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Ed Webb

Please Sir, how do you re-tweet? - Twitter to be taught in UK primary schools - 2 views

  • The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
  • Traditional education in areas like phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic remain but modern media and web-based skills and environmental education now feature.
  • The skills that let kids use Internet technologies effectively also work in the real world: being able to evaluate resources critically, communicating well, being careful with strangers and your personal information, conducting yourself in a manner appropriate to your environment. Those things are, and should be, taught in schools. It’s also a good idea to teach kids how to use computers, including web browsers etc, and how those real-world skills translate online.
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  • I think teaching kids HOW TO use Wikipedia is a step forward from ordering them NOT TO use it, as they presently do in many North American classrooms.
  • Open Source software is the future and therefore we need to concentrate on the wheels and not the vehicle!
  • Core skills is very important. Anyone and everyone can learn Photoshop & Word Processing at any stage of their life, but if core skills are missed from an early age, then evidence has shown that there has always been less chance that the missing knowledge could be learnt at a later stage in life.
  • Schools shouldn’t be about teaching content, but about learning to learn, getting the kind of critical skills that can be used in all kinds of contexts, and generating motivation for lifelong learning. Finnish schools are rated the best in the world according to the OECD/PISA ratings, and they have totally de-emphasised the role of content in the curriculum. Twitter could indeed help in the process as it helps children to learn to write in a precise, concise style - absolutely nothing wrong with that from a pedagogical point of view. Encouraging children to write is never a bad thing, no matter what the platform.
  • Front end stuff shouldn’t be taught. If anything it should be the back end gubbins that should be taught, databases and coding.
  • So what’s more important, to me at least, is not to know all kinds of useless facts, but to know the general info and to know how to think and how to search for information. In other words, I think children should get lessons in thinking and in information retrieval. Yes, they should still be taught about history, etc. Yes, it’s important they learn stuff that they could need ‘on the spot’ - like calculating skills. However, we can go a little bit easier on drilling the information in - by the time they’re 25, augmented reality will be a fact and not even a luxury.
  • Schools should focus more on teaching kids on how to think creatively so they can create innovative products like twitter rather then teaching on how to use it….
  • Schools should focus more on teaching kids on how to think creatively so they can create innovative products like twitter rather then teaching on how to use it….
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    The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK's education system. And that's not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
Martin Burrett

Games to Learn English - 96 views

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    This is a site full of fun ESL games to practise and improve English skills. Games including Hangman and a Spelling Bee and there are lots of topics to choose from. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English+As+An+Additional+Language
Martin Burrett

Vocabulary Pinball - 138 views

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    A great pinball English word game. Collect the letters using your pinball skills developed from your misspent youth and guess the meaning of the word. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Maureen Greenbaum

How diplomas based on skill acquisition, not credits earned, could change education - T... - 15 views

  • a new teaching approach here called “proficiency-based education” that was inspired by a 2012 state law.
  • law requires that by 2021, students graduating from Maine high schools must show they have mastered specific skills to earn a high school diploma.
  • CompetencyWorks, a national organization t
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  • By 2021, schools must offer diplomas based students reaching proficiency in the four core academic subject areas: English, math, science and social studies. By 2025, four additional subject areas will be included: a second language, the arts, health and physical education.
  • proficiency-based idea has also created headaches at some schools for teachers trying to monitor students’ individual progress.
  • Students have more flexibility to learn at their own pace and teachers get time to provide extra help for students who need it
  • It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Bowen said. “It was a systems design problem.”
  • offer students clarity about what they have to learn and how they are expected to demonstrate they’ve learned it.
  • at schools that have embraced the new system, teachers say they are finding that struggling students are seeing the biggest gains because teachers are given more time to re-teach skills and students better understand the parameters for earning a diploma.
  • Deciding to believe that all students are capable of learning all of the standards, she said, “was scary.”
  • Multiple-choice questions have virtually disappeared. Homework is checked, but not graded.
  • students get less than a proficient score, they must go back and study the skill they missed. They are then given a chance to retake the relevant portions of the test until they earn a satisfactory score.
  • We inherited a structure for schooling that was based on time and on philosophical beliefs that learning would be distributed across a bell curve,
  • get crystal clear about what we want students to know and be able to do and then how to measure it.”
Deborah Baillesderr

