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Home/ Cohort 21 Shared Resources/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by garth nichols

Contents contributed and discussions participated by garth nichols

garth nichols

How to Get Ahead At Your Creative Job--From A Guy Who Went From "Daily Show" Intern to ... - 1 views

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    Here are some great strategies for our current grads to navigate their future work environment to get a job, create a job and/or compete for a job!
garth nichols

Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform : Shots - Health News : NPR - 1 views

  • So since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations?
  • "It's really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs," he said. "But think about being in a classroom with 25 kids. The demands on their thinking are so great."
  • "If I believe boys are disruptive and my job is control the classroom, then I'm going to respond with, 'Johnny! You're out of line here! We need you to sit down right now.' "
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  • But if the teacher doesn't carry those beliefs into the classroom, then the teacher is unlikely to see that behavior as threatening. Instead it's: " 'Johnny, tell me more about what you think is going on ... But also, I want you to sit down quietly now as you tell that to me,' " Pianta says.
  • "It's far more powerful to work from the outside in than the inside out if you want to change expectations," he says. In other words, if you want to change a mind, simply talking to it might not be enough.
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    Teachers' Expectations can shift their students, and even their own teaching. This is what Cohort 21 is all about too!
garth nichols

New Milford H.S. Students Explore New Ways Of Learning With Library's 'Makers... - 0 views

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    How Libraries are changing...
garth nichols

Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? | Mother Jones - 2 views

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    Email restrictions work to make a better learning environment. Choose wisely what and when to send them...and when to respond. Responding means you're available and open to these Emails!
garth nichols

Do You have the Personality To Be an Inquiry-Based Teacher? | MindShift - 3 views

  • Are you optimistic? Viewing the world as damaged or the future as bleak shuts down the brain by transmitting fear. Maintaining an optimistic attitude is an expression of love, inspiring curiosity and hope, and fostering emotional and physical health. Optimism is essential to teaching: Without hope, the reason to learn disappears. Are you open? The world is being refreshed and powered by divergent thinking. Outcomes are unclear, even dangerous. But faith in the flexible thinking of the human mind can support young people as they sort out their new world and have the freedom to discover solutions not yet visible. An open attitude activates the frontal lobes, the place of flow and creativity. Are you appreciative? Deep appreciation gives permission for failure, rather than penalizing for the “wrong” answer. It honors the stops and starts of human development. It conveys the ultimate message of a communal world: We are in this together. Are you flexible? In inquiry, the journey matters as much as the destination. Constant reflection is a necessity to improving thinking and doing. Metacognition encourages wisdom, the ultimate goal of any worthy education system. Flexibility tells the brain and heart to keep working, keep going—you’re getting there. Are you purposeful? Purpose binds teacher and student into the high-minded pursuit of solutions that matter. It is the reason that “authentic” education works and inauthentic education struggles. It tightens the connection between the learner and the teacher in ways that spur the natural creative impulse to change and improve the world.
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    This is an important list of attributes for 21st Century Teaching. As schools and teachers are looking to PBL, we often don't think about what is required in the social-emotional realm of teaching that will allow PBL to fly...here's some good info' on this...
garth nichols

Newman's prompts - 1 views

  • The Australian educator Anne Newman (1977) suggested five significant prompts to help determine where errors may occur in students attempts to solve written problems. She asked students the following questions as they attempted problems.1.       Please read the question to me. If you don't know a word, leave it out.2.       Tell me what the question is asking you to do.3.       Tell me how you are going to find the answer.4.       Show me what to do to get the answer. "Talk aloud" as you do it, so that I can    understand how you are thinking.5.       Now, write down your answer to the question.These five questions can be used to determine why students make mistakes with written mathematics questions.
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    Error analysis - how can we incorporate this into students final evaluation mark? Isn't having students understand their errors a key part in education? Maybe evaluation doesn't finish once you've handed the assignment/test back?
garth nichols

