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Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
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Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 1 views

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    Inside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs
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How to Fix the Schools - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Teachers — many of them — will continue to resent efforts to use standardized tests to measure their ability to teach.
  • Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do — places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits — almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so.
  • His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)
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  • Tucker believes that teachers should be paid more — though not exorbitantly. But making teacher education more rigorous — and imbuing the profession with more status — is just as important. “Other countries have raised their standards for getting into teachers’ colleges,” he told me. “We need to do the same.”
  • High-performing countries don’t abandon teacher standards. On the contrary. Teachers who feel part of a collaborative effort are far more willing to be evaluated for their job performance — just like any other professional. It should also be noted that none of the best-performing countries rely as heavily as the U.S. does on the blunt instrument of standardized tests. That is yet another lesson we have failed to learn.
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    On what's wrong with our education system 
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The fantasies driving school reform: A primer for education graduates - The Answer Shee... - 5 views

  • Richard Rothstein
  • In truth, this conventional view relies upon imaginary facts.
  • Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
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  • As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
  • But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
  • Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
  • If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
  • In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
  • equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
  • If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances. That is nonsense.
  • health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
  • If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
  • Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
  • To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
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    An important read for anyone who truly wants to understand what's really important in education and the false reform strategies of our current (and past) administration.
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islt9440 - Group 7: Diigo for Education - About diigo.com - 86 views

  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page
  • The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points.
  • About diigo.com page Details and Tags Print Download PDF Backlinks Source Delete Rename Redirect Permissions Lock discussion history notify me Protected Details last edit by cmh459 Sunday, 7:53 pm - 36 revisions Tags none About diigo.comDiigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark and tag websites. Users are also able to highlight information and put sticky notes directly on the webpage as you are reading it. Your notes can be public which allows other users to view and comment on your notes and add their own or it can be private. Sites can be saved and stored for later reading and commenting. Users can also join groups with similar interests and follow specific people and sites. Teachers can register for an educator account that allows a teacher to create accounts for an entire class. In an education account, students are automatically set up as a Diigo group which allows for easy sharing of documents, pictures, videos, and articles with only your class group. There are also pre-set privacy settings so only the teacher and classmates can see the bookmarks and communications. This is a great way to ensure that your students and their comments are kept private from the rest of the Internet community. Diigo is a great tool for teachers to use to have students interact with material and to share that interaction with classmates. Best Practices for using Diigo tools Tagging Tool Teachers or students can tag a website that they want to bookmark for future reference. Teachers can research websites or articles that they want their students to view on a certain topic and tag them for the students. This tool is nice when researching a certain topic. The teacher can tag the websites that the students should use eliminating the extra time of searching for the sites that would be useful and appropriate for the project.Highlighting Tool Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page . 1The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points. Sticky Notes Tool The sticky note tool is a great addition to the tools of diigo. Students may add sticky notes to a passage as they are reading it. The sticky notes could be used to make notes or ask questions by the students. Teachers could postition the sticky notes in the passage for students to respond to various ideas as they are reading. Students could use sticky notes to peer edit and make comments on other student's work through Google docs. These are just a few ideas of how to apply the diigo tools to your teaching practices. Both students and teachers benefit form using these tools. The variety of uses or practices give both groups a hands on way of dealing with text while making it more efficient. Bookmark/Snapsho
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  • islt9440 - Group 7: Diigo for Education guest · Join · Help · Sign In · Join this Wiki Recent Changes Manage Wiki Group 7 Project HomeDiigo RSS FeedsSample Lesson Plans Social Studies Spanish Math (Functions) Math (Geometry) Collaboration Pages Collaboration Home Job Assignments Project Info Lesson Plan Ideas About diigo.com page Details and Tags Print Download PDF Backlinks Source Delete Rename Redirect Permissions Lock discussion history notify me Protected Details last edit by cmh459 Sunday, 7:53 pm - 36 revisions Tags none About diigo.com Diigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark and tag websites. Users are also able to highlight information and put sticky notes directly on the webpage as you are reading it. Your notes can be public which allows other users to view and comment on your notes and add their own or it can be private. Sites can be saved and stored for later reading and commenting. Users can also join groups with si
  • Diigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark
  • and tag websites
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page.
  • The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page. The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page. The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points.
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page.
  • Teachers or students can tag a website that they want to bookmark for future reference. Teachers can research websites or articles that they want their students to view on a certain topic and tag them for the students.This tool is nice when researching a certain topic. The teacher can tag the websites that the students should use eliminating the extra time of searching for the sites that would be useful and appropriate for the project.
  • The sticky note tool is a great addition to the tools of diigo. Students may add sticky notes to a passage as they are reading it. The sticky notes could be used to make notes or ask questions by the students.Teachers could postition the sticky notes in the passage for students to respond to various ideas as they are reading.Students could use sticky notes to peer edit and make comments on other student's work through Google docs.
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    My group for my grad class, "Learning with the Internet" created this wiki about using and implementing Diigo in the classroom.
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The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
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Serious Reading for Serious Futurists | World Future Society - 39 views

