Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged capability

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Clint Heitz

Critical Issue: Providing Professional Development for Effective Technology Use - 127 views

shared by Clint Heitz on 09 Feb 13 - Cached
Kelly Dau liked it
  • Practice logs can promote these helpful activities. Such logs can show how often teachers use a new practice, how it worked, what problems occurred, and what help they needed (Sparks, 1998).
    • Clint Heitz
       
      Perfect use for reflective blogging on the teacher's part.
  • Professional development for technology use should demonstrate projects in specific curriculum areas and help teachers integrate technology into the content.
  • Specific content can help teachers analyze, synthesize, and structure ideas into projects that they can use in their classrooms (Center for Applied Special Technology, 1996).
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The best integration training for teachers does not simply show them how to add technology to their what they are doing. "It helps them learn how to select digital content based on the needs and learning styles of their students, and infuse it into the curriculum
  • A professional development curriculum that helps teachers use technology for discovery learning, developing students' higher-order thinking skills, and communicating ideas is new and demanding and thus cannot be implemented in isolation (Guhlin, 1996)
  • teachers need access to follow-up discussion and collegial activities
  • The only way to ensure that all students have the same opportunities is to require all teachers to become proficient in the use of technology in content areas to support student learning.
  • An effective professional development program provides "sufficient time and follow-up support for teachers to master new content and strategies and to integrate them into their practice,
  • teachers need time to plan, practice skills, try out new ideas, collaborate, and reflect on ideas
  • The technology used for professional development should be the same as the technology used in the classroom. Funds should be available to provide teachers with technology that they can use at home or in private to become comfortable with the capabilities it offers.
  • he Commission suggests partnering with universities and forming teacher networks to help provide professional development activities at lower cost.
    • Clint Heitz
       
      This was well before development of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs)! Twitter, Facebook, Ning, and such all provide opportunities to make this idea happen.
  • consists of three types: preformative evaluation, formative evaluation, and summative evaluation.
  • Preformative evaluation
  • formative evaluation,
  • summative evaluation,
  • Such a program gives teachers the skills they need to incorporate the strengths of technology into their lesson planning rather than merely to add technology to the way they have always done things.
  • School administrators may not provide adequate time and resources for high-quality technology implementation and the associated professional development. They may see professional development as a one-shot training session to impart skills in using specific equipment. Instead, professional development should be considered an ongoing process that helps teachers develop new methods of promoting engaged learning in the classroom using technology.
Steve Gall

Maral.ly - 51 views

  •  
    This is an amazing site which allows multiple users to collaborate in real time on a multimedia canvas. You can add documents, embedded websites, audio, video, images and more by uploading them or grabbing them from the web. Then just click and drag your content into place. You can invite others to collaborate on your creation and then share or embed on your site. Creativity never looked so simple. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
  •  
    Yes this was recently reviewed in a class for teaching ELL's with technology and we discussed the classroom capabilities (NEIU Chicago). It has a lot of potential and many graphic and style to chose from. On this note it was felt by the reviewers of the tool that it would be best used for older students. To have teacher control, the teacher should start each mural and give the group the link so that the teacher can monitor what is being developed by the students. The teacher should have control over the group and monitor content. I would like to see more suggestions regarding this tool.
  •  
    Visual project planning
Tracy Tuten

Pearson Taps IBM's Watson as a Virtual Tutor for College Students - Bloomberg - 17 views

  • As an online tutor, Watson, a similar messenger-based tool, promises to help students any time they need it while providing insight to professors about how students are learning, according to the companies. Students will be able to ask questions of the tutor, which is capable of responding with hints, feedback and explanations.
  • “One-on-one tutoring is the Holy Grail of teaching and all educational approaches should be aimed at replicating this model,” Harriet Green, who heads IBM’s Watson Education effort, said in prepared remarks delivered in Las Vegas Tuesday. “Advanced technologies can help us to understand individual interaction patterns and enable us to tailor educational content accordingly.”
  •  
    Future of ed?
anonymous

The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views

  • I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
    • anonymous
       
      this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
  • the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
    • anonymous
       
      Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
  • They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
    • anonymous
       
      PROFOUND!!!
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • always evolving
    • anonymous
       
      Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • outside ears, and eyes, are important
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
    • anonymous
       
      So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
  • California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
    • anonymous
       
      Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
  • they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
    • anonymous
       
      Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
  • The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
    • anonymous
       
      The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
  • teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
    • anonymous
       
      This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
  • must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
  • most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
    • anonymous
       
      Progression
  • The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
    • anonymous
       
      The coach also makes you aware of where you are excelling!
  • So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
  • “What worked?”
    • anonymous
       
