Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
NOTE - happy - happy is good. Happy kids want to learn or are more likely to learn.
Nobody should ever be penalized or put at a disadvantage for the supplies they don’t have,” Dillingham thought to herself. “But everyone’s got laundry!”
NOTE - a little digital citizenship too mixed in with online fund raising.
She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.
He decided he would take his students on socially distanced bike rides across the city. “It was a leap of faith. I got extremely nervous. I was trying to find a way to connect with kids,” Clark said.
her young students are musical detectives, in search of learning. She teaches most grade levels and the school chorus.
t he’s found other ways to keep his students engaged and cycling the city. He invited students to a weekly entrepreneurship class for which they rode their bikes uptown from Dunbar to the gym where Clark works, Sweat DC. The students met with the owner of the gym and the owners of a nearby bar, Hook Hall, and the bagel shop Call Your Mother Deli to learn what it takes to run a business.
She wanted them to create their own composition, their own snowy-day song.
NOTE - different locals - maybe something with changing backgrounds.
So as one class studied architecture this fall, Daney, 54, encouraged them to walk in their neighborhood to take photos of houses of different styles: ranch, colonial, Victorian.
nd he stuck with his usual method of helping students learn about the design process, asking them to prepare a meal. They started with ideas and research, made a plan, carried it out and evaluated it. The result: soups and pastas and pastries.
Kids need connection, he said. “I think they’re starving for conversation,” including with adults.
In fifth grade, students are expected to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide with whole numbers, decimals and fractions. Through a computer application the students have, they can program the robot to move a certain distance, stop, maybe even turn.
NOTE - use a robot or technology to achieve the same result.
With learning all-virtual, he packs a big Ziploc bag — for each student, each quarter — with things like fishing line, foam board, pipecleaners, magnets, Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Whatever they will need for their projects.
And a lot of the math is a little sneaky. They think they are trying to get the robot to move, when they are actually measuring the angles to get it to move.”
Others complete their math problems directly on the computer, which can lead to some troubles as they try to show their work.
When Kristin Gavaza interviewed for the music teacher position at Dorothy I. Height Elementary in the summer, she told the principal she had some ideas for how to create a festive concert while students were scattered and learning from home.
NOTE - picture references a complete teacher set up of a large screen and standing desk. Sure, she's video editing yet the concept carries to teaching class too.
Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.
Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram
The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.
“Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.
Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.
Update | Feb. 2012: We'll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, tagged "the NYT and the CCSS."
there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
“Creativity can be taught,”
it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.
Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.
Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
project-based learning
highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.
They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
fact-finding
problem-finding
Next, idea-finding
there is one crucial difference between IQ
and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn
effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are
making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified
and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are
falling.
I aggree that as teachers we need to realize that technology has changed instruction and the way that our students learn and the way that we learn and instruct.
Technology has always changed the way we live. How did we respond to changes in the past? One thought is that some institutions, some businesses disappeared, while others, who took advantage of the new tech, appeared to replace the old. It will happen again and we as educators need to lead the way.
With technology our students brains are wired differently and they can multi-task and learn in multiple virtual environments all at once. This should make us think about how we present lessons, structure learning and keep kids engaged.
Rubbish. The idea that digital native are adept at multitasking is wrong. They may be doing many things but the quality and depth is reduced. There is a significant body of research to support this. Development of grit and determination are key attributes of successful people. Set and demand high standards. No one plays sport or an instrument because it is easy rather because they can clearly see a link between hard work and pleasure.
Information development was slow.
Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated
fields over the course of their lifetime.
Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience.
Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime.
Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains.
Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network,
and complexity and self-organization theories.
Principles of connectivism:
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information
sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual
learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is
a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist
learning activities.
Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn
and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of
a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong
tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the
decision.
So what does this look like? I feel that when I attempt this, evaluators and administrators don't necessarily understand. They want a neat, quiet, well-managed, orderly classroom.