  • free pdf
  • Trends Shaping Education 2010. OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. Paris: OECD Publishing, Sept 2010, 90p, free pdf.
  • free pdf
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  • Learning for Jobs.
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    Education Today 2010: The OECD Perspecive. OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. Paris: OECD Publishing, Oct 2010, 86p, free pdf.
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Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist - 27 views

  • There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
  • A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009
  • America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.
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  • PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days.
  • In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
  • About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
  • In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.
  • in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.
  • The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%
  • PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees
  • the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses.
  • In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting.
  • The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records.
  • Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience.
  • Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.
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    article from the Economist "The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 43 views

  • But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel.
  • Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.
  • a growing percentage of students are arriving at college without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to courses with more-familiar expectations.
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  • Students increasingly are pressured to go to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from middle-class jobs.
  • At most universities, a student is likely to be unknown to the professor and would expect to feel like a nuisance, a distraction from more important work.
  • As academic expectations have decreased, social programming and extracurricular activities have expanded to fill more than the available time. That is particularly the case for residential students, for whom the possibility of social isolation is a source of great anxiety.
  • College has become unaffordable for most people without substantial loans; essentially they are mortgaging their future in the expectation of greater earnings. In order to reduce borrowing, more and more students leave class early or arrive late or neglect assignments, because they are working to provide money for tuition or living expenses.
  • As students' anxiety about the future increases, no amount of special pleading for general-education courses on history, literature, or philosophy—really anything that is not obviously job-related—will convince most students that they should take those courses seriously.
  • But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.
  • we need to make "rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative."
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    ". . . we need to make 'rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative.'"

NJEA has it WRONG for NJ school librarians! - 36 views

started by pseudandry on 08 Dec 10 no follow-up yet
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UK Study: Parents, Not Teachers, Key to Education | Education News - 79 views

  • Children are influenced by everything around them, the way their parents act, what their parents say and do, and increasingly as they spend more time ‘with’ celebrity figures how these role models act.
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    A study by the Royal Economic Society, to be presented this week, finds that parental effect on test results is five times that of teachers' influence. This comes in the wake of warnings by Sir Michael Wilshaw last week that teachers were unable to properly do their own jobs because parents were expecting them to cover their own parenting skill shortfalls and to become surrogate family for the students.
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    It all happens well before school comes into the equation. If a child grows up in a literature rich, engaging environment with adults that spend quality time giving opportunities for great learning experiences in the world, the worst teachers still can't decoy that child's enthusiasm for learning. He can always learn at home. But if the child grows up neglected, not nurtured with rich learning experiences ( and I'm not talking about helicopter parents spending every waking moment ramming study down their throats - just quality conversation and hands on experiences )l doesn't get read to or taken out to shop, teachers are fighting an uphill battle with a disengaged individual. Parents, don't wait for school teachers to teach your kids. Start straight away..
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MOOCs Are Finally Being Analyzed by Educators . . . What's the Verdict? | EdTech Magazine - 24 views

