Interestingly, unlike math, which can often be difficult to teach in all of its abstraction, algorithms do stuff. Algorithms are operational. You show kids how to use a program like Scratch or Hackasaurus and, very soon, they can actually manipulate, create, and do, in their very own and special way.
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UKEdTech Live Stream - Episode 02 - hosted by @ICTmagic - 3 views
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Looking Glass - 36 views
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"This is a superb site and download where you can make 3D animated cartoons by selecting your props, characters and locations and then use blocks to programme how things move and interact in a similar way to MIT's Scratch. You can upload your creations to the website to share. There are a set of challenges to try and you can even remix animations designed by other users."
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What are the 4 R's Essential to 21st Century Learning? | HASTAC - 79 views
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the beauty of teaching even the youngest kids algorithms and algorithmic or procedural thinking is that it gives them the same tool of agency and production that writing and even reading gave to industrial age learners who, for the first time in history, had access to cheap books and other forms of print.
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Cathy Davidson discusses the need for a fourth "R" -pertaining to "algoRithim" - It is important, she argues, because, "in the 21st century, we need [an]...expanded push towards the literacy that defines our era, computational literacy. Algorithms are as basic to the way the 21st century digital age works as reading, writing, and arithmetic were to the late 18th century Industrial era."
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"The classic "3 R's" of learning are, of course, Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. For the 21st century, we need to add a fourth R--and it will help inspire the other three: Algorithm. "
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The union wants an evaluation deal - NY Daily News - 1 views
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w evaluation system for every district in the state, pointed out that hundreds of other districts have precisely these provisions, and that such provisions do not prevent the districts from getting rid of teachers who don’t measure up
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put on the table a two-year “sunset” provision that would have negated the effects of the evaluation process
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We are now working on a framework of best practices that the Education Department can use as part of the training system it must outline to King by Feb. 15 if it wants to avoid the loss of even more state and federal funds.
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But if we are going to be successful, we will need people on the other side of the table who are interested in creating a system that will truly help teachers improve, not in leaving a legacy of blame.
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» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 1 views
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An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price
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Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time
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We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning.
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he very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
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a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education
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That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
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OOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies. Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible
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n the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.
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Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better.
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MaKey MaKey | Buy Direct (Official Site) - 39 views
Scratch Tutorial - Calculator! - YouTube - 31 views
AR SPOT: An Augmented-Reality Programming Environment for Children | Augmented Environm... - 58 views
Greenbush Advanced Technology Studies - 1 views
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Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 61, Stanley Elkin - 0 views
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It’s a rare joke that is funny. Only situations are funny.
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to do the kinds of things which people don’t really do in real life but which they do do in fiction—to follow their own irrational—but sane—obsessions which, achieved, would satisfy them. Alas, these guys never catch up with their obsessions.
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There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think, “Jesus Christ, how many more months do I have left?” or years, I hope. I am totally preoccupied with death. I mean my own death. Barth, for example, has said that he comes from very good stock and expects to live a long time. Bill Gass thinks that one of the reasons he takes so much time writing his novels—it took him ten years to write Omensetter’s Luck—is that he has an infinite amount of time left to him. I don’t believe that I have an infinite amount of time left to me. Probably I would be a healthier man if I did believe it.
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it’s not a question of making imaginary leaps or having a third eye. It’s a question of using the two eyes I have—and looking hard and close at things.
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That kind of observation can be taught. I also try to teach them how to recognize a situation, what legitimately is a situation and what isn’t. Those are the only things that can be taught. I can’t teach a person style. I can’t teach him to write, in terms of language. But I can teach them that things look like other things.
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I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.
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There’s marvelous language in Pricksongs and Descants but it’s subsidiary to the experiment with structure. I tell you this for your own good, Bob. The reason I like Gass so much is that Gass is not fucking around with structure. He is fucking around with language. That to me is legitimate and acceptable, and the furthest out you can go is the best place to be. That’s what’s so magnificent about Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote very conventional plays, but the language wasn’t conventional.
