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Brendon Burchard talks on how "SMART" Goals are limiting. Instead, why not work on D.U.M.B. goals? A different way to view how to grow and work with an abundance vs. a deficit mentality. Question: How do SMART goals in education limit our work, vision, and enthusiasm?

Using Vygotsky's theory of the Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding, one district moved their Prof. Development plan toward a more differentiated model. Read the article, "Individualized Technology Goals for Teachers" for a detailed explanation of it's evolution and practice. http://goo.gl/BJfZIQ

Using Vygotsky's theory of the Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding, one district moved their Prof. Development plan toward a more differentiated model. Read the article, "Individualized Technology Goals for Teachers" for a detailed explanation of it's evolution and practice. http://goo.gl/BJfZIQ

A look at education from a young adult - how it's viewed - goals and outcomes - it should inspire one's mind, not just fill our heads with forgettable information. Re-assess your dreams - define how you view education.

This blog post will get you to ask yourself, "What is the role of a teacher?" Some of the comments show the wide diversity in views among educators - those who would abandon schools if they could (LIsa Nielsen), others who have the paradigm of the student making the instructional choices and the teacher just floating around and helping students, and those who see the teacher as embodying many different skill sets and who work out of a strong relationship with their students. The current educational shifts in pedagogy and goals in education have had a profound impact on teaching. Reading this post will help stimulate and hopefully clarify you own views.

Problem-based learning and project-based learning provide a rich opportunity for students to deepen their knowledge, expand their repertoire of technical skills, and enhance their appreciation of thinking tools, processes and strategies. The larger goal is for enhanced performance under challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insightfulness, perseverance, creativity, and craftsmanship to resolve complex problems.

Online portfolio for teachers - FREE. I would encourage especially pre-service teachers to consider using a tool like this to help provide something more engaging than the standard resume. One of my goals this summer is to use something like this or a blog resume to document my work, experience, skill sets, and learning. 

For me, commenting is no different from any other type of writing, driven by the same goals and motivations. Writing is, first and foremost, about audience, purpose, and context. This means, of course, that commenting is about the potential for more explicit/direct engagement in ways that other more formal writing opportunities are not. This means, to me, that the writing (the commenting) requires both a more direct and a more nuanced consideration of audience, purpose, and context. Read more about commenting and interacting with others in blogging and other online conversations.

Although the first paragraph can be a little grating for ITs/Tech. Coordinators to read, I think it is a perception we must address. Here is my response to one IT whose view of teachers was low. Joe, I can hear the frustration in your reply. I can appreciate some of it. However, I think that the first paragraph,  I think, reflects a perception that we as IT's/Tech. Directors/Coordinators need to address honestly, but respectfully. So when I read the first paragraphs, I asked myself, "How is this true for me?" I think we need to honestly assess that in our practice.  Next, the points that follow were written to be more general in scope to give each reader a chance to explore how they might fit for them in their unique situations. Patronizing? I think they are points of practice we can all reflect on. That's the purpose I see in the blog post. In regards to filtering, we all live with it. It's coming to terms with how much filtering is necessary and how to manage the filter. I get frustrated not having the ability to filter content the way I would like. I didn't hear the author say things like "Get over it," but instead "Consider....". I think a helpful approach for IT's, teachers, and admin. is to form a partnership/relationship that allows each to better understand the needs/challenges each faces to provide the best for students. That's the goal. As a tech. coordinator, I proactively work at that. I taught for eight years, but also was instrumental in helping press into tech. integration and perhaps that has helped me to be more balanced than some in my approach to IT and embrace change. I think also we have to expect failures along the way as we feel our way through new approaches, methods, and devices. Right now, I think most IT's are a bit intimated by the level of change and diversity of needs we have to address. I know I am! Let's become more a part of the dialogue and abstain from labeling and finger-pointing. We're in this together. 

Edutopia post on Project Based Learning & embedded video of Yong Zhao presentation at ISTE 2012, June 26, 2012.  "What makes someone successful in the 21st century is definitely not your ability to memorize facts. What will make someone successful is your relentless capacity to innovate, to create. It's your ability to network, to make friends from your own circle and from other countries. It's your ability to see through challenges, to look for opportunities in problems, and to take action to change things instead of waiting for someone else to do something, Meanwhile, he added, the U.S. is focusing on the wrong goal by aiming for higher standardized test scores. "Fixing the horse wagon won't get us to the moon," he said, referring to the current educational system as a holdover from an outdated era. 

This is a helpful, easy to read guide with videos on Evernote, a tool for teachers and students to bookmark, record voicemails, take text and voice notes, upload pictures, docs, PDFs and files, and capture images and information on the web as well as as a software download on your computer or as a plugin for your browser and also as an application for your mobile device. My goal this summer is to begin to maximize the my use of the tool, as I love being able to use it on my computers and mobile devices.

Interesting article about a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries. The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant yet shallow, would provide deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions. The resulting papers are scheduled to be published by the American Library Association this fall, under the title: "Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know." One thing the librarians now know is that their students' research habits are worse than they thought.

"Will you ever just walk into class and ask, "Okay, what do you want to study today?" Of course not. Inquiry-based learning is founded on students taking the lead in their own learning, but it still requires considerable planning on your part. Projects must fit into your larger program structure, goals and plans, but the students will be actively involved in planning the projects with you and asking the questions that launch their individual inquiries." In thinking about PBL and other inquiry-based learning, this post and the graphic of the inquiry process are easy to connect with.

Will Richardson explores this idea: "By pairing personalized learning and technology, a teacher can help students learn what they need to learn through the topics that interest them most." How does "personal learning" fit into the structures we have in school learning environments? 

Outlines each level of the taxonomy by showing attributes for each level, keywords used in writing that demonstrate that level, and questions you would ask to see that level in a student's writing. Examples of objectives written for each level of Bloom's Taxonomy and activities and assessment tools based on those objectives. Common key verbs used in drafting objectives are also listed for each level.

Wolfram|Alpha is a free online computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Our long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. This can be valuable to educators in many ways. * This allows you to: interact with your results using sliders and controls; rotate and zoom 3D graphics and visualizations, and manipulate results directly in your browser. * "Sometimes being able to change parameters dynamically just enriches what is already rather complete output. But often, it's what really makes the output meaningful." Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers- not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods. Check it out!