  • the best hardware and software for student engagement and learning is a professor that cares about teaching and is interested in improving student learning. The tools they use are just a means to solve the problems they are trying to overcome in their classroom and move their students to a new level. You select the best tool for the job at hand.
  • exciting to think what crowdsourcing could do to gather and catalog data for researchers and what it could mean for just about all fields in academia. It could have a big impact on how we teach
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    "It's a challenging process, and it requires experienced educators and technologists to find value in the data. For that reason, Duke University's Randy Riddle has been working with professors and other faculty for more the last 13 years, honing his expertise and delivering tools that boost engagement and learning. "
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The Liberal Arts Are Work-Force Development - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Hig... - 35 views

  • Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.
  • Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.
  • More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.
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  • Require lots of writing. As the management guru Peter Drucker argued, communication is the one skill required of all professionals, regardless of field. "As soon as you take one step up the career ladder," he said, "your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate your thoughts in writing and in speaking."
  • Clearly, one of the best things we can do for students is to require them to write—a lot.
  • Focus on critical thinking. A common complaint of employers, as reflected in the NACE survey, is that many workers have difficulty thinking for themselves. They may be thoroughly trained, having mastered all of the concepts in the textbooks, but, inevitably, situations arise that weren't covered in the books. When that happens, the ability to think critically, independently, and creatively becomes indispensable.
  • Bring the real world into the classroom. Another strategy we can adopt, if we want our courses to be more relevant, is to make our class discussions, case studies, experiments, and assignments as real-world-based as possible. For example, in my composition courses, I not only allow students to choose their own essay topics, but I also encourage them to write about issues related to their prospective majors. I also assign reading (in addition to the old textbook standbys) from newspapers, popular magazines, even the Internet.
  • Make the connection. Take advantage of every opportunity to connect what students are doing in class with what they will be doing some day as employees. My students hear the term "the real world" so much that, by the middle of the term, they're starting to roll their eyes. But it's important for them to understand that the work we're doing now in class isn't just a series of meaningless exercises, another set of hoops for them to jump through on their way to a degree. They're going to have to do these things for real one day—describe processes, do research to find solutions, draw comparisons—and my course may be the last time anyone ever actually teaches them how.
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iowaonlinelearning - Teaching Standards - 27 views

  • Creates a learning community that encourages collaboration and interaction, including student-teacher, student-student, and student-content (SREB D.2, Varvel VII.B, ITS 6.a)
    • Dean Whaley
       
      What I see in these is that many of these we should be doing already.
  • AEA PD Online Website HomeAbout UsFAQsCurrent InitiativesResearch & ResourcesInstructor ToolboxK-12 Online LearningProject OLLIE Current Projects • Transition Process• Marketing Plan• Job Descriptions guest · Join · Help · Sign In · Teaching StandardsProtected page Details and Tags Print Download PDF Backlinks Source Delete Rename Redirect Permissions Lock discussion (1) history notify me Details last edit by eabbey Mar 11, 2011 6:56 am - 26 revisions Tags none Iowa Online Teaching Standards Composed from Iowa Teaching Standards and Other Resources 1. Demonstrates ability to enhance academic performance and support for the agency's student achievement goals (ITS 1) • Knows and aligns instruction to the achievement goals of the local agency and the state, such as with the Iowa Core (Varvel I.A, ITS 1.f, ITS 3.a) • Continuously uses data to evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of instructional strategies (SREB J.7, ITS 1.c) • Utilizes a course evaluation and student feedback data to improve the course (Varvel VI.F) • Provides and communicates evidence of learning and course data to students and colleagues (SREB J.6, ITS 1.a) 2. Demonstrates competence in content knowledge (including technological knowledge) appropriate to the instructional position (ITS 2) • Meets the professional teaching standards established by a state-licensing agency, or has the academic credentials in the field in which he or she is teaching (SREB A.1, Varvel II.A) • Knows the content of the subject to be taught and understands how to teach the content to students (SREB A.3, Varvel II.A, ITS 2.a) • Is knowledgeable and has the ability to use computer programs required in online education to improve learning and teaching, including course management software (CMS) and synchronous/asynchronous communication t
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Principal: What I've learned about annual standardized testing - The Washington Post - 36 views

