Q. What would you say is the most promising technology for teachers?
A. What technology does is it enables collecting a very rich set of information about student behaviors. So you have a digital curriculum that is designed to be highly interactive. As students interact, there's a time-stamped record of everything they're doing that lives on a server. And if you have a system that's set up to analyze that kind of information, it can provide very valuable diagnostic data for the teacher to personalize instruction. If I'm a teacher, and 70 percent of the class is benefiting from what I'm saying in class now—which is a pretty good number—then I'm losing the 15 percent at the top end who are bored, already know this stuff, and are just being warehoused. And I'm losing the 15 percent at the bottom end who have no clue what I'm talking about. That's a lot of people to lose.
Now I'm able to have different instructional streams, so instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy, I've got enrichment opportunities that the top group can participate in, and I've got remedial activities that the bottom group can participate in. And I still have activities for that big middle group, and they're all happening at the same time because of this digital teaching-platform idea.
One effort I started in June was to announce a seed grant program to support individual faculty and small teams that wanted to try different ways of teaching their course. So the internal funding helps support students or assistants or web developers or other people to help faculty recraft all or part of their course in order to see if new approaches really help.
here isn't an actual fixed fund. We got about 40 applicants. Maybe 20 of those things we funded. Each one was up to $25,000. I think I'd like to continue that on a quarterly basis. And really, we're new at all this. So the scale of this effort will depend on the faculty input and the outcome of how effective we find this to be.
We now have the ability for individual faculty or programs on campuses to produce appealing online content with relatively low effort and distribute that wide
we'd like to see a number of things tried so we can have a good discussion that's informed by rational experiment and collected data. Beyond these individual experiments, one class at a time, I think it would be great to have one or two departments really try to integrate an online experience into their core curriculum so we can understand how that works, so we can provide students more options
Many of these first round of MOOCs were produced with a webcam by an individual instructor using a tablet PC. That's on the order of a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Maybe. Certainly, it's extremely inexpensive compared with a laptop 5 years ago. So the cost of the technology is lower. There's good software for editing video -- we're in an era where producing video is similar to word processing. And everyone is used to interacting with people online in different ways than were prevalent 10 to 15 years ago. The kind of discussion you can have online is more sophisticated. People understand social conventions for how to contribute constructively to an online discussion. Those factors really contribute to the effectiveness of a MOOC or a smaller scale online course.
I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered
traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree — are not correlated with school effectiveness.
frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations — explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness
Hyperlinks are pieces of information, we need context. What was important about the link? What we need is a library that has information about the data we collecting.
Diigo’s research tools make archiving a breeze so you will build a much more complete and useful reference system. An online database that you can search and share with ease.
TakeAways
Bookmarking prevents us from having to remember.
Our bookmarks become a personal reference library
Diigo’s superior tools will help you create an amazing library.
the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.
online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
s new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will "make universities more accountable for what they produce," Dr. Crow says.
The Classroom In the near future, professors will run their courses over digital platforms capable of collecting data on each student's progress. These platforms were initially developed for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. However, universities are now folding these platforms back into their traditional classes because they make it easier to share content, host discussions and keep track of student work. A professor might still "teach" a class, but most of the interaction will happen online.If professors and students do meet in a physical classroom, it will be to review material, work through problems or drill down on discussion topics. Scenes like John Houseman lecturing to an auditorium full of students in "The Paper Chase" will be a thing of the past.
What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include?
This isn't a complete answer, but one thing the very first introductory classes should require is that the students turn off all their electronic computers and actually learn to walk through algorithms with a computer that exists only on paper. (Or, I suppose, a whiteboard or a simulator.) This exercise would give the students a grounding in what is going on inside the computer as a very low level.My first computer programming class in my Freshman year of high school was completely on paper. Although it was done because the school didn't have much money, it turned out to be very beneficial.Another class I had in high school, that wouldn't normally be lumped into a Computer Science curriculum but has been a boon to my career, was good old Typing 101.
If you followed the CS Unplugged curriculum your students would know more about CS than most CS grads:http://csunplugged.orgIt's a really great intro to basic computer science concepts and very easy for students to understand. Best of all you don't even need a computer per student if your school doesn't have the budget,
For younger students, I think that the ability to make something professional-looking, like a real grown-up would, is paramount. Sadly, I think this means that LOGO and BASIC aren't much use any more*.
So, we have a few choices. You can try to write phone apps that look just like real phone apps, design interactive websites that look just like real interactive websites, or do something with embedded systems / robotics. Avoid the temptation to make these things into group projects; the main thing every student needs to experience is the process of writing code, running it, debugging it, and watching the machine react to every command.
