  • Cheryan notes, “was sufficient to boost female undergraduates’ interest in computer science to the level of their male peers.”
  • Another way to promote female students’ sense of belonging in online math and science courses would be putting more women at the head of virtual classrooms.
  • All these approaches have in common a focus, not on teaching girls and women differently, but on helping them to feel differently about their place in the fields of math and science. Just as in the physical world, in the virtual sphere the barriers to girls’ and women’s advancement in STEM fields remain very much in place. With informed intervention and clever design, however, the digital walls may prove easier to scale.
  • garth nichols on 11 Sep 14
     
    This article is great for those at BSS, Branksome, Havergal, oh and any other school! I was on a panel with Brad Rathgeber, the Director of the OnLine School for Girls, and he was a great speaker on this front...
sallymastro

Mobile Tech in Classrooms Boost English Learners - New America Media - 0 views

newamericamedia.org/...-english-learners-a-leg-up.php

shared by sallymastro on 27 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • when a student asked Nieto if he could bring his iPod to class, Nieto agreed, and neither teacher nor student has looked back since.
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      Whether iphone or ereaders...allowing students to use technology to enhance the learning process is something I am starting to approach with a more open mind.
  • said mobile devices are particularly useful because of the many learning applications and basic language tools, such as spell check and grammar check, which increase the speed of learning. Rather than view the mobile applications as learning shortcuts tantamount to cheating, Nieto sees them as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback. It’s a perspective most of his students seem to share.
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      Instant feedback is what I am looking for in the English classroom. I want to be able to provide constructive criticism more immediately, so the students can edit at the moment as opposed to waiting a day or two days to receive my comments on a writing piece.
  • as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback.
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      When I indicated to my students that they could use kindles, kobos or ireaders/iphones for the ISU novel study unit, they were quite excited and quickly retained copies of ISU via this means. I am still using paper copies of the books as well, but I want to be able to have choice in their methods of acquiring texts and engaging in the reading process.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Project Tomorrow survey of roughly 300,000 K-12 students, 42,000 parents, 38,000 teachers and librarians, and 3,500 administrators from over 6,500 public and private schools, on how they are using—and would like to be using —new technologies in the classroom.
  • The results show that while the majority of students—and, perhaps surprisingly, parents—are in favor of using mobile devices for learning as long as the school allows it, most school administrators remain opposed
  • “I know the main reasons mobile technology is not welcome in the classroom are fear and misunderstanding about the structure that it gives the learning,” said Reina Cabezas, a teacher at Cox Elementary in Oakland, Calif., who is also doing masters thesis research on the topic of mobile devices in the classroom.
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      Currently my students are participating in their ISU novel study. They are currently reading and annotating their novels. I have indicated to my students that ireaders or ereaders are the quickest means to accessing a text as opposed to waiting one to two weeks for a book if it has had to be ordered. With the ireaders and ereaders they can now annotate and highlight important or interesting passages as they read. I would like to be able to have the students bring these technology tools to class. I have indicated that this is the direction in which I am going with ISU study, and so far, my Director has indicated he will back in allowing the kids to bring ereaders/ireaders to class. Fingers crossed it will bring positive and engaging results.
  • “But I don't think we stop living because of fear, right? No, we educate ourselves and learn about the security measures, expectations of all stakeholders, and apply principles of successful models of mobile devices in the classroom. Most importantly, we realize that technology is a tool of efficacy for the teacher, not the teacher's replacement. Lastly, technology only engages and motivates students when teachers know how to use them strategically to keep the hook. Overuse of anything is never good.”
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      I am hoping that I will be able to show my Director and Head of School the successful incorporation of ereaders/ireaders into the English classroom.
    • sallymastro
      sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
       
      Ongoing concern within my school is the use of personal mobile devices in the classroom. Policy at our school is mobile phones are in the lockers and not used on school premises.
  • sallymastro on 27 Oct 12
     
    You should read this article because, like me, if you have been skeptical about the use of iphones in the classroom, you will be enlightened about how to proceed in a way that will make technologies in the classroom understandable to and meaningful for all stakeholders:administrators, teachers, parents and students. Stay tuned for my blog on incorporating ireaders/ereaders in the English classroom. 
amacrae