If new learning approaches are required, then why are we still being evaluated in a linear way?
John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages
the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few.
The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability
to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know
today.
Knowledge
is growing exponentially
amount of
knowledge
is doubling
every 18 months
To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations
have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”
(the
understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
know-where
learning
a persisting change in human
performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as
a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”
Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning,
not with the value of what is being learned.
The ability to synthesize and recognize connections
and patterns is a valuable skill.
knowledge is no longer acquired
in the linear manner
What is the impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process
on learning
An entirely new approach is needed.
Chaos is the breakdown of predictability, evidenced in complicated arrangements
that initially defy order.
Meaning-making and forming connections
between specialized communities are important activities.
Chaos, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything to everything.
If the underlying conditions used
to make decisions change, the decision itself is no longer as correct
as it was at the time it was made.
principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected
to create an integrated whole.
Connections between disparate
ideas and fields can create new innovations.
Learning is a process that
occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements –
not entirely under the control of the individual
decisions are based
on rapidly altering foundations
The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant
information is vital.
Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism
do not attempt to address the challenges of organizational knowledge and
transference.
The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends
on effective nurturing of information flow.
This cycle of knowledge development (personal
to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their
field through the connections they have formed.
This amplification of learning, knowledge
and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome
of connectivism.
Diverse
teams of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely
exploring ideas
An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts
of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy surviva
As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what
is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
Access is not enough. Prior knowledge and understanding is needed. Processing is needed. Evaluation of processing and outputs is needed. Feeding that back into the "system" is needed.
learning is no longer an internal, individualistic
activity
learning is no longer an internal, individualistic
activity
February 2011 |
Volume
68
|
Number
5
Teaching
Screenagers
Pages
7-7
Screenagers: Making the Connections
Marge Scherer
"Education has to change. We can't pull kids into
learning
in school if they are engaged in a different
world outside school."
"If you don't know how to use technology in
class, you are
in trouble. But, of course, technology is a
double-edged sword. You can use it
poorly, or
you can use it well."
The principals speaking were two of the
candidates for the
ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award, which will
be presented in March at
ASCD's Annual Conference in San Francisco. A
group of us were interviewing 13
finalists—both administrators and teachers—over
the course of a few weeks, and
we were
talking to them about their leadership, their creativity, their whole
child philosophy, their impact on student
achievement, and, of course, their
technology
use. All the educators spoke to us via Adobe ConnectPro, a two-way
technology that allowed us to see, hear, and
record them in their
schools—whether in New York, Oregon, the
Philippines, or places in between—while
they
viewed us in our meeting room in Alexandria, Virginia.
February 2011 |
Volume
68
|
Number
5
Teaching
Screenagers
Pages
7-7
Screenagers: Making the
Connections
Marge Scherer
"Education has to change. We can't pull kids
into
learning
in school
if they are engaged in a different
world
outside school."
"If you don't know how to use technology
in
class, you are
in
trouble. But, of course, technology is a
double-edged sword. You can use
it
poorly, or
you can
use it well."
The principals speaking were two of the
candidates for the
ASCD
Outstanding Young Educator Award, which will
be
presented in March at
ASCD's
Annual Conference in San Francisco. A
group of
us were interviewing 13
finalists—both administrators and
teachers—over
the course of a few weeks, and
we were
talking to
them about their leadership, their creativity, their whole
child philosophy, their impact on student
achievement, and, of course,
their
technology
use. All
the educators spoke to us via Adobe ConnectPro, a two-way
technology
that allowed us to see, hear, and
record
them in their
schools—whether in New York, Oregon, the
Philippines, or places in
between—while
they
viewed us
in our meeting room in Alexandria, Virginia.
February 2011 |
Volume
68
|
Number
5
Teaching
Screenagers
Pages
7-7
Screenagers: Making the
Connections
Marge Scherer
"Education has to change. We can't pull
kids
into
learning
in
school
if they are engaged in a
different
world
outside
school."