Easy English news, short news, English story, reading skills for you - 107 views

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    This is a useful news site which provides the same news story written at three different levels of English, making it a wonderful tool for ESL classes and differentiating for different age groups. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English+As+An+Additional+Language
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    This is such a great site. They take one news story and put it in 3-4 different reading levels.
Teresa Ilgunas

My Home - Practice speaking English while you watch great videos - EnglishCentral.com - 28 views

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    Wonderful video clips where students can record and practice their speaking. Good for improving literacy as well as English speaking skills. Any student who does not like reading aloud would enjoy! Latest: a clip from Despicable Me!
Judy Robison

Would you hire someone with poor grammar skills? | TechRepublic - 67 views

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    Help for all the English grammar teachers, outside reinforcement!
Rob Belprez

High School ELA Lesson Support by Lexiconic Education Resources - 15 views

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    This is a perfect collection of English lessons and resources for most High School Level classes.  It has all the traditional assignments, stories, skills, terms, and samples to pull from.
Martin Burrett

Pora Ora : The Online 3D Educational Game for Children - 196 views

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    This is a MUST TRY site. It's not often that I'm amazed be an educational resource, but I am with this one. Pora Ora is a stunning educational virtual world for Primary school aged students. Play truely fun educational games which practise skills in English, maths and many other subjects. The graphics and useably is superb. Online safety is at the heart of this site. The parential admin account can set the student's account to free chat with everyone to completely locked down where they have the world to themselves and everything in between. The site has a language filter and users can report any incidents of trouble. Also, the first task requires the user to complete an online safety task. The site is free with a few premium features coming out later. You have got to try this one! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Roland Gesthuizen

Public speaking in primary school - 34 views

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    "confidence in public speaking is a valuable tool for children to have. "A clear confident speaking voice is an essential life skill that fosters self-esteem and personal confidence,"" "Children need lots of opportunities to prepare and present speeches as well as to listen to and watch others speak."
Martin Burrett

Babadum - 16 views

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    "This is a fab HTML5 language learning site which tests your language skills through a series of games with 1500 words. The site collects stats on your performance. The current 21 languages include English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japan, Italian, Russian, Polish and many more."
Sharin Tebo

5 Reasons Why Reading Conferences Matter - Especially in High School English | Three Te... - 57 views

  • Reading Conferences
  • Every child needs one-on-one conversations with an adult as often as possible.
  • One way to show our adolescent students that we care is to talk with them. And face-to-face conversations about books and reading is a pretty safe way to do so, not to mention that we model authentic conversations about reading when we do.
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  • The more we grow in empathy, the better relationship we’ll have with our friends, our families and all other people we associate with — at least the idealist in me will cling to that hope as I continue to talk to students about books and reading.
  • circles about engagement.
  • Try questions like: How’s it going? (Thanks, Carl Anderson) Why did you choose this book? Do you know anyone else who has read this book? What’d she think? How’d you find the time to read this week? What’s standing in the way of your reading time?
  • Try questions like: What character reminds you of yourself or someone you know? What part of the story is the most similar/different to your life? Why do you think the author makes that happen in the book? What does he want us to learn about life? How does this story/character/conflict/event make you think about life differently?
  • when I take the time to talk to each student individually, and reinforce the skill in a quick chat, the application of that skill some how seeps into their brains much deeper.
  • Try questions like: Tell me about _____ that we learned in class today. How does that relate to your book/character? Remember when we learned _____, tell me how/where you see that in your book. Think about when we practiced ___, where does the author do that in your book? You’ve improved with ___, how could you use that skill for _______?
  • We must provide opportunities for our students to grow into confident and competent readers and writers in order to handle the rigor and complexity of post high school education and beyond. We must remember to focus on literacy not on the literature
  • We must validate our readers, ask questions that spark confidence, avoid questions that demean or make the student defensive, and at the same time challenge our readers into more complex texts.
  • Try questions like: On a scale of 1 to 10 how complex is this book for you? Why? What do you do when the reading gets difficult? Of all the books you’ve read this year, which was the most challenging? Why? How’s it going finding vocabulary for your personal dictionary? Tell me how you are keeping track of the parallel storyline?
  • I ask students about their confidence levels in our little chats, and they tell me they know they have grown as a readers. This is the best kind of reward.
  • Try questions like: How has your confidence grown as you’ve read this year? What do you think is the one thing we’ve done in class that’s helped you improve so much as a reader? How will the habits you’ve created in class help you in the reading you’ll have to do in college? Why do you think you’ve grown so much as a reader the past few weeks? What’s different for you now in the way you learn than how you learned before? Describe for me the characteristics you have that make you a reader.
  • What kinds of questions work for you in your reading conferences?
Tony Baldasaro