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palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. One gets a notion of the conceit and one is inspired to work with it as a draftsman might work with some angle that he is interested in getting down correctly.
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Fraser Speirs - Blog - Teaching Programming on iOS - 31 views
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One of the astonishing results of our iPad 1:1 deployment has been the dramatic decline in the use of the Mac. Within less than two years, I am the only teacher still using the Mac on a regular basis. This was never part of the plan and I didn't expect that it would happen so soon. I thought it might happen eventually - perhaps in 3-4 years, certainly after one more refresh of our Mac setup. Today, it quite seriously looks like we won't buy more than a handful of Macs again. We’re not cutting our teaching to fit what the iPad can do either - we have never done more with ICT, with better outcomes and deeper learning than we are doing now with iPads in everyone's hands.
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Inform Yourself: Social Networking and You - 85 views
colliedoscope.blogspot.com/...elf-social-networking-and.html
phd social networking blogs freakonomics social media social learning information age knowledge creation digital life digitalage
shared by trisha_poole on 06 Nov 11
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academia is just scratching the surface about the implications of social networking and what exactly it is, what it means, and how it happens
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"Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?"
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"students were using Facebook to increase the size of their social network, and therefore their access to more information and diverse perspectives. "
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"Powerful new technologies provide great benefits, but they also change the way we live, and not always in ways that everyone likes. An example is the spread of air conditioning, which makes us more comfortable, but those who grew up before its invention speak fondly of a time when everyone sat on the front porch and talked to their neighbors rather than going indoors to stay cool and watch TV. The declining cost of information processing and communication represents a powerful new technology, with social networking as the most recent service to be provided at modest cost. It can be expected to bring pluses and minuses."
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social networking technologies support and enable a new model of social life, in which people’s social circles will consist of many more, but weaker, ties
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Social networking technologies provide people with a low cost (in terms of time and effort) way of making and keeping social connections, enabling a social scenario in which people have huge numbers of diverse, but not very close, acquaintances.
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A brief look at social networking theory with interesting views of SNs and where academia are "at" with regards to the emerging field. The post is a little old (Aug 2010) but much is still relevant and the link through to the Freakonomics blog is worthwhile following.
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I'm not sure how the connection between social networking and Chritianity will fit in a school environment.
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Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How? | Psychology Today - 3 views
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Children come into the world intensely motivated to learn about the physical, social, and cultural world around them; but they need freedom in order to pursue that motive. For their first four or five years of life we generally grant them that freedom. During those first few years, without any teaching, they learn a large portion of what any human being ever learns. They learn their entire native language, from scratch. They learn the basic practical principles of physics. They learn psychology to such a degree that they become experts in how to please, annoy, manipulate, and charm the other people in their environment. They acquire a huge store of factual knowledge. They learn how to operate the gadgets that they are allowed to operate, even those that seem extraordinarily complex to us adults.They do all this on their own initiative, with essentially no direction from adults.
PicoBoard - WIG-10311 - SparkFun Electronics - 3 views
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Kindergarten coders can program before they can read - 26 July 2013 - New Scientist - 50 views
www.newscientist.com/...gram-before-they-can-read.html
Scratch programming cs4hs ComputationalThinking Kindergarten PrimarySchool
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 29 Jul 13
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google-blockly - A visual programming language - Google Project Hosting - 2 views
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Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design - 11 views
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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)
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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.
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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.
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If your organization is inexperienced, expect your average developmental man-hours to be closer to 450-500 man-hours per instructional hour.
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1995 August/September issue of CBT Solutions Magazine reported that 221 hours was the average development time.
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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)
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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)
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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)
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between 40 to 80 hours and costs $15,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of elearning (George & Mcgee, 2003)
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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.
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What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include? -... - 48 views
www.quora.com/ter-science-curriculum-include
high school school computer computer science middle school curriculum science coding code programming include
shared by Steve Kelly on 26 Mar 15
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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.
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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,
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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*.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.