Bringing iPods and iPads into the classroom is a great way to give students access to learning tools. However, there are so many things to keep in mind to make the devices work smoothly in the classroom. While this list of dos and don'ts mainly addresses iPod touch the same advice goes for iPod touch and iPhone.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
"The Alliance for Excellent Education recently released Culture Shift: Teaching in a Learner-Centered Environment Powered By Digital Learning. The report advocates that a culture shift to a learner centered classroom environment is needed to prepare students to meet the challenges and demands of a global economy"
"As part of Edutopia's summer professional development experiences, we are starting a Web Tools Collective to explore and learn with other teachers from around the world. We plan to "study" a variety of web tools and resources, and identify ways that they can be used in the classroom. The Web Tools Collective is a flexible, open-learning experience. We will provide a learning space (Edutopia blogs and groups) and a loose structure for exploration. You are welcome to jump in and out as your schedule and interest allows. You can post daily, weekly, just once or twice, or you can even just lurk. "
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:
One of the more unfortunate buzzwords to appear in online education circles and the press is "flipping the classroom". .. The students watch the videos for homework, freeing up the lesson for interactivity, project work and so on. I not impressed with this brilliant "new" idea. Why not?
I would agree - making this assumption leads to other assumptions that have no scientific basis. It's a reaction to a supposed change in student learning behaviors. But it is the kind of statement that let's technology advocates jump on the bandwagon and sell their technology.
An app called Field Notes LT not only allows students to take copious notes of their observations, it attaches the date, time, GPS location and photographs of what is observed. These notes can be instantly shared, collaborated, and published in the field.
Perhaps a better question is what would I do with them that I could not do with other tools that are available and cheaper?
I agree...While I don't want technology to overtake my classroom, I do want to engage students as much as possible, and I'll use technolgy when it's easy to manage/use and effective.
I feel that our plan right now is to throw a bunch of software applications and hardware at us and let us figure it all out. Not working for me. I need to take one thing at a time and really learn it before I can use it in my classroom.
Diigo is a social network, Gary. The types of discussions you have on here, the learning that you do, that's why we need to be involved in the personalized professional development social networking can give us.
laptop, projector, and internet access.
I recommend investing in low cost laptop carts so students also have devices
If you click on the link just 2 lines below this highlight ('over here') there are clues on how to use wikis in teaching. In Chemical Education, we have been investigating using these both to teach and to build an online living text. See Laura Pence's talk at http://www.softconference.com/llc/player.asp?PVQ=GEDM&fVQ=EKKJFJ&hVQ= (may require ACS membership). Contact me if you are interested in how other chemists are using them.
The ability to speak the foreign language in question can safely be described as the principal objective of learning foreign languages. However, it can often prove difficult to assess your pupils' ability to speak the foreign language in the classroom, as time and numbers often conspire against us.
I know you have heard me say it before: "e-learning is superior to classroom based learning". And I know, that despite all the data, all the research, all the information out there on the net, in the library even on various social media channels that show this to be true, many people are not swayed.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2003, geometry was one area of weakness among American students.
Origami has been found to strengthen an understanding of geometric concepts, formulas, and labels, making them come alive.
Thinking Skills
Origami excites other modalities of learning. It has been shown to improve spatial visualization skills using hands-on learning.
Fractions
Folding paper can demonstrate the fractions in a tactile way.
Problem Solving
Often in assignments, there is one set answer and one way to get there. Origami provides children an opportunity to solve something that isn't prescribed and gives them a chance to make friends with failure (i.e. trial and error).
Origami is a fun way to explain physics concepts. A thin piece of paper is not very strong, but if you fold it like an accordion it will be.
Researchers have found that students who use origami in math perform better.
STEAM
While schools are still catching up to the idea of origami as a STEAM engine (the merging of these disciplines), origami is already being used to solve tough problems in technology.
Additionally, the National Science Foundation, one of the government's largest funding agencies, has supported a few programs that link engineers with artists to use origami in designs. The ideas range from medical forceps to foldable plastic solar panels.
Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.
Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]
Good news for teachers looking to collaborate with their colleagues in other parts of the world. Skype has a new free service just for educators called Skype in the classroom, "a free global community created in response to, and in consultation with, the growing number of teachers" using the tool to help students learn.
The pros and cons of social media classrooms By Charlie Osborne
The debate surrounding social media as a learning tool is unlikely to abate any time soon. Is it just a distraction, or do the interactive educational tools available outweigh any disadvantages?
creating a culture of inquiry takes constant work. Teachers need to establish it from the first day in the classroom, and work to keep it vital throughout the year. Here are some important things to know about creating that culture, and some ideas that you might consider.
When we make a change or set an expectation for how a classroom will operate, we begin to affect the climate. It takes time for something to become a part of the culture
culture of inquiry
Scaffold
A culture of inquiry will not happen overnight, but the right climate for it is much easier to establish.
Teachers should use a variety of strategies, such as structured protocols and question starters and stems, to support students in asking effective questions.
One great tool for building a culture of inquiry is essential questions that drive learning.
Rather than focusing on the answer, they should focus on the process of inquiry that begins when the question is asked.
we have to make sure that our assignments also mirror and honor inquiry
Do our assignments focus on complexity and justification?
Do we honor student voice and choice in these assignments? Are students allowed choice in what they produce and voice in what the assignment will look like?
Do we create assignments and assessments that allow students to investigate their own questions aligned to the content that we want them to learn?
A culture of inquiry can only become the classroom norm if there is commitment from all stakeholders -- parents, students, teachers, administration, and more. Simply saying that we are an inquiry-based classroom and doing an occasional inquiry-based activity is not indicative of a culture of inquiry.
I think the most salient point is to create learning experiences that captivate students and are compelling so that they use the devices as a way to learn what they want to learn. It's about the i...
The worst thing that anyone can do is to get stuck in a rut. This is especially true ifyou are a teacher! This blog is the beginning of a challenge that I have made for myself (and for any other teachers): try something new!
Change is necessary. Clean out your binders and see your classroom with a new set of eyes. Who knows what we’ve been missing.
There was no way to anticipate the extent to which blogging and tweeting would change my understanding of education, but these simple steps allowed me to enhance my practice and provide a richer learning environment for my students. Reaching beyond our classroom walls has meant so much for our school, and we’ve been rewarded with learning experiences worth remembering.
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.
If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
Dos and Don'ts of using Ipads in classroom. Topics included syncing, monitoring, and general usage tips.