It is important to consider what an 11 to 18-year old is familiar with in terms of mathematics and logical thinking. An average 11-year old is probably learning about fractions, simple cartesian geometry, the concept of units, and mathematical expressions. By 15, the average student will be taking algebra, and hopefully will have the all-important concept of variables under his/her belt. So much in CS is dependent on solid understanding that symbols and tokens can represent abstract concepts, values, or algorithms. Without it, it's still possible to teach CS, but it must be done in a very different way (see Scratch).
At this point, concepts such as variables, parenthesis matching, and functions (of the mathematical variety) are within easy reach. Concepts like parameter passing, strings and collections, and program flow should be teachable. More advanced concepts such as recursion, references and pointers, certain data structures, and big-O may be very difficult to teach without first going through some more foundational math.
I tend to agree strongly with those that believe a foundational education should inspire interest and enforce concepts and critical thinking over teaching any specific language, framework, system, or dogma.
The key is that the concepts in CS aren't just there for the hell of it. Everything was motivated by a real problem, and few things are more satisfying than fixing something you really want to work with a cool technique or concept you just learned.
Great resource for teachers (especially those of us not initially trained in Computer Science) about what should 'count' as Computer Science. Worth the read!
Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses.
a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet.
imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information.
mobiles firmly in the near-term horizon as the capabilities of phones have continued to develop rapidly. Innovations over the last year have brought third-party applications, easy GPS, and intuitive interfaces to mobile devices, blurring the boundary between phone and computer.
Unclutter your mind.
I’m all for not having to remember tech tutorials or the tour company we used in NYC, bookmarks allow me to archive that knowledge. They are my digital library.
Your browser enables you to save a link, place it in a folder, and possibly add a few tags (which you probably don’t use).
Can you annotate a link?
How about highlighting a portion of the page?
Does it take a snapshot of the page?
Will it create lists? Generate reports?
How effectively can you search your bookmarks?
How much more useful and complete would your links become with these tools?
Hyperlinks are pieces of information, we need context. What was important about the link? What we need is a library that has information about the data we collecting.
Welcome to Diigo
Social bookmarking and a whole lot more.
As you can see Diigo is an amazing tool that can revolutionize how you research and archive the web.
How Diigo can make you more productive?
Diigo’s research tools make archiving a breeze so you will build a much more complete and useful reference system. An online database that you can search and share with ease.
TakeAways
Bookmarking prevents us from having to remember.
Our bookmarks become a personal reference library
Diigo’s superior tools will help you create an amazing library.
Schools, police, and care agencies are all required to collect data on runaways, but the information is often not pulled together effectively or properly exchanged between the services.
Schools are on the frontline of safeguarding these vulnerable children. Teachers are in a prime position to identify children who are upset, under stress or frequently missing school. These are the children who are most likely to run away from home.
For Stansfield, the "key issue" is that schools know who to call, and that they call them as soon it becomes clear that someone has run away, even if it has been for just a few hours, as this behaviour can "quickly spiral"
The Children's Society is calling for better training for teachers so they can help to identify children at risk of running away and take preventive action
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
forecasters have little ability to predict how intense future El Niño episodes will be. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) it is also near impossible to pinpoint the exact dates that El Niño will begin.
the attitude of professional privacy is not conducive to professional development
Build relationships
Observe the best
Ask questions
Share
Come prepared
preparation sparks much deeper conversation, more complete answers and better solutions. For informal collaborations, before I attempted to try out any new idea, I would ask one of my esteemed colleagues what they thought of it. In terms of assessments, the easiest way to improve the validity of the assessment is to have a colleague or group of colleagues review it.
develop a list of "how to" and "why for" questions regarding student data, instruction, discipline, etc.
bring my list of questions pertinent to the agenda in order to pick the groups' collective brain for answers.
one of the reasons that schools do not improve as fast as we would like them to is that when teachers get together for a purpose, rarely has research been done by the teachers, neither have ideas been mapped out prior to the meeting.
teachers, when it comes to their performance in the classroom, tend to stick to themselves.
It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
It’s unstable.
“Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
eachers have one of the most difficult jobs out there. As an educator, you have to manage a classroom of boisterous students, organize heaps of data, stay up-to-date with current events and plan lessons day in and day out. In today's technologically linked world, the ability to use web applications is at your advantage as an educator, and we are here to tell you the best tools to use. From Early Childhood Education apps to Business Management apps, here is a collection of 100 web and iPhone tools that make the grade for tech-savvy teachers:
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