Purpose - The primary purpose of this research paper is to understand the role of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices in India. India is considered a major player in the world economy today. US multinationals are significantly increasing their presence in India and understanding cultural preferences will help global companies transition better.
Design/methodology/approach - This conceptual paper uses the national cultural dimensions of the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness project, which is identified as the most topical theoretical framework on culture. The national cultural scores are used to develop hypotheses for specific cultural dimensions. Examples from the literature are also used to strengthen the proposed hypotheses.
Findings - This research proposes that national cultural dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, and future-orientation influence e-learning practices. This study distinguishes between synchronous and asynchronous methods of e-learning and the role of culture on the same. Future research can definitely empirically test the hypotheses proposed.
Practical implications - This study provides strategic implications for multinationals with a guide sheet identifying the role of the various cultural dimensions on e-learning. The suggested strategies can be implemented by multinationals in other countries with similar national cultural dimensions also.
Originality/value - This research also proposes a theoretical e-learning model identifying the impact of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices. This research also provides practitioners a strategic implications model that could be implemented for e-learning initiatives in multinationals.
Our 6th grade collaborative project with a focus on global issues. We are looking for schools to join us with the hopes of working on some collaborative lyrics in Google Docs, remixing audio tracks shared between schools and possibly a skype session. We are running the project 5 times this year for 6 weeks at a time.
Email me if you are interested i taking part at one point.
jennifergarcia@abc-net.edu.sv
Understanding how mobile, global and virtual social networks influence our interpretation of socio-cultural theories of learning might allow us to better understand the interplay of settings and contexts within which learning occurs and in doing so better understand how learning may be facilitated.
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:
75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill.
“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”
“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”
“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”
“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”
“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”
“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”
We have bandwidth issues and the issue of students just plain being distracted in school. I see that as a challenge to teachers to teach better rather than letting the teachers sit back and teach the same old way. Figure out a better way to engage students.
Do some students watch the Kanye West dissing Taylor Swift video on YouTube when they should be doing their work? Of course they do.
But this experience has shown me that THIS IS THE WAY students should be learning…
ast year, my high school Current Events students told me that the more rules the school made, the more they, the students, would look for ways around the rules.
Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
"It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
One of the best decisions our team made last summer was to pre-install Casper (5) profiles on all of our iPads. We pulled
the student IDs from our ASPEN (6) student
information system, logged each student into Casper and installed the four
profiles needed for our plan. The profiles took Safari web browser off the iPad.
As we progressed through the year, we discovered that these tools took a lot of
time to create something we were trying to move away from in the first place.
The reason for moving away from textbooks is that they offer a myopic vision of
a world that is ever-changing. Simply viewing a textbook on an iPad does not
change or innovate learning, nor does it use the iPad to its full potential. If
your plan is to digitize a standard textbook, save your money and renew your
textbook licenses.
This year we are incorporating K-12 digital portfolios along with revised
information and digital literacy standards. Every BPS student will have a Google
Apps for Education account that they will use in conjunction with the Blogger (15) application
to begin creating their Life of Learning portfolio
Begrundelser for anvendelsen af iPads i undervisningen bevæger sig fra en forestilling om at erstatte tekstbøger til en forestilling om at kunne lærerne kan samarbejde med eleverne i skyen ved hjælp af værktøjer, der automatisk synkroniserer med eleverns iPads
The students that make it into help desk are those who not only enjoy working
with technology in an educational context, but have a desire to serve, support
and possibly solve problems in the school on a daily basis.
.
Aside from simply troubleshooting, our
students help their former teachers at the middle and elementary levels as well
as create how-to scripts and videos for students, faculty and the Burlington
community. Our students have not only helped within the BPS community, but have
helped our Tech Team organize two major conferences in the past year:
You can have the most precisely calculated plan in place before you launch, but
if you don't have the right support in place, your launch may stumble. I regard
our IT department as one of the best I have ever worked with. I say this in all
sincerity because I do "work with" this team. These guys not only manage a
robust infrastructure, but they take part in the educational conversation and
give our staff the best tools to create dynamic, engaging classrooms.
Teknisk support er en del af løsningen og de skal deltage i den løbende pædagogisk/didaksike debet
However, we must work to incorporate information and digital literacy standards
into the K-12 curriculum as early as possible. Students in Kindergarten should
understand what it means to be nice to someone and how that will translate to
writing and living on the Web. As students grow up through the educational
pathways, they must be exposed to new and emerging technologies as early as
possible in a safe, responsible manner. By doing so, we are preparing them for a
global economy that requires these skills.
