This year, I was asked to attend as a Canadian Teacher Representative, along with Ontario Ministry Officer, Colette Ruduck and our Ontario Deputy Minister of Education, George Zegarac.
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Cambium Learning Technologies - Innovative Education Technology Solutions - 0 views
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shared by Peter Beens on 01 Jun 12
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PIPEDREAMS - Seeing with New Eyes - International Perspectives on Trust and Regulation ... - 16 views
pipedreams-education.ca/...st-and-regulation-in-education
education inspiration @zbpipe Israel conference 201205 international trust regulation
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Our regulations are meant to encourage equality and diversity, choice, opportunity, innovation – fundamental values in our society.
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In contrast to many of the other countries represented, our Canadian context was unique in that the regulations (organizations, federations, policies, curriculum) imposed actually tie in Trust and Relationship building and partnerships as key factors to increase capacity building with a wide range of stakeholders.
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We need our profession to be respected, which includes paying us well, treating us fairly, supporting us with resources, nurturing our learning and leadership opportunities
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We need to feel safe to make mistakes because we too are learners, especially in a profession that is changing so drastically in the 21st Century
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We need to feel trusted and with that, we want our skills, our education, our talents and our passions to be respected so we -together – can become the creators of our own pedagogies
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these passionate and experienced leaders agreed that such tests don’t work when used to rate, or punish teachers
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I wonder if there is a correlation between that supportive, trusting principal and the fact that we have incredibly dynamic teachers here, at Van Leer from all over the globe
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By sharing and reflecting our learning openly and even by sometimes being vulnerable and asking for help and challenging the status quo
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we need to recognize that our learning environments are changing and are very different from how we were once trained and educated
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We need to remind our leaders that we are not just teachers of academics but we teach the whole person
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Many of us struggle, without supports – to help impoverished families, students with mental health disabilities, learning disabilities, students that speak a different language, large class sizes, violence, inequalities
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The conference in Jerusalem, Israel that Van Leer hosts each year is intended to encourage professional dialogue among educators, academics, representatives of the Third Sector, and policymakers from diverse areas and places in Israel and abroad. This year, I was asked to attend as a Canadian Teacher Representative, along with Ontario Ministry Officer, Colette Ruduck and our Ontario Deputy Minister of Education, George Zegarac. With the theme of "Trust and Regulation" at the center of our discussions, it did not take long to realize that my context, as a Canadian Educator, a parent, and a student - was one of privilege and opportunity.
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The Innovative Educator: Educators Examine Flipped Classrooms - 73 views
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Eric Sheninger: Common Misunderstandings of Educators Who Fear Technology - 113 views
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Don't let fear based on misconception prevent you from creating a more student-centered, innovative learning culture. Rest assured, everything else will fall into place.
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The fear of not being able to meet national and state standards, as well as mandates, leaves no time in the minds of many educators to either work technology into lessons, the will to do so, or the desire to learn how to. Current reform efforts placing an obscene emphasis on standardized tests are expounding the situation
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With budget cuts across the country putting a strain on the financial resources of districts and schools, decision makers have become fearful of allocating funds to purchase and maintain current infrastructure
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Many teachers and administrators alike often fear how students can be appropriately assessed in technology-rich learning environments. This fear has been established as a result of a reliance on transitional methods of assessment as the only valid means to measure learning
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For technology to be not only integrated effectively, but also embraced, a culture needs to be established where teachers and administrators are no longer fearful of giving up a certain amount of control to students. The issue of giving up control seems to always raise the fear level, even amongst many of the best teachers, as schools have been rooted in structures to maintain it at all costs
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With the integration of technology comes change. With change comes the inevitable need to provide quality professional development. Many educators fear technology as they feel there is not, or will not be, the appropriate level of training to support implementation
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"Even as we are seeing more schools and educators transform the way they teach and learn with technology, many more are not. Technology is often viewed either as a frill or a tool not worth its weight in gold. Opinions vary on the merits of educational technology, but common themes seem to have emerged. Some of the reasons for not embracing technology have to do with several misconceptions revolving around fear."
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shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 29 Dec 13
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Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 10 Proven Strategies to Break the Ban and Build ... - 60 views
theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com.au/...g-blocks-to-break-ban-and.html
mlearning studentvoice mobilephone blog list classroom rules behaviour
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The nice thing, however, about cell phones is that you don’t have to worry about distribution, collection, storage, imaging , and charging of devices. Consider working with your students to develop this plan, you may find that they build a strong, comprehensive policy of which they will take ownership and be more likely to follow.