Sugata Mitra and the new educational Romanticism - a parody - 0 views

  • ll children are born to drive their education. The problem is that prior to the digital age there were no child-friendly pedagogic vehicles. Now that the military-industrial complex has created them, parents and teachers should give the keys to the kids as soon as possible and let them head off on their own down the beautifully linear highway of knowledge.
  • One of the empires is the empire of fear. Surely we are not free if our lives are dominated by fear. Although Mitra’s minimal model blithely assumes that children greet everything new with a calm curiosity, Rousseau recognises that children can just as easily respond to the new with fear. To avoid this requires early training. A snippet of his advice on this subject:
  • At another junction on the same road is the empire of habit. We are not free if we are too firmly set in our ways. Hence Rousseau’s advice: “the only habit that a child should be allowed to contract is none. Do not carry him on one arm more than the other; do not accustom him to give one hand rather than the other, to use one more than the other, to want to eat, sleep, or be active at the same hours…Prepare from afar the reign of his freedom…” (63) (Sir Ken Robinson’s critique of the school bell is but a footnote to this.)
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  • If tools are needed, he suggested, it is better that we make them ourselves, and for the sake of the children’s freedom it is better that they acquire the belief that the imperfect tools they make themselves are better than perfect tools made by others.
  • he great Romantic pedagogy of liberation becomes a parody of itself when it loses sight of how vulnerable the child is to a myriad imperial forces, reducing itself to the myopic claim that the only thing children need to be liberated from is teachers.
  • Of course, the child must feel at every step of the way that she is making the discoveries, or, as Rousseau says of his Emile in his now outdated language: “let him always believe he is the master” but, he reminds the tutor, “let it always be you who are.” (120)
  • Rousseau suggests beginning the scientific part of a child’s education with some geographical discovery learning. He has a nice criticism of his EdTech contemporaries: “You want to teach geography to this child, and you go and get globes, cosmic spheres, and maps for him. So many devices! Why all these representations? Why do you not begin by showing him the object itself so that he will at least know what you are talking about?” (168)
  • If curiosity and attention need cultivation and direction, they also need protection. Rousseau sees a particular risk with the sciences – and this is one which online learning surely magnifies, not diminishes. He puts it beautifully, describing the entry into science as something that can be like entering “into a bottomless sea…When I see a man, enamoured of the various kinds of knowledge, let himself be seduced by their charm and run from one to the other without knowing how to stop himself, I believe I am seeing a child on the shore gathering shells and beginning by loading himself up with them; then, tempted by those he sees next, he throws some away and picks up others, until, overwhelmed by their multitude and not knowing anymore which to choose, he ends by throwing them all away and returning empty-handed.” (172)
  • In a parallel way, learning emerges at the edge of chaos where children meet Google, and it emerges with the same spontaneity seen when the first amoeba dragged itself out of the primordial soup.
  • “The man who did not know pain would know neither the tenderness of humanity nor the sweetness of commiseration. His heart would be moved by nothing. He would not be sociable; he would be a monster among his kind.” (87)
  • Rousseau makes a point more specifically about the psychology of the child, arguing that it is damaging for children to be encouraged to learn things that are beyond the developing sphere of their experience.
  • Children become accustomed to parroting the truth instead of perceiving for themselves that something is true.
  • No child ever came face to face with his mortality when his avatar was struck by a pixelated bullet. No, the child learns infinitely more about the human condition from a single bout of toothache than from 1,000 hours of online gaming.
  • Mitra’s minimalism is not just the minimalism of a hands-off approach to teaching; it is also the minimalism of a theory that – in that questionable analytic tradition – wants to limit itself to technique. All we are given is a methodology – the theoretical equivalent of the automotive machinery that children can drive.
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    This is a real eye-opener for the counter-digital-revolution perspective. It's good to keep these perspectives in mind as we chart our way forward because these ideas can help temper our enthusiasm for tech as a panacea
garth nichols

The Other 21st Century Skills: Why Teach Them | User Generated Education - 1 views

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    This is a great look at the larger context of learning in the 21st Century. The 6Cs are important, but so too are the underlying skills...Read here to find out what they are...
garth nichols

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

  • 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

http://www.kineo.com/m/0/blended-learning-today-2014.pdf - 0 views

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    Great overview of Blended Learning...best practices and some great crossover with Flipped Learning as well
garth nichols