  • the Department of Education should not be “a national school board.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Quote from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island)
  • to think that first-graders fluently reading would “cure poverty” is not only indefensible, it trivializes the great economic inequities that are the root cause of our nation’s greatest challenge.
  • I have witnessed schools move from progressive practices such as inclusion, to the grouping of special education students with ELLs and other struggling learners into “double period” classes where they are drilled to pass the test.
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  • There is now minimal support from the research community for the use of annual test scores in teacher evaluations, often referred to as VAM.
  • When teachers begin losing their jobs based on test scores, how easy will it be to attract excellent teachers to schools with high degrees of student mobility and/or truancy? Who will want to teach English language learners with interrupted education, or students with emotional disabilities that make their performance on tests unpredictable?
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Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November on Vimeo - 68 views

    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "People learn through conversations"
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Easy to teach teachers to use technology. Difficult to get the teachers to shift control away from themselves to the kids."
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Tech robbed kids of the opportunity to make a contribution to their communities." How can I find a way to help kids contribute, via English class?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Interdisc. Bauhaus created an amazing flow of ideas." How can we make our classes more interdisc.?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Need authentic conversations locally and around the world"
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "this gives students more of a choice to do the kinds of assignments they want to do, as opposed to just the teacher deciding." You would certainly need to check that they were doing challenging, relevant work.
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      All of these skills mentioned above are exactly what are essential in the 21st century workplace.
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      Concrete idea for how to answer the above, last question. He used a concrete example from a 3rd grade class: "Have the kids create a podcast every week of what they learned. Have a writer, producer, mixer, etc." Would you do that during class time or outside of classtime?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Have an official Note Taker each class as well. Have the class as a whole review the notes to see if they are good/correct."
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Another solution: you need to be more reflective on the body of work that you are doing. What have I learned? Where have I been and where am I going?" How do you do this?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Teach kids really good research skills. Have them look up assignments and related material from other teachers from all over the world." And then do what with them?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "One solution: have an official classroom researcher everyday in your class." The job would be to gather the websites that will be used connected to whatever it is you're studying? Is that right? Need more thought on this.
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Final Myth: Tech will make kids smarter. Actually it's a distraction. Creates more plagiarism and people wanting to get things done. Losing critical thinking." How can we use the enormous resources of the internet and at the same time increase critical thinking?
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "Another myth: the internet will give people a range of ideas. The opposite is true. People search out their version of the truth, e.g. Fox News or Huffington Post." I find this to be incredibly true.
    • MIchael Heneghan
       
      "It's a myth that tech will be the great equilizer in society. At least not for now." Why?
  •  
    This was shared previously, but I've added many annotations I think teachers will find interesting.
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How high-school decisions can affect your career - 72 views

  • According to research cited in the book, high-school seniors who worked 20 hours per week had annual earnings as young adults that were 25 to 30 percent higher than those seniors who didn't work.
  • Increased chance of being hired More hours of work over the year Higher hourly or annual earnings Increased benefits offerings, such as health insurance Greater employment stability Better upward mobility Increased chances of employer-supported training
  • four key issues that need to be addressed in high school to help set students up for career success.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • t an early age is a dev
  • ge is a deve
  • nvestm
  • "The problem for many students, and even parents, is that they fail to think of high-school education as an investment good," according to the book "College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs."
  • Pay levels can also vary based on how much higher learning is obtained. As the book explains, graduates of two-year degree programs earn 22 percent more per year than high-school graduates with no degree. Bachelor's degree holders earn about 66 percent more per year than their high-school graduate counterparts.
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Dawn of the cyberstudent | University challenge | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • students often have more experience of using new technologies than many university managers — even if they need guidance in using them effectively
    • Ed Webb
       