Our middle school is adding character education to the arts and humanities curriculum. Teaching students at a young age to be thoughtful and responsible with technology will make it a much better experience inside the classroom.
disruption that technology has inflicted on the retail sector over the past decade is often used to illustrate what is about to happen in higher education.
institutions rarely introduce the sometimes radical changes they need to make, because one group of constituents believes the sky will fall tomorrow anyway, while others refuse to acknowledge that this time is different.
question is whether institutions will quicken their pace of change to lower their costs and better serve the changing educational needs of students and the global economy.
moving away from a one-size-fits-all system, in which students largely follow the same calendar and curriculum on their way to collecting 120 credits for a bachelor's degree
More of the decisions colleges make about their direction must be rooted in data.
Now the data exist to track students, the classes they took, how they performed, and their outcomes after graduation—all of which can inform decisions.
We want to: promote educational change through empowering teachers and bringing students to the center of the learning conversation through simple, easy to use technology.
Technology is too powerful to not allow teachers to provide unique and differentiated learning opportunities and effective questions to meet the variety of students in today’s classrooms.
Technology is too powerful to not provide accessibility features that fill in the gaps where a different learning style or special need or other exceptionality would typically or potentially impede learning.
Technology is too powerful to be confined to the walls of one classroom and not connect and reach a global audience and link learners across oceans and cultural differences and languages.
Technology is too powerful to continue in a failed system of bubble sheets and a single “right” answer; our kids deserve better systems of teaching and learning.
Technology is too powerful to not be leveraged for the benefit of our students.
I love their vision - to promote educational change through empowering teachers and bringing students to the center of the learning conversation through simple, easy to use technology. Amen?!
The importance of a respect for elders was illustrated as soon as the meeting started. Mr. A introduced us to the community leaders, and made sure that highest ranking leader was invited to say his piece first. Once he did that the discussion became lively and we were all encouraged to contribute. Understanding the cultural norms around formal meetings and political discussions is good manners, but it also will help us understand the social norms during our work, as well as help us better analyze the upcoming election process. It is social norms such as respect for elders that informs the political practices built into Liberian society, and the manner in which democracy functions.
I’m personally interested in the existence of generational gaps in West Africa, especially around conflicting notions of the role of youth in society.
I’d specifically like to explore the impact of the spread of a global youth culture facilitated by communications technology on youth voice in both Monrovia and New York’s Liberian community.
As my name is common in Liberia, and is associated with specific ethnic groups between Sierra Leone and Liberia, it will be interesting for me to navigate these issues from a personal standpoint.
I also believe that through religious institutions is the best way to really get to know members of any community.
With a connection to his previous Texas home, Ashby has helped set up collaborative student projects between North Carolina and Texas schools, among others.
"We're just trying to basically let our students get connections, and then we want our students to take it from there," Ashby said.
These connections — both in the U.S. and globally — help students understand that their work is not just for their teacher, but for a broader audience. He hopes that will give them intrinsic motivation to perform better.
design thinking is a set of tools, methods, and processes by which we develop new answers for challenges, big and small.
Through applying design thinking to challenges, we learn to define problems, understand needs and constraints, brainstorm innovative solutions, and seek and incorporate feedback about our ideas in order to continually make them better. The more we apply design thinking to the challenges we see, the deeper we strengthen the belief in our ability to generate creative ideas and make positive change happen in the world.
If you are interested in finding a program or resources to help integrate design thinking in your school, the directory offers a great set of organizations already listed for inspiration and new connections.
We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.
As we help today’s students build their foundation of core academic knowledge and skills, we also need to look at the ways we are helping our youth build their confidence in their abilities to create.
From a parent's perspective (and sometimes from the child's), this can seem like we are "de-gifted" the child.
The most important thing is that you have the "data" that shows what the student needs and that you are matching this with an appropriate service.
Be very explicit with what the differentiation is and how it is addressing the needs
A major shift with RTI is that there is less emphasis on the "label" and more on the provision of appropriate service.
When a child has met all the expected benchmarks
independent reading
reading log
small group for discussions using similar questions.
long-term solutions might include forming a seminar group using a
program like "Junior Great Books."
Ideas for differentiating reading for young children can also be found at:
http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/readingdifferentiation.asp
http://www.appomattox.k12.va.us/acps/attachments/6_6_12_dan_mulligan_handout.pdf
enrich potential
to plan appropriate instruction, based on data that show the learners' needs.
additional enrichment and challenge in their area(s) strength.
