How might policymakers remove barriers and support enabling conditions for optimizing learning for each student’s unique needs — both inside and outside of classroom walls?
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New Blog Series: Promising Policies for Personalized Learning - iNACOL - 15 views
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Personalized learning is tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests — including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn — to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.
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According to this RAND study, students attending schools using breakthrough, personalized learning models “made gains in mathematics and reading over the past two years that were significantly greater than a comparison group made up of similar students selected from comparable schools.”
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Build educator capacity and professional judgement in calibration on assessing evidence on common performance tasks
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Book Review: The Learning Power Approach by @GuyClaxton - 3 views
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"Learning is such an important and crucial aspect of being. No matter what path our lives are drawn towards, our learning - and attitude to learning - will help us succeed professionally and personally. Of course, learning can take place at formal and informal moments of our lives, involving observations, readings, critiquing, experimenting, imagining, reasoning, imitating, discussing, reflecting and practising."
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Gray, T. (2014). Enabling e-Learning: Professional learning community. Personal Blog. - 17 views
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This item will be referenced in my paper, but is not a part of the 3 item diigo annotated bibliography. This professional learning community blog discusses how PLC's and Communities of Practice can enable e-Learning community members to engage more with each other, to help define/discuss/debate e-learning theory, pedagogy and practice.
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This item will be referenced in my paper, but is not a part of the 3 item diigo annotated bibliography. This professional learning community blog discusses how PLC's and Communities of Practice can enable e-Learning community members to engage more with each other, to help define/discuss/debate e-learning theory, pedagogy and practice.
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http://www.knowledgeworks.org/sites/default/files/district-conditions-scaling-personali... - 27 views
www.knowledgeworks.org/...ling-personalized-learning.pdf
pli personalized personalized learning ilp pdf
shared by Jon Tanner on 10 Nov 14
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The Innovative Educator: Think you're a Digital Immigrant? Get Over It! - 103 views
theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/...igital-immigrant-get-over.html
digitalcitizenship PLN learning professional technology blog elearning education
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 27 Oct 10
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educators hesitant to use the modern tools of today, to stop relying on others and take ownership of their learning and suggests this can be done through developing a personal learning network
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educators must take ownership of their learning rather than waiting for/relying on others to provide it.
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Teachers do not need to be technology experts to allow students to use it to retrieve information, collaborate, create, and communicate
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There is less tolerance for educators who do not believe it is their responsibility to move their teaching out of the past. Those stuck in the past... those who are not developing their own personal learning networks... those not taking ownership for their learning... are doing a great disservice to our students and themselves.
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The Early Results Of An iPad Classroom Are In. - Edudemic - 80 views
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I’ve never observed anything else that has had the impact on teacher personal learning like the introduction of the iPad.
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students having their own highly engaging and personalized learning device and their own space to learn in. They share better, problem solve better and most importantly learn that there is more than one way to solve a problem
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I believe that the most successful of the students we are educating today will be those that can find information the fastest and know best what to do with that information.
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"Our school has been working with iPads for three years now and I can easily say that these have been the most exciting years of my educational career. While the decision to share these positive results is a direct result of the positive impact on student learning, it is also important to realize the impact this initiative is having with teachers"
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A change in teaching style Direct impact Maximizing Student Learning Time The Journey Continues...
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Weblogg-ed » "Tinkering Toward Utopia" - 1 views
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During Boot Camp last week, Sheryl turned me on to Phillip Schlechty's newish book "Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations" and I had a chance to get through a chunk of it on the cramped, smelly plane(s) to Melbourne. In it, he makes a pretty compelling case that "reform" is really not going to cut it in the face of the disruptions social Web technologies are creating and that we really do have to think more about "transform" when it comes to talking about schools. There are echoes of Sir Ken Robinson here, and I've still got Scott McLeod's NECC presentation riff on Christensen's "Disrupting Class" on my brain as well, especially the "the disruption isn't online learning; it's personalized learning" quote. And while there are others who I could cite here who are trumpeting the idea that this isn't business as usual, I think Schlechty does as good a job as I've seen of breaking down why schools in their current form as "bureaucratic" structures will end up on the "ash heap of history" if we don't get our brains around what's happening.
