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Eric Calvert

Educational Leadership:Teaching to Student Strengths:Recognizing Neglected Strengths - 2 views

  • More important, however, was another result: Students in the diverse teaching condition outperformed the other students even on the multiple-choice memory tests. In other words, even if our goal is just to maximize students' retention of information, teaching for diverse styles of learning still produces superior results. This approach apparently enables students to capitalize on their strengths and to correct or to compensate for their weaknesses, encoding material in a variety of interesting ways.
  • The studies described here, conducted in diverse locations and with diverse groups of students, suggest that many students have strengths that are unrecognized and neglected in traditional schooling. By becoming aware of those strengths and incorporating them into instruction, educators can boost student achievement. Whether we are talking about students whose cultural background differs from the mainstream or about students whose cognitive strengths diverge from the model commonly emphasized in schools, the same principle applies: Teaching to strengths works.
Eric Calvert

Differentiating with Self Paced Units - 0 views

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    PowerPoint on pedagogy of "science cafes," including connections between wikis and differentiating instruction.
Eric Calvert

Technology Integration Matrix - 0 views

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    The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments.
Eric Calvert

NAGC - Programming Standard: Curriculum Planning and Instruction - 0 views

  • curriculum content
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      "What" is taught.
  • instructional strategies
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      "How" it's taught.
  • Educators develop and use a comprehensive and sequenced core curriculum that is aligned with local, state, and national standards, then differentiate and expand it.
    • Eric Calvert
       
      In some cases, it may be more practical to aim lessons at the higher end of your continuum of learners and then provide additional resources or more opportunities for practice for students who need additional support.
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  • affective
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      Emotional
  • aesthetic
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      Sensory (literally, related to awareness and appreciation of beauty.)
Eric Calvert

Kyung Hee Kim's Home Page of Creativity - 0 views

  • What is Creativity? Eastern Perspective: A state of personal fulfillment, the expression of an inner essence of ultimate reality (Chu, 1970; Kuo, 1996; Mathur, 1982).
  • how can we encourage children to be creative?   Provide a psychologically safe environment, which allows for disagreement and a degree of controversy. Shift focus of learning to the children; allow choice; engage them as a partner. Set clear, simple, and reseasonable limits; allow choice and flexibility within these limits. Allow for movement and reasonable noise. Acknowledge humor; provide time and outlet for humor. Encourage sampling. browsing, and exploring varied topics; allow for questioning and probing; provide hands-on activities. Employ integrated and broad thematic approaches to curriculum development; approach problems as opportunities for novel solutions; incorporate metaphor and analogies in instructional practices. Provide situations/activities that are open-ended, provocative, and multidisciplinary. Allow multimedia approaches to assignments; provide materials for artistic expression in all content areas. Allow individual work time and provide a space and time for queit thinking and reflection. Discuss multiple perspectives and encourage sensorial exploration of materials; accept emotions and explore affective responses. Provide for individualization and differentiation in curriculum and materials; include opportunities for the use of imagery in educational activities. Susan Daniels, 1997, in "Handbook of Gifted Education"
Eric Calvert

Survey: Teachers want more access to technology, collaboration | News | eClassroom News - 0 views

  • a national survey on college and career readiness and the challenges facing U.S. teachers reveals that educators consider the ability to differentiate instruction for their students as essential for students’ success—and more access to technology will help them do this, they say.
  • Given limited resources, teachers say opportunities for collaborative teaching (65 percent), access to online and technology resources (64 percent), better tools for understanding students’ learning strengths and needs (63 percent), and instructional strategies for teaching English language learners (62 percent) would have a major impact on their ability to address the different learning needs of individual students.
  • A significant majority of middle and high school teachers (61 percent) say they are able to differentiate instruction “a great deal” to meet the varying learning needs of students in their classrooms. Their confidence in this ability to effectively customize their teaching for each student, however, varies by subject. Math teachers are the least likely (46 percent) to say they are able to differentiate instruction a great deal to help their students, compared with higher numbers of English teachers (60 percent) and teachers of other non-math and English subjects (65 percent).
Eric Calvert

