Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.
Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram
The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.
“Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.
Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.
Update | Feb. 2012: We'll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, tagged "the NYT and the CCSS."
Anything that can be learned falls broadly into two categories: things you need to understand intellectually, and skills you need to be able to perform. Most things you want to learn involve a mix of the two.
ee the distinction between skills and concepts, you can devise two separate learning strategies for each.
Rule #1: Practice for Skills, Connections for Concepts
Patterns make concepts useful, patternless concepts tend to have a very limited use, so they aren’t studied that much.
But it needs more time to mature in the back of your head while you do other things. Worse, it utterly fails when put under intense stress or time constraints.
Rule #4: Concept Checklists are Useful
Then create a second-order list under each of the larger bullet points with sub-concepts.
Write out (I suggest on a word document, since it allows multiple levels of bullets) all of the major concepts covered in your course.
Heuristics for Learning Better
A concept checklist is a good way to handle those scary, “I don’t understand anything!” moments that many learners face. It allows you to dissolve the frightening implications of total ignorance into a step-by-step guide that can allow you to slowly conquer any subject.
Tactic #1: The 5-Year Old Method
Tactic #2: Metaphors
I recommend brainstorming for metaphors. Start with open-ended questions like:
This idea reminds me of…?
This idea is used in real-life situations, such as…?
What phenomenon mimics this idea?
If I wanted to tell a story about this idea, it would go like…?
Tactic #3: Visceralization
combine smell, feeling and motion into an image, not just a picture.
Tactic #4: Deep Linking
if you know you don’t actually have to deeply learn the material, going deeper into a subject can actually make the original idea easier to understand.
1. How to Learn Faster - The basics of learning better
2. How to Learn Anything - Rules of thumb to master hard subjects
3. Tactics for Learning Better - Specific methods to learn faster
Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
Trainers and facilitators need to remember these numbers:
90, 20, 8, 6.
90 minutes is the ideal chunk of time for participants can learn and understand
20 minutes is how long participants can listen and retain information
8 minutes is the length of time you can talk for before before they stop listening. We are trained to focus for just eight minutes due to decades of TV watching, where ad breaks occur approximately every eight to ten minutes.
6 is the ideal number of times to present information to make sure a learner remembers the content.
the challenge for facilitators is to keep things changing so that learners’ RAS keep firing so they stay alert to the learning
It’s essential that trainers and facilitators keep learning themselves, to acquire new tools that will help them keep ensuring the training sticks!
And if you’ve been ignoring social media, now’s the time to reconsider because it’s clearly here to stay.
Blended learning is about mixing up face-to-face learning with webinars, blogging, emails, forums, video, online learning and social media.
trainers must move away from doing things in the same old way, must reach out to learners in new ways, personalise their learning campaigns, and help people connect to each other around issues they care about!
From planning phase to project end, things have to change – become familiar with new styles of presenting using multimedia, and carefully choose visuals to tell your story!
are you trapped in DDD – Dinosaur design and development?
Activity Based Curriculum Design
70% of learning happens on the job
20% of learning happens through coaching and mentoring
10% of learning happens in training room and formal learning
BCF principle – better cheaper faster
no more plan-plan-do, its plan-do plan-do plan-do
Get used to bigger groups
Our community must start the shift by preparing learners for this new way of learning!
What makes professional development even more frustrating to
practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly
from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years,
countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations,"
and tried to move "from Good to Great."
With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a
group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day
than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional
development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing
each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never
have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates
into what I do with students.
This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal
interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure
of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long
been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional
development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of
high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org).
Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving
school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps
me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice.
John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby,
and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of
working in high-needs communities.
That's when I introduce them to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed readers.
If you're not sure where to begin, explore the blogs that I've organized in my
professional Pageflake at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841. I read these blogs all the
time. Some leave me challenged. Some leave me angry. Some leave me jazzed. All
leave me energized and ready to learn more. School leaders may be interested in
the collection of blogs at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/23697456.
