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Jeremy Brueck

Navigating Text Complexity - 80 views

www.ccsso.org/avigating_Text_Complexity.html

text complexity text complexity CCSS Common Core ELA reading literacy

shared by Jeremy Brueck on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Includes lesson videos and model text-dependent questions.
  • Our text complexity roadmaps bring together the quantiative, qualitative, and reader and task considerations of texts.
  • take a close look at what text complexity is and why it's important to preparing students for college and career.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • what makes a text complex
  • how will it help prepare my students for college and career?
  • What tools can I use to select rich, worthy texts for instruction in my classroom?
  • How can analyzing the qualitative characteristics of a text inform my instruction of a text?
  • Jeremy Brueck on 12 Sep 13
     
    "Understanding text complexity is essential to implementing the Common Core State Standards in ELA & Literacy. But what makes a text complex and how will it help prepare my students for college and career? What tools can I use to select rich, worthy texts for instruction in my classroom? How can analyzing the qualitative characteristics of a text inform my instruction of a text? These have been our guiding questions in developing this text complexity resource for teachers. "
ekpeterson

Educational Leadership:Teaching Screenagers:Too Dumb for Complex Texts? - 72 views

www.ascd.org/...b-for-Complex-Texts%C2%A2.aspx

reading technology education texts complex learning resources

shared by ekpeterson on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Willingness to Probe
  • readers may need to sit down with them for several hours of concentration.
  • hey insert a hesitant question before moving on.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • That willingness to pause and probe is essential, but the dispositions of digital reading run otherwise. Fast skimming is the way of the screen. B
  • they have grooved for many years a reading habit that races through texts, as is the case with texting, e-mail, Twitter, and other exchanges, 18-year-olds will have difficulty suddenly downshifting when faced with a long modernist poem.
  • They are deep and semiconscious behaviors that are difficult to change except through the diligent exercise of other reading behaviors.
  • Texts like this one are too complex to allow for rapid exit and reentry. They often originate in faraway times and places and discuss ideas and realities entirely unfamiliar to the modern teenager. To comprehend what they say requires a suspension of present concerns.
  • Finally, the comprehension of complex texts depends on a receptive posture in readers. They have to finish the labor of understanding before they talk back, and complex texts delay the reaction for hours and days.
  • Digital communications, on the other hand, especially those in the Web 2.0 grain, encourage quick response.
  • Complex texts aren't so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb.
  • reserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. One hour a day of slow reading with print matter, an occasional research assignment completed without Google—any such practices that slow down and intensify the reading of complex texts will help.
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Reading: The Core Skill:The Challenge of Challenging Text - 131 views

www.ascd.org/...lenge-of-Challenging-Text.aspx

teaching text complexity literacy

shared by Mr. Eason on 24 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.
  • higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.
  • Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text—phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.
  • Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text.
  • maintaining understanding across a text.
  • Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.
  • building skills, establishing purpose, and fostering motivation.
  • even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.
  • A final determinant of text difficulty, however, depends on the reader's prior knowledge.
  • pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.
  • Ongoing, solid vocabulary instruction
  • also on general academic words.
  • also explore the connections among words,
  • In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.
  • teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading.
  • Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger.
  • You need to create successive successes.
  • Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction.
  • Christine Dailey on 24 Mar 12
     
    What makes text difficult and how to teach skills for successful comprehension.
Sydney King

Text Complexity Grade Bands and Lexile Bands | The Lexile® Framework for Reading - 42 views

lexile.com/...-grade-bands-and-lexile-ranges

shared by Sydney King on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • 11–CCR  1070L–1220L 1185L–1385L
  • In the subsequent grade or grades within a band, students must "stretch" to read a certain proportion of texts from the next higher text complexity band. This pattern repeats itself throughout the grades so that students can both build on earlier literacy gains and challenge themselves with texts at a higher complexity level.
  • As students advance through the grades, they must both develop their comprehension skills and apply them to increasingly complex texts. The proportion of texts that students read each year should come from a particular text complexity grade band.
meghankelly492

Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views

muse.jhu.edu/224140

world Music

shared by meghankelly492 on 22 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
  • "Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
  • raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
  • This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
  • 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."
  • as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
  • Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
  • Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
  • n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
  • 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
  • By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
  • which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
  • . 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.
  • 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
  • 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."
Tanya Hudson

7 Actions that Teachers Can Take Right Now: Text Complexity » TextProject - 102 views

textproject.org/...take-right-now-text-complexity

education reading CCSS text complexity Common Core resources

shared by Tanya Hudson on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Tanya Hudson on 06 Dec 12
     