Tiers 2 or 3
As the intensity of the needs increase, the intensity of the services also increases.
our ability to nurture potential in students prior to formal identification
appropriately scaffolded activities through Tier 2 support.
, with high-end differentiation and expectations, we are able to support the development of potential in all students.
This body-of-evidence can be used to support the nomination process and formal identification when appropriate.
likely to be of particular benefit for culturally and linguistically diverse, economically disadvantaged, and twice exceptional youngsters who are currently underrepresented within gifted education.
Tier 1 include:
Tier 2 include:
Tier 3 include:
universal screening
Aspergers
gifted children with learning disabilities?
If we provide enrichment activities for our advanced students, won't that just increase the acheivement gap?
Educational opportunities are not a “zero sum” game where some students gain and others lose.
the needs of all learners.
One is focusing on remediation, however the second approach focuses on the nurturing of potential through creating expectations for excellence that permeate Tier 1 with extended opportunities for enrichment for all children who need them at Tier 2. With the focus on excellence, the rising tide will help all students reach their potential. This is the goal of education.
make sure that the screener is directly related to the curriculum that you are using and that it has a high enough ceiling to allow advance learners to show what they know.
recognizing that students who are above grade level, or advanced in their academics, also need support to thrive
all students deserve to attend a school where their learning needs are met
seek out ways to build the knowledge and skills of teachers to address the range of needs
This includes learning about differentiated instruction within Tier 1and creating additional opportunities for enhancements and enrichments within Tier 2.
first
This often means that the district views the school as a “high-needs” school and does feel that many children would qualify for gifted education services (thus no teacher allocation is warranted). If this is the case, then this is a problematic view as it perpetuates the myth that some groups of children are not likely to be “gifted”.
These five differentiation strategies are as follows:
Curriculum Compacting (pre-assessment of learners to see what they know)
The use of Tiered Assignments that address: Mastery, Enrichment, and Challenge
Tiered Learning Centers that allow children to further explore skills and concepts
Independent and Small group learning contracts that allow students to follow area of interest
Questioning for Higher Level thinking to stretch the minds of each child.
RTI was,
first proposed as a way to help us better identify students who continue to need additional support in spite of having appropriate instructional opportunities to learn.
The primary issue is the need for measures of potential as well as performance.
an IQ measure
portfolio
that sometimes occur outside of school
children with complex sets of strengths and needs require a comprehensive evaluation that includes multiple types, sources, and time periods to create the most accurate and complete understanding of their educational needs.
a "diamond" shaped RTI model
confusing
use the same icon to represent how we address the increasing intensity of academic and behavioral needs for all learners.
English Language Learners?
Differentiated instruction is part of a strength-based approach to Tier 1, providing enriched and challenging learning opportunities for all students. However, a comprehensive RTI approach for gifted learners will also need strong Tier 2 and 3 supports and services.
Tracking, or the fixed stratification of children into learning levels based on limited data (placing children in fixed learning groups based on a single reading score), is the opposite of RTI.
off grade level trajectories
this may includ
assess the slope and speed of learning and plot the target from there.
content acceleration and content enrichment.
independent or small group project of their choice.
renzullilearning.com.
additional learning opportunities that both challenge the learner and address high interest learning topics.
Florence Dujardin on 23 Jun 11Purpose - The primary purpose of this research paper is to understand the role of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices in India. India is considered a major player in the world economy today. US multinationals are significantly increasing their presence in India and understanding cultural preferences will help global companies transition better. Design/methodology/approach - This conceptual paper uses the national cultural dimensions of the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness project, which is identified as the most topical theoretical framework on culture. The national cultural scores are used to develop hypotheses for specific cultural dimensions. Examples from the literature are also used to strengthen the proposed hypotheses. Findings - This research proposes that national cultural dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, and future-orientation influence e-learning practices. This study distinguishes between synchronous and asynchronous methods of e-learning and the role of culture on the same. Future research can definitely empirically test the hypotheses proposed. Practical implications - This study provides strategic implications for multinationals with a guide sheet identifying the role of the various cultural dimensions on e-learning. The suggested strategies can be implemented by multinationals in other countries with similar national cultural dimensions also. Originality/value - This research also proposes a theoretical e-learning model identifying the impact of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices. This research also provides practitioners a strategic implications model that could be implemented for e-learning initiatives in multinationals.
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