The Third Teacher - 1 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/5qz9p/5nc2

shared by amacrae on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • 2Getting Started with the Physical EnvironmentOVERALL ...It is both an art and a science to design (as opposed to decorate) a learning environment that responds to our ultimate goal as educators – to develop independent and rigorous thought. Therefore, if we want to foster discovery and reflection, dialogue and the sharing of ideas, the overall physical environment should include:•A large gathering space for whole-group work and discussions, located near whiteboards, easels and/or projector screens.•A gathering space for small-group and whole-group discussions – where students can see clearly the representations of learning that are posted on boards or screens and hear classmates as they share ideas.•Flexible and reconfigurable space for small-group collaborative work and inquiry – space must allow for groupings of various sizes, such as pairs, triads and groups of four or more.•Desks and tables configured to facilitate discussion by allowing eye contact with peers and teacher, the unencumbered flow of traffic and enough space for students to write collaboratively.•Active areas for inquiry, investigation and wonder and quiet areas for thinking and exploring technology – all areas need to be accessible to students for communicating and documenting their own learning (e.g., computers, computer software, tablets, digital cameras and video recorders, document cameras, interactive white boards).•Instructional materials organized in such a way as to provide easy selection and access for all students – materials may include computer software, educational web sites and applications, found materials, graphic organizers, newspapers and other media, resource texts, etc.FOR MATHEMATICS ...Mathematically literate students demonstrate the capacity to “formulate, employ and interpret mathematics” (OECD, 2012, p. 4); they view themselves as mathematicians, knowing that mathematics can be used to understand important issues and to solve meaningful problems, not just in school but in life. By extension, the physical environment for mathematics learning should include: •Spaces where students can use manipulatives to solve problems and record their solutions.•Board and/or wall space to display student solutions for Math Congress and Bansho – student solutions should be easily visible from the group gathering space.•Space to post co-created reference charts such as glossary terms and past and current summaries of learning that specifically support the development of the big ideas currently under study.•Instructional materials organized in such a way as to provide easy selection and access for all students; may include mathematics manipulatives, calculators and other mathematical tools, mathematical texts, hand-held technology.FOR LITERACY ... Today’s literate learners experience “a constant stream of ideas and information” – they need strategies for interpretation and making sense and lots of practice in identifying meaning, bias and perspective (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009, 2006). By extension, the physical environment for literacy learning should include: •Spaces where students can talk, listen, read and write.A place for wonder, mystery and discovery ...“We need to think about creating classroom environments that give children the opportunity for wonder, mystery and discovery; an environment that speaks to young children’s inherent curiosity and innate yearning for exploration is a classroom where children are passionate about learning and love school.” (Heard & McDonough, 2009)
  • maintain that the key to learning in today’s world is not just the physical space we provide for students but the social space as well (
  • A large gathering space
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • mall-
su11armstrong

Remind101 | Free and Safe Text Messaging for Teachers - 1 views

www.remind101.com/?rid=454503

free messaging teachers technology text

shared by su11armstrong on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • su11armstrong on 09 Sep 13
     
    An option for reminding students about homework or sending messages while maintaining a level of privacy.
Justin Medved

Tour Builder - 2 views

tourbuilder.withgoogle.com

storymaps storytelling

shared by Justin Medved on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Justin Medved on 26 Nov 13
     
    Tour Builder is a new way to show people the places you've visited and the experiences you had along the way using Google Earth. It lets you pick the locations right on the map, add in photos, text, and video, and then share your creation.
  • farley_mike on 26 Nov 13
     
    This is fantastic Justin! I have had my Gr.9 Geo students plan out a Cross-Canada road trip using the Google Earth 'KML Tour', but Tour Builder might be the way to go from now on. I love that it is browser-based. Will definitely check this out. Thank you sir!
garth nichols

Change the Subject: Making the Case for Project-Based Learning | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...s-larry-rosenstock-rob-riordan