What are Learning Analytics? (Siemens, 2010) - 0 views

  • Learning analytics is the use of intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections, and to predict and advise on learning
  • I’m interested in how learning analytics can restructure the process of teaching, learning, and administration.
  • LA relies on some of the concepts employed in web analysis, through tools like Google Analytics, as well as those involved in data mining (see educational data mining).
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  • Learning analytics is broader, however, in that it is concerned not only with analytics but also with action, curriculum mapping, personalization and adaptation, prediction, intervention, and competency determination.
  • For now, it’s sufficient to state that our data trails and profile, in relation to existing curriculum, can be analyzed and then used as a basis for prediction, intervention, personalization, and adaptation.
  • Effective utilization of learning analytics can help schools and universities to pick up on signals that indicate difficulties with learner performance. Just as individuals communicate social intentions through signals well before they actually “think” they make a decision, learners signal success/failure in the learning process through reduced time on task, language of frustration (in LMS forums), long lag periods between logins, and lack of direct engagement with other learners or instructors.
  • Curriculum in schools and higher education is generally pre-planned. Designers create course content, interaction, and support resources well before any learner arrives in a course (online or on campus). This is an “efficient learner hypothesis” (ELF) – the assertion that learners are at roughly the same stage when they start a course and that they progress at roughly the same pace. Any educator knows that this is not true and will eagerly resist the assertion that their teaching assumes ELF. But systems don’t lie.
  • Learning content should be more like computation – a real-time rendering of learning resources and social suggestions based on the profile of a learner, her conceptual understanding of a subject, and her previous experience.
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    Elearnspace blog post by George Siemens on ideas for using analytics tools with online teaching tools and student profile data to to personalize teaching and learning.
Eric Calvert

Snowflake Effect for Learning - 1 views

  • At least in the digital world, there is an evolution from scarcity to abundance in many domains. This evolution creates important new opportunities and challenges for (higher) education and strongly influences the expectations of students and, increasingly, of teachers. In the media in general and music in particular, this trend is clear. The average young person in the 70s had a collection of maybe 20 LP's, which were heard at home. The average young person now has virtually all music ever recorded at her disposal, and can listen to it anywhere and anytime, via an iPod and other devices. She can share her music with friends - legally or not. Because of this great abundance of material and its availability anytime and anywhere, it is no longer meaningful to deal with music in the traditional way. One can manually manage the music on 20 physical carriers. This approach no longer works with 3,000,000 songs. A first workaround is to provide sophisticated search, so you can create playlists of songs by title, artist, etc. Then the playlist can be played without further intervention by the listener. That is roughly the original model of iTunes. It is also roughly the model of the teacher who searches for relevant learning resources, modifies and packages them and expects the student to work through the material in a more or less controlled way.
  • But this approach is now passé, because there is too much overhead in searching for music and creating playlists, and because it is often not at all evident to search for music that you do not know. Indeed, users now exchange playlists as well as songs. Newer applications such as last.fm, pandora, finetune, jango and seeqpod follow a different approach: they support personalized recommendations and generate playlists themselves, on the basis of user interactions. The effect is that of a radio station which is specifically tailored to the needs and characteristics of one listener. It is interesting to note that these applications rely on very different technologies to achieve this effect: last.fm is based on "social recommending", while pandora relies on a very extensive set of metadata developed in the "music genome project".
  • In "social networking" applications such as facebook, this evolution is taken one step further: the user can follow what his "friends" are doing and be guided in this way to interesting material, relevant applications or even face-to-face events. Such an approach could certainly prove useful in education, where social networks can facilitate "community based learning": learners can refer one another to relevant resources in much the same way that such resources spread virally on social networking sites. Note that resources in this context include teachers or other learners, as well as applications, besides content!
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  • In the same way that all snowflakes in a snowstorm are unique, each user has her specific characteristics, restrictions and interests. That is why we speak of a "snowflake effect", to indicate that, more and more, the aforementioned facilities will be relied upon to realize far-reaching forms of personalization and "mass customization". This effect will be realized through a hybrid approach with push and pull techniques, in which information is actively requested or searched by the user, but also more and more subtly integrated in his work and learning environment. In this way, a learning environment can be created that is geared to the individual needs of the teacher or student.
  • What could, for example, a "snowflaked" learning environment look like? The teacher will not have to search for learning resources (in google or repositories), but can draw on suggestions that are automatically prepared for him, including, for example: Material that he already used in a similar context; New material that meets queries which he earlier submitted to search engines in a similar context; Material that other teachers with a similar teaching approach have used in a similar context. The student will see: the material his fellow students have used and how long they have spent time on it; What questions his colleagues had - including the answers to those questions from other students or teachers; What fellow students are working at the same time with the same material - an excellent step to collaborative learning; What feedback his colleagues have given to the teacher about the quality of the material.
  • PPS. The reader could also ask whether the implications for education will be as drastic as the way in which these technologies have shaken up the music industry. The author of this piece could say that this is probably so, but that formal education can provisionally hide behind the accreditation of diplomas in the probably vain hope that it can skip this cycle of innovation...
Eric Calvert