    Seven specific action steps for approaching complex texts in elementary school. Includes suggested texts.
Glenn Hervieux

Common Core: What Is A "Complex Text" Anyway? | Catlin Tucker, Honors English Teacher - 72 views

catlintucker.com/...-what-is-a-complex-text-anyway

ccss English reading blogpost

shared by Glenn Hervieux on 09 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Glenn Hervieux on 09 Nov 13
     
    Catlin Tucker clarifies what "Complex Text" is and shares a link for teachers to see what the Lexile Measure is. Read the comments on her post, as a few teachers respond with additional resources.
Amy Gearhart

5 Tools That Demystify Text Complexity - Literacy in the Digital Age - 120 views

www.teachingchannel.org/...igital-age-text-complexity-sap

shared by Amy Gearhart on 30 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Amy Gearhart on 31 Aug 15
     
    Editor's Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators. The Common Core State Standards emphasize the importance of students being exposed to and understanding texts of increasing complexity as they progress through grade levels.
Martha Hickson

5 Things Every Teacher Should be Doing to Meet the Common Core State Standards - 40 views

www.eyeoneducation.com/...5ThingsCCSS_Davis.pdf

common_core

shared by Martha Hickson on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Martha Hickson on 08 Jul 12
     
    The Common Core State Standards highlight five shifts that should be happening in every classroom. Teachers should: * Lead High-Level, Text-Based Discussions * Focus on Process, Not Just Content * Create Assignments for Real Audiences and with Real Purpose * Teach Argument, Not Persuasion * Increase Text Complexity
Clint Heitz

Which is better -- reading in print or on-screen? - 12 views

www.insidehighered.com/...better-reading-print-or-screen

reading digital resources

shared by Clint Heitz on 21 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In a review of educational research published by SAGE Journals in July, Singer and University of Maryland professor Patricia Alexander discovered that readers may not comprehend complex or lengthy material as well when they view it digitally as when they read it on paper. While they concluded with a call for more research, the pair wrote, “It is fair to say that reading digitally is part and parcel of living and learning in the 21st century … No matter how complex the question of reading across mediums may be, teachers and students must understand how and when to employ a digital reading device.”
  • In an interview with “Inside Digital Learning,” Singer confirmed, “Digital devices aren’t going anywhere. This no longer is a question of, ‘Will the digital device be in your classroom?’ but ‘What do we know about the digital device, and how can we make this equal to print?’”
  • For example, she said instructors should take the time to show students how to annotate a PDF and make them aware that most people read more quickly on a screen than in print and therefore could lose some comprehension. She also suggested that teachers ask students to answer, in one sentence, what the overall point of the text was every time they read a chapter or an article online.
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  • “Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.
  • Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”
  • But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”
Jeremy Brueck

Closing in on Close Reading - 73 views

www.ascd.org/...osing-in-on-Close-Reading.aspx

Common Education reading literacy ELA Common Core CommonCore Close reading close_reading closereading

shared by Jeremy Brueck on 26 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension.
  • Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately.
  • If reading closely is the most effective way to achieve deep comprehension, then that's how we should teach students to read.
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  • But the teaching of reading veered significantly off track when those personal connections (also well represented on some high-stakes state assessments) began to dominate the teaching and testing of comprehension, often leaving the text itself a distant memory.
  • the shift to teaching reading as a set of thinking strategies too often left readers with the notion that the text was simply a launching point for their musings, images that popped into their heads, and random questions that, in the end, did little to enhance their understanding of the text itself.
  • examining meaning thoroughly and analytically
  • directing attention to the text, central ideas, and supporting details
  • reflecting on meanings of individual words and sentences
  • developing ideas over the course of the text
  • The best thinkers do monitor and assess their thinking, but in the context of processing the thinking of others (Paul & Elder, 2008)
  • kari schack on 26 Jul 13
     
    Close Reading
Sharin Tebo

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

threeteacherstalk.wordpress.com/...ecially-in-high-school-english

SDW reading conferences literacy high school sdwwl conferring 21daysSDW

shared by Sharin Tebo on 21 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • 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?
Jeremy Brueck

Text Compactor: Free Online Automatic Text Summarization Tool - 61 views

www.textcompactor.com

summary text autosummarize writing reading compactor research text complexity

shared by Jeremy Brueck on 17 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Michelle Kassorla on 17 Dec 12
     
    Free Online Automatic Text Summarization Tool
Rob Weston

Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before' - Times Online - 88 views

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article584810.ece

texting teenagers literacy

shared by Rob Weston on 31 Dec 10 - Cached
  • using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.
    • Rob Weston
      Rob Weston on 31 Dec 10
       
