Group items tagged

All subjects need to teach students how to search for, analyze and utilize digital information within the subject area. This is where students will be getting info until someone pulls the plug or locks them in a bookmobile.

"We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? ,,, High school and college students may be "digital natives," but they're wretched at searching."

I thought I could read my students' body language. I was wrong. As an experiment, I used Socrative when I taught binary numbers. What I learned forever changed my views on being a better teacher. Formative assessment is done as students are learning. Summative assessment is at the end (like a test).

Great resource to use for planning and assessing a skype session. (Resources available in PDF format).

An engaging look at student self-assessment used to increase learning skills and feedback while decreasing teacher load for formative feedback. Two templates included. 

Models for blended learning and how it changes the learning environment for students and educators. Discusses what works and what needs to change in our system.

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi-experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.

To assess your students' ongoing awareness of what and how they're learning, consider using cameras, screenshots, video, and screencasting as everyday classroom tools.

Here is a great idea for using student learning activities for a public good by having students create web based lessons for others to be able to learn what they've learned about a topic.

A critical view about e-learning as it mostly happens today.

A critical view about e-learning as it mostly happens today.

Important things are difficult to assess. Content Knowledge is easy to assess. Great infographic showing this.

So the "research" doesn't back up claims of great gains from formative assessment? I stilll can't see how a data collection "check-up" along the way isn't a good idea. Why wait until the autopsy of data at the end of the unit/year? Wonder if they researched the effect size on the same teacher when they used formative assessment vs. when they did not?

We rely on an assessment measure without taking a close look at what it is measuring and we obfuscate the information we need to evaluate the utility of these measures by reducing the results to numerical values.

There are terms within education that we use with reckless abandon and as a result cause great levels of confusion. Understanding is one such word and its usage and our 'understanding' of it can have a significant effect on the learning we plan, deliver and assess. With multiple definitions and its broad usage in curriculum documents, philosophies of teaching and learning and as an indicator of the quality or depth of student learning it is a word we should better understand. 

"Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:"

Really useful reminder of how we need to address very basic ideas about how to absorb new information and ask students to self-monitor and push themselves. I appreciated the information and plan to incorporate the wrappers!

Learning and teaching in higher education is experiencing rapid change, in part, as a result of the influences of emerging technologies. These proceedings are the refereed papers of the 2nd Annual Conference on Emerging Technologies conducted by the University of Wollongong's Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources (CEDIR) and the Faculty of Education's Research Centre for Interactive Learning Environments (RILE) between 18 - 20 June 2008. The conference provided a showcase for research into these technologies and an insight into the way they can be used to promote meaningful learning in the higher education sector. Papers have undergone a double blind peer refereeing process to Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) standards. The papers have been assessed as providing information that increases the stock of knowledge and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications; they are original and have the potential to produce results; they represent substantial scholarly activity; and they have validity through a peer validation process. Further details of refereeing are included in the Conference Program available below.

WOW! Free tools related to literacy skills. The book builder tool has a section which reads a story (here's a link for "A Tortoise and a Hare") - They offer professional development and multimedia learning tools. ....."A Tortoise and a Hare" - just this one book offers an amazing variety of learning tools including: activating background knowledge, self assessment and reflection, collaboration and communication, action and expression, coping skills and strategies, challenge and support, recruiting interest, goal-centered learning, and designing flexible curriculum. Each of these skills has a specific activity within the story to address it (almost every page has a different one!). Every page also has a question to think about and respond to. At the end it discusses the moral in another activity and the story itself offers extension activities for follow-up. The story is read by a young girl, but there is also a text reader built in, a glossary, and word-by-word English/Spanish translations.

An educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.

CAST is an educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.

Defines the difference between technology and media and provides information (based on academic experience) about how to most effectively create online lessons and media.