      And there's the rub. Students can often read, too, in the basic sense. But our job as higher educators is to get them to really read, to read critically and do something with that reading. So, too, with the affordances of web2.0.
  • the research process is likely to become much more open
    • Ed Webb
       
      We can hope
  • a balance that suits them, which may lead to more varying degrees of face-to-face and online contact,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant,
  • All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
    • Ed Webb
       
      Interesting concept. Dickinson and other internationally-connected institutions would be in good shape to innovate here.
  • learning culture
  •  
    Guardian on how higher ed will have to adapt. Not sure the revolution is here quite yet.
  •  
    "Cyberstudent" is a hideous term.
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Students tap into technology - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - 1 views

  • use their laptops to read "Don Quixote" and Dante's "Divine Comedy" on the Internet
  • Technology is the wave of the future
  • a computer program
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "Most jobs require computers," noted Brittnee Stephen, 16, as she assembled a slideshow on her HP Mini laptop. "It's good that we're learning it now."
    • Ed Webb
       
      The technology is still very visible, if students are talking in terms of 'computers' rather than the skills involved. We don't talk about 'paper' but writing, critical reading etc. Yet here the platform itself is emphasized. Early days, I guess.
  • has just begun incorporating technology
    • Ed Webb
       
      Uh, no. They have been using 'technology' forever, in the form of, say, books.
  • students seem far more interested in learning via interactive technology than they had been with a chalkboard and an overhead projector
    • Ed Webb
       
      Well, the problem here is that some of that can be ascribed to novelty. Once every class uses 'interactive technology' (yuk) then how much difference will there be? The tools are great. All tools can be useful. But focus on the pedagogy, people!
    • Scott Merrick
       
      I'm for focusing on understanding. I love the word "pedagogy" because most lay people don't really know what it entails--theory (which can be anything institutional or community deems effective or correct), practice (which, as we know, can be summed up with the phrase "mileage will vary"), and some third thing which if I could come up with it I'd have the magic 3 elements in an effective argument. I think effective tools used effectively by effective teachers (there! 3 uses of one adjective!) will remain effective as long as they are used to promote understanding. No argument here, Ed, just sayin'...
    • Ed Webb
       
      Perhaps the magic third thing would be 'attitude' or 'state of mind'? Alternatively, perhaps another of those non-transparent terms, 'praxis'. The point I was trying to make, of course, was that it ain't what you use, it's the way that you use it.
  • "I think the kids that have turned school off because it's boring to them will come here and see something familiar,"
    • Ed Webb
       
      Boring and familiar seem to me to be closely related, not opposites. I suspect that often when students say their learning environment is 'boring' they mean 'challenging'.
  • Educational technology does not come cheaply
    • Ed Webb
       
      The cost of books is astronomical!
  • "Learning is changing,"
    • Ed Webb
       
      Was it EVER the case that we could "just deliver a lecture and expect all the kids to get it"?
    • Gregory Louie
       
      Computer technology in my classroom has revolutionized my teaching of biology. Instead of static images on a printed page, or talk and chalk, my students can manipulate 3-D images of DNA, RNA and proteins. These have even been embedded in a research-based learning progression that leads the students to a robust understanding of the foundational elements of molecular literacy. 1. Atoms and molecules are constantly in motion. (A visualization is not possible on a 2-3 printed page.) 2. All atoms and molecules have a 3-D structure that determines how they interact with other particles. 3. Charges and other intermolecular forces play a role in atomic and molecular interactions. My students can see these for themselves, change the number of particles in a box, or the distribution of charge on a large particle or the temperature of the box and other thought experiments which they can follow in real-time. There is no way, I could do that without the computer!
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