      Great way to open any coaching conversation!
  • “How could you help her?”
  • “What else did you notice?”
    • anonymous
       
      These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
  • something to try.
    • anonymous
       
      Suggestions of something to try! Any colleague can offer this - so why don't we ask colleagues for ideas of something to try more often?
  • three colleagues on a lunch break
  • Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
    • anonymous
       
      I probably need this printed out and stuck to the monitor of my computer or tattooed on my hand!
  • “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
    • anonymous
       
      patient, engaged listening
  • coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is
  • trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
    • anonymous
       
      Encouraging people to think - it is important to teach and encourage thinking rather than teaching them WHAT to think!
  • a whole list of observations like this.
  • one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
  • watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
    • anonymous
       
      This is one of the greatest strategies to promote growth - ever!
  • routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
    • anonymous
       
      I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
  • I know that I’m learning again.
  • It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
    • anonymous
       
      But it still works and is effective at nudging even those who are fabulous to be even better!
  • modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
  • coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
  •  
    Valuable points about coaching - makes me want my own coach!
elsjekool

Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg - 35 views

  • There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail.
  • Fewer than a fifth of undergraduate degrees in computer science awarded in 2012 went to women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology
  • The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The true measure of a language isn’t how it uses semicolons; it’s the standard library of each language. A language is software for making software. The standard library is a set of premade software that you can reuse and reapply.
  • A coder needs to be able to quickly examine and identify which giant, complex library is the one that’s the most recently and actively updated and the best match for his or her current needs. A coder needs to be a good listener.
  • Code isn’t just obscure commands in a file. It requires you to have a map in your head, to know where the good libraries, the best documentation, and the most helpful message boards are located. If you don’t know where those things are, you will spend all of your time searching, instead of building cool new things.
  • Some tools are better for certain jobs.
  • C is a simple language, simple like a shotgun that can blow off your foot. It allows you to manage every last part of a computer—the memory, files, a hard drive—which is great if you’re meticulous and dangerous if you’re sloppy
  • Object-oriented programming is, at its essence, a filing system for code.
  • Where C tried to make it easier to do computer things, Smalltalk tried to make it easier to do human things.
  • Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style—that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.
  • Coding is a culture of blurters.
  • Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable.
  • Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared.
  • Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation.
  • For a truly gifted programmer, writing code is a side effect of thought
  • As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement.
  • “Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things.”
  • Of course, while we were trying to build a bookstore, we actually built the death of bookstores—that seems to happen a lot in the business. You set out to do something cool and end up destroying lots of things that came before.
  •  
    A lengthy but worthy read for all non-programmers on code.
  •  
    Explains code
Rob Ruddle

PowerSchool student information system with Microsoft Office 365 - 13 views

  • Microsoft School Data Sync to synchronize roster data from the PowerSchool SIS into Office 365. 
  • create class groups and add students to a OneNote Class Notebook
  • online teacher-to-teacher collaboration and the synchronized creation and grading of assignments.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • applying email rules based on grade level, they prevent elementary school students from sending or receiving email but still provide them with the full capabilities of Office 365.
  •  
    ...CCSD used Microsoft School Data Sync to integrate its PowerSchool student information system with Microsoft Office 365. And with the addition of Microsoft Classroom, CCSD teachers can automate more administrative tasks and focus their time on teaching.
Evan Bibbee

Why choose Schoolshape for your next language lab? | Schoolshape - 35 views

  •  
    We have decided to start using this online service as part of the online toolkit for our French courses. While some of its functions may be found in CMS systems and others in more narrowly focused website (i.e., VoiceThread), Schoolshape does so, so much more. In particular it duplicates or even surpasses the capabilities of traditional language lab software. The big differences are 1) its price (more than 1/10 the cost in our case), 2) greater flexibility in terms of use and format support and 3) user friendliness. From the corporate website: Schoolshape does everything offered by other language labs, and more besides: CD quality audio recording High quality video recording Audio broadcast Video broadcast One-to-one audio calls One-to-one video calls Audio bookmarking Audio group discussion Teacher-controlled pairing Random pairing Group text discussion (forum) Private messaging Pronunciation exercises Dialogue exercises Audio and video upload and download Supports mp3, flv, wav, wmv, mp4, ogg formats Supports pictures in jpg, gif, png formats Supports flash animations and games Supports YouTube video Download audio for use with mp3 players Supports Windows XP, Vista, 7, MacOS 10.4+, Linux, ChromeOS, iPad 2, Android 2.2+.
Sue Bailey