Inversions - Practical Theory - 1 views

  • Then, class, rather than being a time when all kids sat and received the instruction, could be the time when they reinforce skills by doing problem sets, worked on real-world application projects, collaborated with teachers to reinforce concepts, etc... in some ways, it's an inversion of what we traditionally think of as a math class.
  • If we use technology to invert that idea, so that kids could watch the teacher's demonstration of the skills and concepts at home (and with the ability to rewind when necessary,) we could allow kids the opportunity to apply and practice their knowledge in the space where they can get help, collaborate, etc... doesn't that make more sense? (Interestingly, I was trying to imagine what that would look like in an English classroom, and I realized that is, in many respects, similar to what we do already when we ask kids to read the book at home, and then come in and interact with the community to uncover the deeper aspects of the text. Hm.)
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    I'm about 80% of the way through Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn. (Yeah, I know... I'm the last one to read it.) There's a lot that's very interesting about the book, and while we should critically examine the book, it is still a fascinating read. If nothing else, it is continuing to make me think about how much more could happen in our classrooms if we created more opportunities for students to learn basic skills and content outside of class, rather than inside class. I've been thinking a lot about math class. How many students would learn math more efficiently if they could watch math videos, narrated by a teacher with problems done "on the board" as they watched with multiple examples of concepts (think geometry here, as an example) that speak to different learning modalities.
Javier E

The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com - 41 views

  • Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
  • all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
  • “Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”
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  • It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.
  • Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.
  • Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
  • The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.
  • “We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher. We have issues with depression. Getting students alert and motivated — even getting them to class, to be honest with you — it’s a challenge.”
  • “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
  • “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
  • This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.
  • concrete business skills tend to expire in five years or so as technology and organizations change.
  • History and philosophy, on the other hand, provide the kind of contextual knowledge and reasoning skills that are indispensable for business students.
  • when they hand in papers, they’re marked up twice: once for content by a professor with specialized expertise, and once for writing quality by a business-communication professor.
  • a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations.
  • what about employers? What do they want? According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.
Trevor Cunningham

Playfic - 128 views

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    This is an interesting site that feels like a cross between coding and story writing. Make branching stories where readers choose what happens next. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
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    Gameification: develop interactive fiction pieces to reinforce literacy skills, develop process charts to reinforce skills, etc.
D. S. Koelling

Teaching to the Text Message - NYTimes.com - 50 views

  • learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation.
  • A lot can be said with a little — the mundane and the extraordinary. Philosophers like Confucius (“Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.”) and Nietzsche were kings of the aphorism.
  • I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language.
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    College English prof advocates teaching students to write concisely with text-like assignments.
Glenn Hervieux

CUE Conference Keynote: Common Core - Transforming Teaching & Learning | Catlin Tucker,... - 56 views

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    Katlin Tucker, a dynamic high school teacher presents her approach-pedagogy-instructional strategies to transform teaching and learning. She demonstrates ways she helps engage students and grow skills in several areas, including communication, comprehension & critique, collaboration, content knowledge, etc. A couple of her main tools include Collaborize Classroom and Google Docs. 
Martin Burrett

Skoolbo - 208 views

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    This is a must try site which provides an amazing 3D world which teaches English and maths core skills. Players race against two other randomly chosen online players of a similar level. The questions start out very easy and adapt to the performance of the player. The questions are read out and some are displayed on the screen. The player just clicks on the correct multiple choice answer to increase their speed. There is a download for PCs and Macs as well as apps for iPad and Android. There are teacher accounts which allow you to make logins for lots of children quickly. When there log in students will be asked to design an avatar. Because the resource requires a sizeable download it takes a little time to set up, but because it runs on your local device game play is very smooth and quick. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Marc Patton

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - What is NAAL? - 0 views

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    A nationally representative and continuing assessment of English language literary skills of American Adults
Penny Roberts

VOCEDplus | VOCEDplus: the international tertiary education research database - 19 views

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    "VOCEDplus is a free research database for tertiary education, especially as it relates to workforce needs, skills development, and social inclusion. It encompasses vocational education and training (VET), higher education, adult and community education, informal learning, and VET in Schools. It is international in scope and contains over 55,000 English language records, many with links to full text documents."
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