A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is
emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this
will find themselves ever more isolated—cut off from the networks that are
sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value. (Kindle location
268–271)
The few moments
Technology has made it easy for educators to embrace continual
professional development.
Presentations about the uses of cell phones to support learning both inside and outside the traditional classroom have been popular as well as contentious at educational technology conferences in the past year. I first become aware of the wide variety of constructive ways cell phones can be used to support learning through Liz Kolb's presentation for the 2007 K-12 Online Conference, "Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools." Liz is the author of the blog "From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning," and published the book "Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education" with ISTE in 2008. This past week, at the eTechOhio conference in Columbus, I heard Ohio technology director Ryan Collins' outstanding presentation "Cellphones in the classroom? Yes way!" In his session Ryan identified seven different ways cell phones can and are being used to support learning:
Linda Yollis, an award-winning 3rd grade teacher, made this video with her students to share how they have used blogs to learn the importance of connecting online with others online, about Digital Footprints and Internet safety, and sharing their voice. I think you'll enjoy it and hopefully think about the ways you encourage students to make their writing/learning visible and connect with others, whether it be a blog or an interactive online discussion.
Being a blogger isn’t just about publishing posts.
It’s also about reading others posts, taking time to comment on their posts (in meaningful ways), engaging with your readers by commenting back when they leave comments — being a good blog citizen.
Because reading posts that talks about other bloggers or their posts but doesn’t include links to them is really frustrating for readers. Readers like to follow the links and check out the information in more detail but without the links they can’t!
nowadays increasingly readers are reading blog posts by links shared on twitter rather than RSS. So it is now a good idea to tweet when you’ve written a new post.
If you’re not currently using twitter – here’s how to get started.
The purpose of tagging is to help make it easier for the content to be easily found.
Blogs, wikis, podcasting, video sharing websites (e.g. YouTube and Vimeo), photosharing websites (e.g. Flickr and Picasa), social networking sites (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter) are all examples of Web 2.0 technologies.
Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connection with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community.
Lengthy, substantive piece on blogging for educators, starting from "what is a blog," continuing through Web2.0 tools, and ending with Personal Learning Networks. Something for everyone here.
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:
Writing becomes authentic and important because it is something that a 'real' audience is going to see!
The cool thing about this is that family members can far more easily be involved in her learning and in providing regular feedback than they could be if her writing was only contained in the traditional paper journal.
What an easy way to have parental involvement! This would solve some of that issue of parents not knowing what their children are doing at school or what is going on when the child gets older and more close-lipped.
Don't we ALL benefit from somebody interacting with us and commenting on our thinking?
Grandparents and other relatives rarely have an opportunity to observe or see what their grandchildren are doing in school. The student blogs also allows them to be a part of our classroom community.
Looked at this class blog. Wouldn't this be a wonderful exercise? The teacher could blog, the students could blog on personal level but also have a class blog which is a place for inspiration for writing exercises (thinking like a language arts/writing/reading teacher here) when students don't have their own inspiration/focus for creative writing.
This blog would also be a great place to steal ideas! :)
When I visit with teachers and suggest they have students create a web site or blog as an educational tool, often the teacher will tell me he/she doesn't have time to read/monitor that. However, most teachers have students complete writing assignments and turn them in for a grade - lab reports, essays, reports, etc. So, wouldn't this also be a way for students to create such assignments?
This article shows the versatility of the 3rd grade students' blogs - one reported on planet studied, one on animal, etc. So, it wouldn't have to just be a place for creative writing/online writer's notebook!
technology needs to be — above everything else — in the service of learning. Administrators who fail to articulate the connection between iPads and learning often hamper their iPad initiative.