Tech Talk for Teachers: Play with Purpose - 3 views

  •  
    Blog post of links to educational games with teacher management capabilities. Submit your favorite game sites and have them added to the custom Google search engine embedded in the post.
Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
  •  
    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
Roland Gesthuizen

It's the End of an Era - Enter the Knowledgeable Networker - Forbes - 26 views

  • Knowledgeable networkers are very good at what they do, and at the same time, do not pretend to know it all. They consider the entire puzzle, not just their own area of expertise. They’re integrative thinkers with broad interests and connections. They see how puzzle pieces fit together without needing to know everything about each piece
  • They have instant access to multiple knowledge workers via a phone call, email, Twitter post, or LinkedIn InMail. They can bring experts and expertise into a team, a department, or organization to fulfill a specific need or help seize an opportunity.
  • The knowledgeable networker can also seek out, find, assimilate, and translate useful information into workable solutions.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In a faster-and-faster moving world, the ability to tap your team members’ or former colleagues’ networks to bring expertise to a situation and then set it free, will allow your organization to be faster, more nimble, and more capable than ever before.
  •  
    "My colleague Ken Perlman is fascinated by the employee and team dynamics within large organizations. Here he shares the type of skills and sensibilities that he has observed in the most efficient workers."
Maureen Greenbaum

A Peek Into the Future: What College Will Be Like in 10 Years - WSJ.com - 51 views

  • the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.
  • online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.
  • Traditionally, schools have been judged by how many prospective students they turn away, not by how many competent graduates they churn out.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • s new technologies seep into the classroom, it will be easier to measure what students actually learn. That will "make universities more accountable for what they produce," Dr. Crow says.
  • The Classroom In the near future, professors will run their courses over digital platforms capable of collecting data on each student's progress. These platforms were initially developed for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. However, universities are now folding these platforms back into their traditional classes because they make it easier to share content, host discussions and keep track of student work. A professor might still "teach" a class, but most of the interaction will happen online.If professors and students do meet in a physical classroom, it will be to review material, work through problems or drill down on discussion topics. Scenes like John Houseman lecturing to an auditorium full of students in "The Paper Chase" will be a thing of the past.
Mark Swartz

Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery - 3 views

  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology tha
  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology that influences the quality of learning.
  • However, it is not the computer per se that makes students learn, but the design of the real-life models and simulations, and the students' interaction with those models and simulations. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners (Clark, 2001).
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.
  • Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.
  • The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.
  • Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).
  • Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.
  • Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2.  Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3.  Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4.  Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.
  • The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).
  • The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.
  • Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).
  • Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.
  • Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.
  • Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.
  • information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.
  • Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).
  • Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.
  • Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.
  • Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.
  • The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences
  • The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.
  • To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997).
  • Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.
  • Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.
  • it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.
  • “the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p. 12).
  • Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.
  • Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.
  • Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H
  • When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.
  •   Learners should be given control of the learning process
  • Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.
  • Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.
  • Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.
  • Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.
  • Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.
  • Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997).
  •  
    From:  FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL THEORY FOR ONLINE LEARNING
Dallas McPheeters

Ed/ITLib Digital Library → Enduring Themes and New Horizons for Educational T... - 27 views

  • the enduring themes that emerge across contexts and times. These themes include the need to: negotiate educational beliefs in each situation; focus on the details of learning design; consider the importance of relevant and authentic tasks that enable learners to develop lifelong learning and earning capabilities; and accommodate shifting roles of both teachers and learners in a mutual comfort zone so that all participants benefit
    • Dallas McPheeters
       
      Excellent presentation that distills the edtech world to the issues of critical mass.
bovetsky

School reform's meager results - 33 views

  •  
    "The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren't motivated, even capable teachers may fail."
Steve Ransom

Digital Age Damaging Learning | Nicholas Carr - 72 views

  • excessive use of the internet and other forms of technology diminishes our capacity for deep, meditative thinking, "the brighter the software, the dimmer the user", a counter-revolution may be required.
  • curricula must be developed not only with the potential benefits of technology linked to every learning outcome in mind, but also the costs.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      The Faustian bargain that Postman so often wrote about
  • available where there is clear utility, to remove it when there is not
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And who do we leave this decision up to? The individual? If so, we are in big trouble.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • we must be mindful of any cost associated with allowing ourselves to devolve to a more machine-like state.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      NO ONE is striving for this. Just the opposite.
  • As a senior high school teacher, one of my greatest bugbears is the reluctance of students to reflect on the information they have collected and plan their essays. Rather, some expect to Google their entire essay, often skipping from one hyperlink to the next until they find something that appears to be relevant, then pasting it into their essay, frequently oblivious to academic honesty and coherence of argument. The ability to discern reliability of sources is also severely lacking
    • Steve Ransom
       
