Group items tagged

sitting in circles provokes a collective mindset

blue and green has been shown to enhance performance on tasks that require generating new ideas.

red has been linked with superior performance on tasks involving attention to detail.

dimmer

invest in a green plant or two

window with a view

“We don’t understand psychologically why putting someone in an impoverished space should work, when it doesn’t work for any other animal on the planet,”

it is a simplistic and short- sighted phrase that suggests if every student had a device and if every teacher were trained to use these devices, then student learning would rise automatically.

Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.

Let’s drop the phrase “one-to-one” and refer instead to “one-to- world.”

The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.

As soon as you shift from “one- to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support

Perhaps the weakest area of the typical one-to-one computing plan is the complete absence of leadership development for the administrative team

Craft a clear vision of connecting all students to the world’s learning resources.

Model the actions and behaviors they wish to see in their schools.

Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology.

Move in to the role of systems analyst to ensure that digital literacy is aligned with standards.

Ensure that technology is seen not as another initiative, but as integral to curriculum.

support risk- taking teachers

creating cohorts of teachers across disciplines and grades who are working on innovative concepts

Mathtrain.TV.

how much responsibility of learning can we shift to our students

How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world?

How can we engage parents in new ways?

How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?

publishing their work to a global audience.

2. How to read

how to look at some text and to understand, in a deep way, what is being asserted (this also applies to audio and video, but grounding yourself in text will transfer relatively easily, if incompletely, to other domains).

3. How to distinguish truth from fiction

Do not simply accept what you are told. Always ask, how can you know that this is true? What evidence would lead you to believe that it is false?

4. How to empathize

this will allow other people to become a surprising source of new knowledge and insight.

5. How to be creative

Sometimes people think that creative ideas spring out of nothing (like the proverbial 'blank page' staring back at the writer) but creativity is in fact the result of using and manipulating your knowledge in certain ways.

creativity involves a transfer of knowledge from one domain to another domain, and sometimes a manipulation of that knowledge.

pattern recognition can be learned

6. How to communicate clearly

7. How to Learn

Learning to learn is the same as learning anything else. It takes practice.

8. How to stay healthy

9. How to value yourself

You can have all the knowledge and skills in the world, but they are meaningless if you do not feel personally empowered to use them; it's like owning a Lamborghini and not having a driver's license.

10. How to live meaningfully

When you realize you have the power to choose what you are doing, you realize you have the power to choose the consequences. Which means that consequences -- even bad consequences -- are for the most part a matter of choice

Personal Learning Networks are one of the three prongs necessary to be a do it yourself learner in today’s world.

As soon as you shift from “one-to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support.

learning how to manage the transition from a learning ecology where paper is the dominant technology for storing and retrieving information, to a world that is all digital, all the time.

Leaders must be given the training to: Craft a clear vision of connecting all students to the world’s learning resources. Model the actions and behaviors they wish to see in their schools. Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology. Move in to the role of systems analyst to ensure that digital literacy is aligned with standards. Ensure that technology is seen not as another initiative, but as integral to curriculum.

In a one-to-world approach, the critical question is not, “What technology should we buy?” The more important questions revolve around the design of the culture of teaching and learning.

t’s essential to craft a vision that giving every student a digital device must lead to achievements beyond what we can accomplish with paper.

Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.

require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.

current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century

information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.

Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.

ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.

Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).

challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.

making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.

What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?

a rut story. A different interpretation could be

Our thoughts create our realities

rejuvenated

no more than three hours a day of work.

class suggests that the writer’s question

This becomes a teachable moment. When the respondent asks for assistance from the class, this break in the session becomes an opportunity for the class to assist the writer and the respondent. The writer appears stuck, not knowing what to ask. And the respondent appears perplexed, too.

we follow Carl Anderson’s suggestion to teach students how to ask questions about their writing through role-playing.

dynamic list that students freely update throughout the semester on the class classro

organize the questions within categories such as tone, content, evidence-based support, style, and logistics

The end result is a robust list of questions for writers to ask of their respondents.

in-class discussion about effective and less effective questions for writers

raft three to five questions they have about the assignment to ask of their peers as they prepare to write or revise their assignment. When appropriate, we can direct our students to the course text, where there are

: pointing, summarizing, and reflecting

Students’ comments often point to their struggle to position themselves in peer response.

“What would it take for you to be in-vested as writers in peer response?” Students’ typical responses include the following:>“I need to know what to ask.” >“I don’t know what to ask about my writing, except for things like punctua-tion and grammar.”>“Does the person reading my work really know what the assignment is? Bet-ter than I do?”>“I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to talk or ask questions when someone is giving me feedback about my work, so I don’t really do anything. They write stuff on my paper. Sometimes I read it if I can, but I don’t really know what to do with it.”

it is important to offer activities to ensure that both respondents and writers are able to articulate a clear purpose of what they are trying to accomplish. These activities, guided by the pedagogies used to prepare writing center consultants

devote more attention to the respondent than to the writer, we may unwit-tingly be encouraging writers to be bystanders, rather than active participants, in the response process.

, “Feedback: What Works for You and How Do You Get It?”

highlight the value of both giving and getting feedback:In 56 pages near the end of this book, we’ve explained all the good methods we know for getting feedback from classmates on your writing. . . . The ability to give responses to your classmates’ writing and to get their responses to your own writing may be the most important thing you learn from this book. (B

we question whether textbooks provide emergent writers with enough tools or explicit models to engage actively in peer response conversations.

While such questions are helpful to emerging writers, who depend on modeling, they lack explanation about what makes them “helpful” questions. As a result, emerging writers may perceive them as a prescriptive set of questions that must be answered (or worse, a set of questions to be “given over” to a respondent), rather than what they are intended to be: questions that could advance the writer’s thoughts and agenda.

this information is limited to the instructor’s manual

llustrates the difference be-tween vague and helpful questions, pointing out that helpful questions

You will need to train students to ask good questions, which will help reviewers target their attention.Questions like “How can I make this draft better?” “What grade do you think this will get?” and “What did you think?” are not helpful, as they are vague and don’t reflect anything about the writer’s own thoughts. Questions like “Am I getting off topic in the introduction when I talk about walking my sister to the corner on her first day of school?” or “Does my tone on page 3 seem harsh? I’m trying to be fair to the people who disagree with the decision I’m describing” help readers understand the writer’s purpose and will set up good conversations. (Harrington 14, emphasis added

uestions” when soliciting feedback (like the advice we found in many textbooks), she also provides explicit examples for doing so

he most explicit advice for writers about ask-ing questions and, in effect, setting up good conversations is buried in an instruc-tor’s manual for The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing. In thi

“Getting Response” chapter later in the book, they will benefit from the textbook authors’ instructions that they should in fact use questions that will help them solicit their feedback

dependent on what parts of the textbook they choose to read

point writers to a specific set of questions that they should ask of their respondents. Such instructions take a notable step toward shifting the locus of control from the respondent to helping writers engage their peers in conversation.

there is no mention that writers might use them for purposes of soliciting feedback.

we see an opportunity for modeling that is not fully realized.

we argue that Faigley offers respondents specific examples that empower them to actively engage the process and give feedback. We contend that emergent writers need a similar level of instruction if they are to be agents in response.

textbook authors offer few examples for how to get specific feedback

Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff ’s first edition of A Community of Writers published in 1995, in which eleven “Sharing and Responding” techniques, d

we worked to understand how textbooks highlight the writer’s role in peer response.

We wanted to know what books tell writers about asking questions

lthough we do not discount the importance of teaching respondents how to give feedback, we argue that writers must also be taught how to request the feedback they desire.