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educational-origami - Bloom's Digital Taxonomy - 145 views
edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom's+Digital+Taxonomy
bloomstaxonomy blooms taxonomy Karen SJ Kaz remembering understanding applying analysing evaluating creating PDF sheets help guides howto digital approaches wiki education learning pedagogy objects ILT Bash Potter Paul web2.0 tutorials mind maps resources
shared by Paul McKean on 10 Oct 09
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Dennis OConnor liked it
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This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
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Details last edit Oct 9, 2009 12:19 am by achurches - 56 revisions - locked Tags a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning a churches blooms blooms digital taxonomy blooms revised taxonomy digital edorigami learning Type a tag name. Press comma or enter to add another. Cancel Table of Contents Synopsis: A little Disclaimer: Introduction and Background: Bloom's Domains of learning The Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Sub Categories Bloom's as a learning process. Is it important where you start? Must I start with remembering? Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Summary Map Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Collaboration. Resources: Web 2.0 Tutorials Acknowledgements:This is the introduction to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. The different taxonomical levels can be viewed individually via the navigation bar or below this introduction as embedded pages. Synopsis: This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy accounts for many of the traditional c
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Teachers Testimonials : TTS Online : Free Text to Speech : Read The Words - 83 views
www.readthewords.com/TestTeachers.aspx
exceptional students Language Impaired Learning Disabled in Autistic PDD tools reading aid diversity
shared by Charity Fisher on 28 May 11
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find ReadTheWords.com to be one of the most useful services on the Internet today. Many LD (learning disabled) students struggle with auditory processing.
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these students are very capable, they tend to favor auditory processing, versus the more common visual processing. It is important that these students learn how their mind works and modify their learning techniques accordingly.
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5 students incorporate this service for study of their weekly vocabulary words. We started by making an audio file of the words and definition, and turned it into an mp3 format. The students spent 10 minutes each day on the computer. Each student has averaged a minimum of a full letter grade higher. Two students have received perfect scores for the past 2 weeks.
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ReadTheWords.com allows me to create listening material for some learners that struggle a little bit. It allows my students to read along with the Virtual Avatar Reader. This saves a lot of time so I can focus on certain children without slowing down the rest of the class.
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We create links to audio files that read our upcoming events, and we use it to help visually impaired patrons read anything - articles, letters they have received, emails that can be copy/pasted from their email account...the possibilities are endless! On a personal level, I have been using ReadTheWords toolbar plug in.
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brings the text to life, and stimulates my second language learners in a dynamic way. I would recommend this program to all foreign language teachers,
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I have been assisting students to create audio files of study review materials. This greatly helps them decode and analyze the material for comprehension. I have seen a great improvement on test scores
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Students listen to a piece of their own writing, so they can hear if what they wrote sounds correct. It helps students with comprehension, spelling, grammar and structuring sentences.
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This service is godsend for many students, especially auditory learners. I cannot even begin to imagine how many people this will help in the future. We just received approval to offer this service to our entire school. (Email webmaster@readthewords.com to get a special deal like we did.
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I believe that the audio could act as a reinforcer of the written word as students read. This could be helpful not only with students who are Language Impaired, but also for students who struggle with reading comprehension.
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This website could be benefitical to students who are Hearing Impaired or Learning Disabled in Reading.
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This could be a great tool for Language Impaired students, but also Learning Disabled in reading as well. The audio would act as a reinforcer of the written material. Even though this is learning or reading comprehension tool, students may see it as a reward thereby motivating them to read more. This could a aid to any teacher attempting to motivate reluctant or struggling readers.
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readthewords.com for Special Ed, ESOL, Low Level Readers, Writing and More!
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Read The Words could be a beneficial tool to students who are Language Impaired and/or Learning Disabled in Reading. The audio can reinforce the written word and increase comprehension. Also, it could be a valuable tool for autistic students who prefer to work independently. They can use this to aid comprehension and also it could be a reward. This tool could also add interest to text for any student.
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Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views
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"Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
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The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
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It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
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Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
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Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
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raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
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It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
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n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
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I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
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This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
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Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
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I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
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When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
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Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
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ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
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In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
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n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
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Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
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Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
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I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
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Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
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Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
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In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
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If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
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After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
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n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
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In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
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Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
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Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
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Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
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Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
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n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
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While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
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By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
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which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
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. On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
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Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
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Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
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Education Week: N.H. Seeking to Reinvigorate High Schools - 0 views
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One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
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One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
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One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
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One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
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The approach, which goes into effect this school year, moves away from the traditional Carnegie-unit system based on seat time.