      This is a by-product of failing to address and teach good research methods in a digital world and assigning work that can simply be cut and pasted. We must move beyond "reporting" in a digital, information-rich, and connected world.
  • Of greatest importance, however, is the status of our thinking, understanding how we think and the effect new technologies have on our cognitive processes. This debate extends beyond the neuroscience to questions relating to what is worth knowing and what mental functions are worth preserving at their present level of development
  • A primary role of educators is to foster qualities that are distinctly human: our ability to reflect, reason and imagine
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly... and this must happen, regardless of the types of information that we have access to. To say that technology impedes this is laughable.
  • In the curricula of tomorrow this may entail identifying topics and tasks that begin with an instruction to turn all electronic devices off.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      No- it should begin with teachers establishing and negotiating meaningful, interesting, and powerful learning opportunities with access to all available tools. The computer as a learning tool is meant to extend physical human capabilities, not weaken them. It is the low-level, rote tasks that we require that weaken them. It's time to recognize this and wake up. Blaming the technology does little more than preserve the status quo.
Tim Hornbacher

Animoto: Photostory on Steroids - 92 views

  •  
    I love this website. Educators get full video capability. If you do not have the educator access, the "Average Joe" free access is only 30 seconds.
Mr. Stanley

Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of H... - 69 views

    • LuAnne Holder
       
      This would be a great activity for introductions.
  • One of my colleagues asks her students to sketch their names using a typeface that conveys something about themselves
  • One thing I do is bring in the style manuals from different local companies and show students how each company expects different things
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Students in all disciplines are more than capable of producing and analyzing visual work in amazingly rich and complex ways.
  • many faculty members continue to specify detailed formatting requirements for student writing.
  • Your paper must be double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins.
  • Such draconian formatting requirements stifle students’ creativity and cut off any critical thinking about what should be a crucial part of any writing-intensive classroom, namely visual design.
  • Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements
  • well-meaning and thoughtful teachers establish hard and fast formatting rules that may make their lives easier, but do a disservice to their students.
  • By making these requirements, we are telling them not to think critically—or even at all—about the visual layout of their documents.
  • We are telling them we value conformity over creativity, practicality over originality, our needs over theirs.
  • It all starts with students recognizing that design is a part of what they do when they write.
  • the rules we give our students should be negotiable, and in order for them to be negotiable, we need to talk to our students about those rules, why they exist, what the consequences of breaking or following them are, and so on.
  • Your paper should be readable and take into consideration the needs of your audience.  Most importantly, though, you should have fun and be creative with your design.
  •  
    Teachers need to allow their students more room to creatively use visual design, and at the same time, teach students to be aware. Forcing students to follow exact formatting requirements is counterproductive.
Adrienne Michetti

2009 Horizon Report » Technologies to Watch - 0 views

  • Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is pretty amazing, though slightly scary.
  • a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet.
  • imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • mobiles firmly in the near-term horizon as the capabilities of phones have continued to develop rapidly. Innovations over the last year have brought third-party applications, easy GPS, and intuitive interfaces to mobile devices, blurring the boundary between phone and computer.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      You'd be a silly or naive educator to not make mobile use part of your classroom learning in the near future - if you're not already.
Maggie Tsai

FL08 - 21st Century Researching with Diigo - PETE&C 2009 - 0 views

  • Program Description: Learn how to harness the powerful research tools and knowledge-sharing community of Diigo to take your students’ researching capabilities into the 21st century. Through the new Teacher Console and educational accounts your students can safely access the bookmarking and annotation features of Diigo and can collaborate through secure class groups.
Michele Brown

Behold | - 4 views

  •  
    About Behold BeholdTM is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images -- at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images, using techniques of computer vision. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames. Behold looks for high quality images, so you don't have to sift through hundreds of poorly taken pictures to find a good one. Behold uses both aesthetic and technical quality indicators to find some of the best images available online. Behold draws computational power from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to handle large volumes of images. Features Behold is capable of recognising a number of visual concepts in pictures. You can ask Behold to return images that look like one of these concepts. This new type of search can be flexibly combined with regular text-based search. For example you can ask Behold to return images tagged with the word 'london' that look like pictures of buildings (try it!). You can also filter text-based image search results based on what the images actually look like. Both of these features are demonstrated in these videos. With a newly introduced feature, Behold goes one step further and automatically suggests visual filters after analysing the words in your query. It shows you what your search results would look like if you apply one of these filters, so you save time on finding the right one.
  •  
    Search High Quality Flickr Images.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 79 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page