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Martin Burrett

Starting at age 6, children spontaneously practice skills to prepare for the future - 11 views

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    "Deliberate practice is essential for improving a wide range of skills important for everyday life, from tying shoelaces to reading and writing. Yet despite its importance for developing basic skills, academic success, and expertise, we know little about the development of deliberate practice. A new study from Australia found that children spontaneously practice skills to prepare for the future starting at the age of 6. The study, from researchers at the University of Queensland, is published in the journal Child Development."
Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
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  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
Javier E

Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Sp... - 0 views

  • The expert performance framework distinguishes between deliberate practice and less effective practice activities. The current longitudinal study is the first to use this framework to understand how children improve in an academic skill.
  • Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. Rated as the most effortful and least enjoyable type of preparation activity, deliberate practice was increasingly favored over being quizzed as spellers accumulated competition experience. Deliberate practice mediated the prediction of final performance by the personality trait of grit, suggesting that perseverance and passion for long-term goals enable spellers to persist with practice activities that are less intrinsically rewarding—but more effective—than other types of preparation.
Russ Goerend

ASCD Inservice: Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?) - 1 views

  • Homework needs to be completed in order to produce the highest achievement gains. Design it with ease of completion in mind. A large amount of homework does not result in better learning. Homework should be academically purposeful, not a punishment or a symbol of the seriousness of study. Homework should be explicitly tied to the current learning goals of the class. Homework should be able to be completed without adult assistance. Parents or guardians should not be expected to act as content experts. Parents should, however, be provided with clear homework guidelines. Assignments that involve using the parents' expertise or personal experiences (such as interviews) are often successful.
Roberta Bandfield

Research : For Educators : Promethean. - 39 views

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    Dr. Robert Marzano's Evaluation Study on Promethean's ActivClassroom Effect on Student Achievement shows that "Effective teaching practices combined with interactive classroom technologies significantly boosts student academic performance." It was commissioned by Promethean, so take it with a grain of salt, but the actual report looks fairly convincing. I would need somebody with more expertise in statistics to verify the research methods, though.
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    Interesting research
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    You have to assume two things when looking at this research....1. People have had adequate training using the Promethean boards using effective teaching practices, and 2. that the teacher has good teaching practices in place. The other thing to consider, could we get the same or better results using a Document camera, laptop, & LCD projector? I bet we could and it's a lot cheaper solution.
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    We call those 'extraneous' variables. Another point to consider is, was it the actual Promethean board? or can we extend these results to include other interactive whiteboards, such as SMART? Just wondering.
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