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when it comes to preparing students for success in the 21st century you not only have to think outside the ban, sometimes you have to dive in head first and break it. The following is a collection of ideas each teacher implemented to successfully break and/or work within the ban where they teach in an effort to empower students with the freedom to use their cell phones as personal learning devices.
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The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views
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proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
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Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
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felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
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One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
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adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
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Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
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Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
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“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
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One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
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Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
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“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
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Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
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We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
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ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
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e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
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pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
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a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
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he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
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Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
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certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
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MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
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It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
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part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
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“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
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I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
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it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
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for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
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Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
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professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
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The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
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Why Schools Must Move Beyond One-to-One Computing | November Learning - 139 views
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I’m concerned that most one-to-one implementation strategies are based on the new tool as the focus of the program. Unless we break out of this limited vision that one-to-one computing is about the device, we are doomed to waste our resources.
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Then, teachers are instructed to go! But go where?
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it is a simplistic and short- sighted phrase that suggests if every student had a device and if every teacher were trained to use these devices, then student learning would rise automatically.
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Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.
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The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.
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As soon as you shift from “one- to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support
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Perhaps the weakest area of the typical one-to-one computing plan is the complete absence of leadership development for the administrative team
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Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology.
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How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world?
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How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?
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Educational Leadership:Best of Educational Leadership 2009-2010:21st Century Skills: Th... - 40 views
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The debate is not about content versus skills. There is no responsible constituency arguing against ensuring that students learn how to think in school. Rather, the issue is how to meet the challenges of delivering content and skills in a rich way that genuinely improves outcomes for students.
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Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division. The plan of 21st century skills proponents seems to be to give students more experiences that will presumably develop these skills—for example, having them work in groups. But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
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A growing number of business leaders, politicians, and educators are united around the idea that students need
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shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 27 Oct 10
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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
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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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How are Educators Using Google Plus Hangouts? | MindShift - 72 views
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As the name suggests, a “hangout” is an informal place, but that doesn’t mean that teaching and learning won’t happen there, of course. And as the show-and-tell on “Ask an Engineer” demonstrates, we’re just beginning to see the innovative ways in which Google+ will be used in educational settings. I asked those who follow me on Google Plus if they’re planning on using Hangouts with their students in the Fall, and it’s clear that we’ll see office hours, collaborative grading sessions, and the like occur via the new video conferencing tool.
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CBI: Change is possible - but we must be clearer about what we ask schools to develop i... - 1 views
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In Finland, the goals of education are explicitly linked to competitiveness, research and innovation.
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This lack of a comprehensive statement of the achievement we are looking for schools to deliver is a key failing.
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One such school leader told us they had taken a conscious decision with one group of young people to focus on five key subjects and some life skills, knowing that the accountability system would score them down for it, as it expected eight qualifications from all students at that time.
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Our system should reward schools making brave decisions which focus on boosting long-term outcomes for pupils, not punish them.
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It should be able to survive changes of government and provide the test against which policy changes and school actions are judged
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shine the light on whether the system is truly addressing the needs of all students, rather than just the few required to meet a government target.
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thos and culture that build the social skills also essential to progress in life and work, and allow them time to focus on this
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Have a school accountability and assessment framework that supports these goals rather than defining them.
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An exclusive focus on subjects for study would fail to equip young people with these, though rigour in the curriculum does help
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Behaviours can only be developed over time, through the entire path of a young person’s life and their progress through the school system.
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Development of a clear, widely-owned and stable statement of the outcome that all schools are asked to deliver.
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resourcing these bodies to develop an approach based on a wider range of measures and assessments than are currently in use,
Online-Learning Portal Allows Educators to Create Adaptive Content - Wired Campus - The... - 1 views
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shared by Jim Aird on 23 Apr 13
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How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views
chronicle.com/...138729
education technology Teaching innovative higher education computers public online online education report government
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they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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"Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
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I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
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Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education - 60 views
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As history repeats itself, we may find that a great deal of information is better presented visually rather than verbally.
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Kellner (1998) proposes that multiple literacies are necessary to meet the challenges of today's society, literacies that include print literacy, visual literacy, aural literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy, and ecoliteracy.
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Learning through orderly, sequential, verbal-mathematical, left-hemisphere tasks is a pattern seen frequently in education (West, 1997). Those whose thought processes are predominantly in the right-hemisphere where visual-spatial and nonverbal cognition activities rule frequently may have difficulty capitalizing on a learning style that is not compatible with their abilities.
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If visual literacy is regarded as a language, then there is a need to know how to communicate using this language, which includes being alert to visual messages and critically reading or viewing images as the language of the messages.
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Technology, particularly the graphical user interface of the World Wide Web, requires skills for reading and writing visually in order to derive meaning from what is being communicated.