Differentiating Instruction For the Gifted - 0 views

  • If middle school students differ in readiness, interest, and learning profiles, and if a good middle school attempts to meet each student where he or she is and foster continual growth, a one-size-fits-all model of instruction makes little sense. Rather, differentiated instruction seems a better solution for meeting the academic diversity that typifies the middle school years.
  • In a differentiated class, the teacher uses (1) a variety of ways for students to explore curriculum content, (2) a variety of sense-making activities or processes through which students can come to understand and "own" information and ideas, and (3) a variety of options through which students can demonstrate or exhibit what they have learned.
  • A class is not differentiated when assignments are the same for all learners and the adjustments consist of varying the level of difficulty of questions for certain students, grading some students harder than others, or letting students who finish early play games for enrichment. It is not appropriate to have more advanced learners do extra math problems, extra book reports, or after completing their "regular" work be given extension assignments. Asking students to do more of what they already know is hollow. Asking them to do "the regular work, plus" inevitably seems punitive to them (Tomlinson, 1995a).
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  • Concrete to abstract.
  • Instruction is concept focused and principle driven.
  • On-going assessment of student readiness and growth are built into the curriculum.
  • Flexible grouping is consistently used. In a differentiated class, students work in many patterns. Sometimes they work alone, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. Sometimes tasks are readiness-based, sometimes interest-based, sometimes constructed to match learning style, and sometimes a combination of readiness, interest, and learning style.
  • Students are active explorers. Teachers guide the exploration.
  • Adjustments based on learning profile encourage students to understand their own learning preferences.
  • Readiness-based adjustments can be created by teachers offering students a range of learning tasks developed along one or more of the following continua:
  • Four characteristics shape teaching and learning in an effective differentiated classroom (Tomlinson, 1995a):
  • Simple to complex.
  • Basic to transformational.
  • Fewer facets to multi-facets.
  • Smaller leaps to greater leaps
  • More structured to more open.
  • Less independence to greater independence.
  • Quicker to slower.
  • Among instructional strategies that can help teachers manage differentiation and help students find a good learning "fit" are the following: use of multiple texts and supplementary materials; use of computer programs; interest centers; learning contracts; compacting; tiered sense-making activities and tiered products; tasks and products designed with a multiple intelligence orientation; independent learning contracts; complex instruction; group investigation; product criteria negotiated jointly by student and teacher; graduated task- and product-rubrics.
  • Teachers moving toward differentiated instruction in an inclusive, integrated middle school classroom find greater success if they (1) have a clear rationale for differentiation, (2) prepare students and parents for a differentiated classroom, (3) attend to issues of classroom structure and management as they move toward more student-centered learning, (4) move toward differentiation at a pace comfortable to both teacher and learners, and (5) plan with team members and other colleagues interested in differentiation
Eric Calvert

Twurdy Search - Search for Readable Results - About Twurdy - 0 views

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    Twurdy is a customized version of Google search, which color codes search results according to reading level.
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