Simply handing a teacher an iPad in advance won’t serve to address these challenges when the school year starts
Teachers need instruction on how to incorporate the devices into the learning process, which is quite different than trying out a few apps
School administrators should be explaining to their constituents that the iPad
supports essential skill areas — complex communication, new media literacy,
creativity, and self-directed learning. Instead of focusing on the convenience
of ebooks, they should instead be emphasizing the incredibly immersive and
active learning environment the iPad engenders and the unprecedented
opportunities to develop personalized, student-centered learning. They should
highlight some of the beneficial consumption, curation, and creativity
activities the iPad facilitates — as well as the student empowerment it
inspires.
"While we've witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we're struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We're sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn't have to make them.
"
"While we've witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we're struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We're sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn't have to make them.
"
"Building a personal learning network (PLN) is a great way to exchange ideas, share resources, collaborate and get inspired. Teacher connections can be made with various web tools like Edmodo and Twitter, but did you know you can easily create a PLN within your district through Edmodo?"
The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted. The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.
Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top. What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.
Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information. In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.
Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.
I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.
The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development
Parents can expect that the other three will be neglected as teachers frantically try to prepare students for the difficult and high-stakes tests.
They see data, not children.
Data should be used as a strategy for improvement, not for accountability
A fool with a tool is still a fool. A fool with a powerful tool is a dangerous fool.
Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle
by Scott Edinger | 9:00 AM January 17,
2013
Comments (78)
In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard
anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the
most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360
evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the
subject in question learned to communicate more effectively.
What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements —
ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago.
Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should
believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate
my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in
communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for
good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an
organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most
"Creation-based tasks promote higher-order thinking, encourage collaboration, and connect students to real-world learning. Whether you're teaching in a project-based learning classroom, engaging students with authentic assessments, or committed to pushing students to analyze and synthesize, providing opportunities for creation is a must."
Mixbook
(or Mixbook for Educators) is a
photo-based creation platform that offers
hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from
along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful.
Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and
edit to your heart's content.
Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding,
travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create
stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to
produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or
journey, to tell the story of a field trip. Mixbook
for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for
sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should
you choose to print. (A similar option is Scrapblog.)
Storybird,
a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13,
inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional
artists and the collection of art is growing.
Two (or more) people create a Storybird
in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting
pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird
privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be
printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared
through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple
publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to
experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.
Myth and Legend Creator 2 shares a collection of traditional stories from England and
around the world to hear and read. The site offers historical
context for each story, story time lines and maps, ideas for use of the
story in the classroom, and student work inspired by the story. The Story Creator--with
its libraries of backgrounds, characters, props, text bubbles, sound
and video recording tools, and options to upload--provides students
easy opportunities to create their own versions of traditional stories.
The Historic
Tale Construction Kit is similar in that it helps students
construct stories around a theme, in this case stories set in the middle
ages with movable, scalable beasts, folks, braves, buildings. and
old-style text.
Tikatok is a platform devoted to kid book publishing at a variety of levels. Children have the option of exploring a collection of interactive
story templates called StorySparks prompts, personalizing an existing
book with their own names in Books2Go, with their own names, or
starting from scratch in Create Your Own Book. Tikatok’s Classroom Program allows teachers to share lesson plans, view and edit students' work online, encourage collaboration,
and track
writing progress.
Big Universe is both an online library and a publishing and sharing community for grades K through 8. Using Big Universe Author, students may create, research, and collaborate on books using a library of more than 7000 images and interactive tools.
"Over the course of two years, I, along with the Burlington Public Schools tech team, had the opportunity to meet and connect with over one hundred schools. These discussions would usually involve what device works best in the classroom and how the iPad is affecting teaching and learning outcomes. Frequently this conversation focuses on the most effective hardware for teaching and learning. While this is an important decision to make, it should not be the focus. In fact, the best devices a school can employ are great teachers."
In a knowledge economy it's not about transmitting content, it's about giving students a 'High Order' question under which multiple outcomes hang. Then allowing the students to respond to the question using the resources provided, their prior learning and the worldwide library that is the internet.
Update | Feb. 2012: We'll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, tagged "the NYT and the CCSS."
A good list of reading strategies for informational text from the New York Times.