project based learning staff_development learning projectbasedlearning

shared by garth nichols on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • What should students learn in the 21st century? At first glance, this question divides into two: what should students know, and what should they be able to do? But there's more at issue than knowledge and skills.
  • For the innovation economy, dispositions come into play: readiness to collaborate, attention to multiple perspectives, initiative, persistence, and curiosity. While the content of any learning experience is important, the particular content is irrelevant. What really matters is how students react to it, shape it, or apply it. The purpose of learning in this century is not simply to recite inert knowledge, but, rather, to transform it.1 It is time to change the subject.
  • Expanding the "Big Four" Why not study anthropology, zoology, or environmental science? Why not integrate art with calculus, or chemistry with history? Why not pick up skills and understandings in all of these areas by uncovering and addressing real problems and sharing findings with authentic audiences? Why not invent a useful product that uses electricity, or devise solutions to community problems, all the while engaging in systematic observation, collaborative design, and public exhibitions of learning?
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  • What might students do in such schools, in the absence of prescribed subjects? They might work together in diverse teams to build robots, roller coasters, gardens, and human-powered submarines. They might write and publish a guide to the fauna and history of a nearby estuary, or an economics text illustrated with original woodcuts, or a children's astronomy book. They might produce original films, plays, and spoken word events on adolescent issues, Japanese internment, cross-border experiences, and a host of other topics. They might mount a crime scene exhibition linking art history and DNA analysis, or develop a museum exhibit of World War I as seen from various perspectives. They might celebrate returning warriors, emulating the bard in Beowulf, by interviewing local veterans and writing poems honoring their experiences. The possibilities are endless.
  • Changing the subject, then, means deriving the curriculum from the lived experience of the student. In this view, rather than a collection of fixed texts, the curriculum is more like a flow of events, accessible through tools that help students identify and extract rich academic content from the world: guidelines and templates for project development, along with activities and routines for observation and analysis, reflection, dialogue, critique, and negotiation.
garth nichols

Who Is Afraid of Knowledge? | Moments, Snippets, Spirals - 1 views

momentssnippetsspirals.wordpress.com/...who-is-afraid-of-knowledge

cohort21 knowledge technology Critical thinking

shared by garth nichols on 06 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Back to my statement: Knowledge of facts is critical to building understanding. In-depth understanding. And yet, knowledge is slowly becoming a Cinderella in the broader context of education for reasons that escape me. Cognitive science tells us that “thinking” well depends on activating knowledge effectively: “The power of human cognition depends on the amount of knowledge encoded and the effective deployment of it.” (A Simple Theory of Complex Cognition, John R. Anderson, 1995) We all know that there are two types of knowledge: declarative knowledge (yes, those “irrelevant”, googlable facts), and procedural knowledge (more commonly known as “skills”). These two are intertwined and as student-friendly as you might want to be in dismissing the former (because, well, “knowing” stuff is hard and we want students to have only great experiences or “fun”), you cannot. These facts (“units” in scientific terminology) are the building blocks of skills (“rules”). Simply put, you cannot build a skill or develop deep conceptual understanding in the absence of facts.
  • garth nichols on 06 Jan 14
     
    Great article that was going around our twitter feed, but I thought I would add it here to juxtapose with Sarah's recent post from Wired.
garth nichols

Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking | Granted, and... - 2 views

grantwiggins.wordpress.com/...er-egocentrism-design-thinking

Design education curriculum

shared by garth nichols on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • As teachers we understandably believe that it is the ‘teaching’ that causes learning. But this is too egocentric a formulation. As I said in my previous post, the learner’s attempts to learn causes all learning.
  • From this viewpoint, the teacher is merely one resource for learning, no different from a book, a peer, an experience, or an experimental result.
  • It is the learner who decides to try to learn (or not) from what happens.
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  • We think like a designer, not like a teacher, when we say: the teacher is just one element in the design. The choice of task, pedagogy, groupings, flow of work, resources, furniture, light, noise level, role of people and text – all of these design elements are arguably as important as the teacher.
  • What are those conditions, in a nutshell? I would highlight the following: Thought-provoking intellectual challenges (inquiries, questions, problems) The challenge has been designed to optimize self-sustaining and productive work by learners, related to a clear and intellectually worthy goal The learners have become reasonably competent in classroom routines that foster productive goal-focused work The challenge cannot be accomplished by a worksheet, checklist or recipe. It requires strategic use of knowledge and skill, creative problem-solving, and critical thinking; and the eliciting of multiple perspectives on how to address the challenge and gauge progress. There is an unambiguous product or performance goal (even if there is ambiguity about how to achieve the goal), supported by clear criteria and standards, thus permitting ongoing student self-assessment and self-adjustment. There is enough feedback within the challenge (and resources) that the work can be maximally self-sustaining and productive. The teacher is therefore freed up to coach for a significant amount of time, permitting personalized feedback and guidance (as well as just-in-time mini-lessons). This coaching role also permits the teacher to determine what is and isn’t working in the challenge, and thus enables the teacher to quickly change gears if the desired learning is not occurring or the process is not working.
  • In other words, it is a poor design for learning that puts all the burden of teaching and processing on the teacher. Then, the teacher can neither coach nor understand what is going on in the minds of learners. Worse, endless teaching, no matter how expert, soon becomes passive and without much meaning to learners who must wait days, sometimes weeks, to get meaningful chances to interact with the content, to try out their ideas on others, and to get the feedback they need.
  • Group-worthy tasks – Focus on central concepts or big ideas that require active meaning-making The challenge itself has ambiguity or limited scaffold and prompting so that student meaning-making and different inferences about the task and how to address it will emerge. Are best accomplished by ensuring that multiple perspectives are found tried out in addressing the task. This not only rewards creative and non-formulaic thought but undercuts the likelihood that one strong student can do all the key work. Provide multiple ways of being competent in the task work and the task process Can only be done well by a group, but are designed to foster both individual and group autonomy. (The teacher’s role as teacher and direction-giver should be minimized to near zero). Demand both individual and group accountability Have clear evaluation criteria
Urvi Shah