ON 2014 Autocrat and Schedule - 1 views

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    The 2014 GAFE conference notes
garth nichols

The Science of Character (a new 8 min "Cloud Film") - YouTube - 0 views

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    This is a great video that walks you through the Hows and Whats and the importance of character and growth mindset
garth nichols

The Secret Skill Behind Being An Innovator | LinkedIn - 0 views

  • Let’s look more closely at what is happening, conceptually, when we make an analogy. “The essential requirement for analogical thinking,” Holyoak and Thagard write, “is the ability to look at specific situations and [] pull out abstract patterns that may also be found in superficially different situations.” That’s important, so I’ll say it again in a slightly different way: A useful analogy reveals the deep commonalities beneath superficial differences.
  • What does this allow us to do? The scientists Kevin Dunbar studied used analogies, first, to formulate hypotheses that they could then test. Their thought process went something like this: If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that A does Y when Z, too? Let’s find out. That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.
  • The appearance in the transcript of words indicating uncertainty, such as “maybe,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t understand,” was often followed by an attempt to draw an analogy—to compare the ambiguous situation to a situation with which the scientists were familiar.
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  • At such moments, the scientists were employing analogies as different sort of bridge—a conceptual catwalk that provides just enough space to move forward and keep searching for solutions. As Schunn writes: “Scientists and engineers do not always seek to completely eliminate uncertainty (and indeed, sometimes it is not possible to do so) but often drive problem solving with the aim of converting it into approximate ranges sufficient to continue problem solving.”
  • To aid in finding just the right analogy, it helps to have a deep pool of potential targets. The Boston Strategy Group, a consulting firm, has created an online gallery of sources of analogical inspiration for its consultants and their clients to use. We can do this, too—bookmarking or pinning websites that inspire connections, keeping a folder of ripped-out articles or pictures from newspapers and magazines. A class or a workplace team can create a shared repository of analogical targets.
  • The best use of an analogy, as we’ve seen, is as as a bridge—and once we’ve crossed over the bridge, we can leave it behind.
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    Great article for why analogies are important
garth nichols

Google Debuts Education Tool Oppia for Teaching Others - 3 views

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    Want to flip the flip of the flip?
garth nichols

3 ways to weave digital citizenship into your curriculum - 0 views

  • Fortunately, in a classroom where students already use technology, it’s a simple matter to incorporate a digital citizenship component into any lesson — all while meeting both the ISTE Standards and the Common Core. For example, teachers have the opportunity to address digital citizenship whenever students: 1. Create digital presentations
  • Anytime students create content to share online, teachers can supplement the lesson with an age-appropriate discussion about copyright and fair use. Mendoza suggests going beyond simply showing students how to properly cite ideas and images. “Flip the tables on them. When they’re creating and sharing their work with the world online, ask them: How do you want other people to use your work? Would you want other people to make a profit off it, share it or alter it? That’s when it really hits home,” she said.
  • 2. Study historical figures or literary characters Prompt students to think about how they present themselves online — and what it means to leave a digital footprint — by creating fake social media profiles for the characters they’re studying in history or English classes. “If Lincoln had a Twitter feed, what would he tweet? Get students to think about how these characters might present themselves online,” Mendoza said. “Reframe social media to look at how the characters might have exemplified themselves in a digital world and how it might have impacted them.” Add another dimension to this activity by using characters that have two very distinct sides to their personalities, such as Jekyll and Hyde. “It helps them think about how sometimes people present themselves online in a whole different way than they really are in person and why we might share things about ourselves that might not really be in line with who we are in person.”
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  • 3. Research a project If a project requires students to perform research online, help them develop information literacy skills by introducing effective search strategies and discussing how to determine whether a website is credible.
garth nichols

SAMR.jpg (2480×1754) - 3 views

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    Great WorkThrough of SAMR and how you can use it design lessons or assess them. Thanks to Tim from Lakefield for the link!
garth nichols

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

  • 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
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    What's the difference between Education 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? #SAMR
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