      Increased use of colloquial words in written exams.
  • Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.
  • Rob Weston on 31 Dec 10
     
    I know it's an old article but it's interesting to have a study on literacy in this post-texting world.
Randolph Hollingsworth

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2011 - 2 views

nces.ed.gov/...2012470.pdf

NAEP National Center for Education Statistics writing writing assessment transition computer-based assessment CBI college and career readiness

shared by Randolph Hollingsworth on 21 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Randolph Hollingsworth on 21 Sep 12
     
    Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly: "Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."
Marc Hamlin

Reintroducing students to Research - 144 views

homepages.gac.edu/...LakeForest.html

research resources tools

shared by Marc Hamlin on 01 Dec 12 - Cached
  • First, we think research, broadly defined, is a valuable part of an undergraduate education. Even at a rudimentary level, engaging in research implicates students in the creation of knowledge. They need to understand that knowledge isn’t an inert substance they passively receive, but is continually created, debated, and reformulated—and they have a role to play in that process.
  • we recognize that research is situated in disciplinary frameworks and needs to be addressed in terms of distinct research traditions.
  • research is a complex and recursive process involving not just finding information but framing and refining a question, perhaps gathering primary data through field or lab work, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and composing some kind of response, all activities that are not linear but intertwined.
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  • learning to conduct inquiry is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout a research project and throughout a student’s education.
  • the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.
  • Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think they’ll get in trouble.
  • In reality, students doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question. This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels. They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re looking for.
  • she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society in that time period.
  • For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful” that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society. Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.
  • Marc Hamlin on 01 Dec 12
     
    What are our assumptions about how students get research done in the humanities? How do those assumptions affect our instruction, and what really is our students' approach to research?
Enid Baines

Why Learning and Multitasking Don't Mix | The Creativity Post - 82 views

www.creativitypost.com/...ning_and_multitasking_dont_mix

multitasking homework

shared by Enid Baines on 13 May 13 - No Cached
  • But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.
  • But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”
  • “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”
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  • Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake while learning, according to Rosen. That’s a problem, because these operations are actually quite mentally complex, and they draw on the same mental resources—using language, parsing meaning—demanded by schoolwork.
  • “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
  • “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”
  • mental fatigue
  • takes longer
  • negatively associated with students’ grades
Tonya Thomas

Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design - 11 views

www.nwlink.com/...costs.html

elearning rates expense costs pricing freelance contracting consulting

shared by Tonya Thomas on 24 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Instructional Designer - $28.00 hour (based on salary of $60,000 per year) eLearning designer - $37.00 hour (based on salary of $78,000 per year) Organizational Specialist - $38.46 (based on salary of $80,000 per year)
  • 200 to 500 man-hours for each instructional hour of IMI
  • Simple Asynchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 117 hours Simple Synchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 86 hours Average Asynchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 191 hours Average Synchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 147 hours Complex Asynchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 276 hours Complex Synchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 222 hours
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  • Course is five days or less, then 3 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is between five and ten days, then 2.5 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is over 10 days, then 2 hours of preparation for each hour of training.
  • research generally shows that there is at least a 50% reduction in seat time when a course is converted from classroom learning to elearning. Brandon Hall reports it is a 2:1 ratio.
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $1,901.00 to $2,170.00
  • If your organization is inexperienced, expect your average developmental man-hours to be closer to 450-500 man-hours per instructional hour.
  • 1995 August/September issue of CBT Solutions Magazine reported that 221 hours was the average development time.
  • Category 1: Baseline Presentation
  • 34:1 -- Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc. (Chapman, 2007). 33:1 -- PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion (Chapman, 2006a, p20). 220:1 -- Standard e-learning, which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity (Chapman, 2006a, p20) 345:1 -- 3rd party courseware. Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware (Private study by Bryan Chapman 750:1 -- Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content (Chapman, 2006b)
  • Category 2: Medium Simulation Presentation
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $3,768.00
  • Category 3: High Level Simulation Presentation.
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $7,183.00
  • Verizon says once they develop enough learning objects, they will be able to build courses in five hours or less ($10,000 to $15,000)
  • includes the instructional designer, project manager, and outsourcing fees (the instructional designer takes the content that is written in instructional design format to three other companies and an in house group for bids)
  • They use a content management system from OutStart
  • between 40 to 80 hours and costs $15,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of elearning (George & Mcgee, 2003)
  • If the elearning looks more like a PowerPoint presentation, then a 1:1 is probably close, however, the more elearning moves away from looking like a Powerpoint presentation and looks more like an interactive package, then the more the ratio starts to increase.
  • Outside Consultant - $90.00 hour
  • Chapman
  • Category 1: Baseline Presentation
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