Text Message (SMS) Polls and Voting, Audience Response System | Poll Everywhere - 0 views

www.polleverywhere.com

poll survey polling technology cellphone

shared by Urvi Shah on 20 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Urvi Shah on 20 Oct 12
     
    Instant audience feedback
Christina Schindler

Student Surveys: Using Student Voice to Improve Teaching and Learning | Edutopia - 2 views

www.edutopia.org/...-improve-teaching-and-learning

technology education collaboration EdTech

shared by Christina Schindler on 15 Oct 16 - No Cached
    • Christina Schindler
      Christina Schindler on 15 Oct 16
       
      Love the application of this in the classroom
  • how do they learn best
  • Student Surveys: Using Student Voice to Improve Teaching and Learning
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  • It changed and informed his instruction
garth nichols

Math Teachers Should Encourage Their Students to Count Using Their Fingers in Class - T... - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...478053

Math education Cohort21

shared by garth nichols on 15 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.
  • Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation
  • Evidence from both behavioral and neuroscience studies shows that when people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they get better at doing so, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. The tasks we have developed for use in schools and homes (see below) are based on the training programs researchers use to improve finger-perception quality.
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  • The need for and importance of finger perception could even be the reason that pianists, and other musicians, often display higher mathematical understanding than people who don’t learn a musical instrument.
  • Teachers should celebrate and encourage finger use among younger learners and enable learners of any age to strengthen this brain capacity through finger counting and use. They can do so by engaging students in a range of classroom and home activities, such as:Give the students colored dots on their fingers and ask them to touch the corresponding piano keys:
  • Visual math is powerful for all learners. A few years ago Howard Gardner proposed a theory of multiple intelligences, suggesting that people have different approaches to learning, such as those that are visual, kinesthetic, or logical. T
  • To engage students in productive visual thinking, they should be asked, at regular intervals, how they see mathematical ideas, and to draw what they see. They can be given activities with visual questions and they can be asked to provide visual solutions to questions.
  • garth nichols on 22 Nov 16
     
    Great article on the strategies and rethinking of them in Math class for younger grades
garth nichols

SAMR as a Framework for Moving Towards Education 3.0 | User Generated Education - 1 views

usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/...r-moving-towards-education-3-0

SAMR education education 3.0 Personalized digitalcitizenship

shared by garth nichols on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Briefly, Education 1.0, 2.0. and 3.0 is explained as: Education 1.0 can be likened to Web 1.0 where there is a one-way dissemination of knowledge from teacher to student.  It is a type of essentialist, behaviorist education based on the three Rs – receiving by listening to the teacher; responding by taking notes, studying text, and doing worksheets; and regurgitating by taking standardized tests which in reality is all students taking the same test. Learners are seen as receptacles of that knowledge and as receptacles, they have no unique characteristics.  All are viewed as the same.  It is a standardized/one-size-fits-all education. Similar to Web 2.0, Education 2.0 includes more interaction between the teacher and student; student to student; and student to content/expert.  Education 2.0, like Web 2.0, permits interactivity between the content and users, and between users themselves.  Education 2.0 has progressive roots where the human element is important to learning.  The teacher-to-student and student-to-student relationships are considered as part of the learning process.  It focuses on the three Cs – communicating, contributing, and collaborating. Education 3.0 is based on the belief that content is freely and readily available as is characteristic of Web 3.0. It is self-directed, interest-based learning where problem-solving, innovation and creativity drive education. Education 3.0 is also about the three Cs but a different set – connectors, creators, constructivists.  These are qualitatively different than the three Cs of Education 2.0.  Now they are nouns which translates into the art of being a self-directed learner rather than doing learning as facilitated by the educator. Education 3.0: Altering Round Peg in Round Hole Education
  • garth nichols on 25 Feb 14
     
    What's the difference between Education 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? #SAMR
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