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learning evolves from the concrete to the abstract; visual symbols are nonverbal representations that precede verbal symbols (Sinatra, 1986).
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West (1997) conveys an innovative mathematics approach whereby students “do” mathematics rather than “watch” mathematics. The technique emphasizes learning through interactive graphics without words. “The words go into an idea only after the idea has already settled in our mind”(West, p.
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The literature suggests that using visual elements in teaching and learning yields positive results.
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shared by Rachael Hodges on 20 Apr 12
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Five Best Practices for the Flipped Classroom | Edutopia - 186 views
www.edutopia.org/...m-best-practices-andrew-miller
flipped classroom best practices learning teaching practices
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It doesn't solve anything. It is a great first step in reframing the role of the teacher in the classroom. It fosters the "guide on the side" mentality and role, rather than that of the "sage of the stage." It helps move a classroom culture towards student construction of knowledge rather than the teacher having to tell the knowledge to students.
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We must first focus on creating the engagement and then look at structures, like the flipped classroom, that can support.
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If the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason to know the content.
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Lack of technology doesn't necessarily close the door to the flipped classroom model, but it might require some intentional planning and differentiation.
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you must build in reflective activities to have students think about what they learned, how it will help them, its relevance
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Ok, I'll be honest. I get very nervous when I hear education reformists and politicians tout how "incredible" the flipped classroom model (1), or how it will "solve" many of the problems of education. It doesn't solve anything. It is a
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Learning and earning: Equipping people to stay ahead of technological change | The Econ... - 34 views
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working lives are so lengthy and so fast-changing that simply cramming more schooling in at the start is not enough. People must also be able to acquire new skills throughout their careers.
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lifelong learning that exists today mainly benefits high achievers—and is therefore more likely to exacerbate inequality than diminish it.
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a burst at the start and top-ups through company training—is breaking down. One reason is the need for new, and constantly updated, skills.
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The 19th and 20th centuries saw stunning advances in education. That should be the scale of the ambition today
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It is easier to learn later in life if you enjoyed the classroom first time around: about 80% of the learners on Coursera already have degrees. Online learning requires some IT literacy, yet one in four adults in the OECD has no or limited experience of computers. Skills atrophy unless they are used, but many low-end jobs give workers little chance to practise them.
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Lifelong learning starts at school. As a rule, education should not be narrowly vocational. The curriculum needs to teach children how to study and think. A focus on “metacognition” will make them better at picking up skills later in life.
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Pushing people into ever-higher levels of formal education at the start of their lives is not the way to cope.
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WHEN education fails to keep pace with technology, the result is inequality.
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What We Learned: A 1:1 iPad Reflection | Edutopia - 185 views
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One of the best decisions our team made last summer was to pre-install Casper (5) profiles on all of our iPads. We pulled the student IDs from our ASPEN (6) student information system, logged each student into Casper and installed the four profiles needed for our plan. The profiles took Safari web browser off the iPad.
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As we progressed through the year, we discovered that these tools took a lot of time to create something we were trying to move away from in the first place. The reason for moving away from textbooks is that they offer a myopic vision of a world that is ever-changing. Simply viewing a textbook on an iPad does not change or innovate learning, nor does it use the iPad to its full potential. If your plan is to digitize a standard textbook, save your money and renew your textbook licenses.
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This year we are incorporating K-12 digital portfolios along with revised information and digital literacy standards. Every BPS student will have a Google Apps for Education account that they will use in conjunction with the Blogger (15) application to begin creating their Life of Learning portfolio
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The students that make it into help desk are those who not only enjoy working with technology in an educational context, but have a desire to serve, support and possibly solve problems in the school on a daily basis.
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. Aside from simply troubleshooting, our students help their former teachers at the middle and elementary levels as well as create how-to scripts and videos for students, faculty and the Burlington community. Our students have not only helped within the BPS community, but have helped our Tech Team organize two major conferences in the past year:
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You can have the most precisely calculated plan in place before you launch, but if you don't have the right support in place, your launch may stumble. I regard our IT department as one of the best I have ever worked with. I say this in all sincerity because I do "work with" this team. These guys not only manage a robust infrastructure, but they take part in the educational conversation and give our staff the best tools to create dynamic, engaging classrooms.
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However, we must work to incorporate information and digital literacy standards into the K-12 curriculum as early as possible. Students in Kindergarten should understand what it means to be nice to someone and how that will translate to writing and living on the Web. As students grow up through the educational pathways, they must be exposed to new and emerging technologies as early as possible in a safe, responsible manner. By doing so, we are preparing them for a global economy that requires these skills.