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One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state. All earned high school credit for their work outside school, an opportunity available under a burgeoning high school redesign effort in New Hampshire that sets its sights beyond simply stiffening course requirements and graduation standards.
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8 Ideas, 10 Guides, And 17 Tools For A Better Professional Learning Network - 5 views
www.teachthought.com/...-professional-learning-network
web2.0 PLN collaboration guides tools professional development learning
shared by Jennie Snyder on 27 Jan 13
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Get started developing your social media PLN with these tips and ideas for great ways to make use of social tools.
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hese guides to find out how other educators have used social media and other tools to grow their personal learning networks.
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Use these popular social media tools for learning to grow and take advantage of your network with the latest technology.
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The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views
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I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
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the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
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They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
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always evolving
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no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
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For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
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So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
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California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
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they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
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The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
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The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
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teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
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must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
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most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
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The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
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So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
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“What worked?”
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“What else did you notice?”
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something to try.
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Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
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“listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
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trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
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one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
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watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
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routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
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It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
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modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
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We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
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New Learning Institute - 0 views
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"The New Learning Institute delivers engaging, personalized, project-based digital media programs to young people and educators. We work in classrooms, after-school centers, museums, and cultural institutions, or wherever learning takes place. Using the latest mobile technologies and digital media practices and tools, we help young people explore their interests, direct their own learning, and better prepare themselves for living and working in the 21st century."
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Ant Heald liked it
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One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
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Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
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In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
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We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
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And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
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by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
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We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
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A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
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The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
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Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
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If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
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The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
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the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
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If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
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We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
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Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
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But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
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Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
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You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
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if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
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They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
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And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
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They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
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As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
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Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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Moving beyond technology in designing online learning - 70 views
www.tonybates.ca/...y-in-designing-online-learning
effective teaching screencast designing online learning
shared by Matt Claxon on 09 Feb 15
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Some loved them, some hated them, and few were indifferent.
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At the time (and for many years afterwards) researchers such as Richard Clark (1983) argued that ‘proper’, scientific research showed no significant difference between the use of different media. In particular, there were no differences between classroom teaching and other media such as television or radio or satellite. Even today, we are getting similar findings regarding online learning (e.g. Means et al., 2010).
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different media can be used to assist learners to learn in different ways and achieve different outcomes. In a sense, researchers such as Clark were right: the teaching methods matter, but different media can more easily support different ways of teaching than others
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Thus requiring the television program to be judged by the same assessment methods as for the classroom lecture unfairly measures the potential value of the TV program. In this example, it may be better to use both methods: didactic teaching to teach understanding, then a documentary approach to apply that understanding. (Note that a television program could do both, but the classroom lecture could not.)
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The use of different media also allows for more individualization and personalization of the learning, better suiting learners with different learning styles and needs.
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This of course is what we do with technology in education. We try either to incorporate new technology into old formats, as with clickers and lecture capture, or we try to create the classroom in virtual space, as we do with learning management systems. What we are still developing but not yet clearly recognizing are formats, symbols systems and organizational structures that exploit the unique characteristics of the Internet as a medium.
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Given the need to create and interpret meaning when using media, trying to use computers to replace or substitute for humans in the education process is likely to be a major mistake, at least until computers have much greater facility to recognize, understand and apply semantics, value systems, and organizational factors,
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it is equally a mistake to rely only on the symbol systems, cultural values and organizational structures of classroom teaching as the means of judging the effectiveness or appropriateness of the Internet as an educational medium.
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Why Curiosity Enhances Learning | Edutopia - 40 views
www.edutopia.org/...nces-learning-marianne-stenger
thinking curiosity learning edutopia literacy inquiry
shared by Sharin Tebo on 11 Jan 15
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It's no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers.
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While it might be no big surprise that we're more likely to remember what we've learned when the subject matter intrigues us, it turns out that curiosity also helps us learn information we don't consider all that interesting or important. The researchers found that, once the subjects' curiosity had been piqued by the right question, they were better at learning and remembering completely unrelated information
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if a student struggles with math, personalizing math problems to match their specific interests rather than using generic textbook questions could help them better remember how to go about solving similar math problems in the future.
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there is no such thing as a dumb question, because as cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham notes in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, it's the question that stimulates curiosity -- being told the answer quells curiosity before it can even get going.