"If you don't know how to use technology
in
class, you
are
in
trouble.
But, of course, technology is a
double-edged sword. You can use
it
poorly,
or
you can
use it
well."
The principals speaking were two of
the
candidates for the
ASCD
Outstanding Young Educator Award, which
will
be
presented
in March at
ASCD's
Annual
Conference in San Francisco. A
group
of
us were interviewing 13
finalists—both administrators and
teachers—over
the course
of a few weeks, and
we
were
talking to
them about
their leadership, their creativity, their whole
child
philosophy, their impact on student
achievement, and, of course,
their
technology
use.
All
the educators spoke to us via Adobe ConnectPro, a
two-way
technology
that
allowed us to see, hear, and
record
them in
their
schools—whether in New York, Oregon,
the
Philippines, or places in
between—while
they
viewed
us
in our meeting room in Alexandria,
Virginia.
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!
Does Edmodo's Digital Citizen Starter Kit handle the challenge of educating kids to be good digital citizens? The answer is "Yes!" according to Bianca Hewes, a high school English teacher in Sydney, Australia who's also been doing awesome things with Edmodo since 2009 (including connecting 30 of her students with registered Edmodo teachers in the US, South America and England to mentor their individual writing projects). "Edmodo is a social network with training wheels," says Bianca. "By introducing it at a young age, teachers are able to develop the habits of the mind that are essential for students to be good digital citizens. Students learn to use appropriate language, to speak kindly and with compassion, to be supportive rather than critical, and to ask thoughtful questions."
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:
"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.
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?
"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?
"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?
"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.
"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?
"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.
Compared to us, I believe their brains have developed differently," says Sheehy. "If we teach them the way we were taught, we're not serving them well."
Whether their brains have developed differently or not, we still need to teach our students differently than we were taught. They are living in different times with different demands and expectations. If we teach to the demands and expectations of our childhood would not meet our students needs.
children were much more likely to have connections between brain regions close together while older subjects were more likely to feature links between parts of the brain that are physically farther apart.
Recent reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that 93 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 go online. Of those kids, 55 percent use social-networking sites (like Facebook and MySpace), and 64 percent are creating their own original content (such as blogs and wikis)
Unlike watching television, using the Internet allows young people to take an active role; this move from consumption to participation affects the way they construct knowledge, develop their identity, and communicate with others.
"Computers give you different ways to solve problems, the opportunity to run and test simulations, and a way to offload processing. . . . We need kids to think about problems in innovative and creative ways. We need to change the emphasis of education to focus on higher-order kinds of thinking."
"It's a shift from how to memorize and retrieve data in one's mind to how to search for and evaluate information out in the world
Even if we're duplicating a real-life scenario in a virtual environment, the fact that students are engaged with technology and performing through a semblance of anonymity lends itself to a deeper level of discourse.
Why do we need anonymity to get to a deeper level of discourse?
"If we fail to do so, our kids are going to look at what they're learning in schools and see that it is irrelevant to the future they see before them."
Davis says today's teachers are seeking information when they need it instead of waiting for more formal professional development workshops.
acob is your average American 11-year-old. He has a television and a Nintendo DS in his bedroom; his family also has two computers, a wireless Internet connection, and a PlayStation 3. His parents rely on e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype for daily communication, and they're avid users of Tivo and Netflix. Jacob has asked for a Wii for his upcoming birthday. His selling point? "Mom and Dad, we can use the Wii Fit and race Mario Karts together!"
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Common Sense announces di
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Common Sense Media announced plans to create a digital driver’s license, an
interactive online game that will teach kids the basics of how to be safe and
responsible in a digital world.
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Internet safety FREE curriculum and implementation guides. The site has admin, teacher, and student resources. Digital Passport is one of the Internet Safety programs available.
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?!
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.
Not really finding this video as helpful. Twitter has been a round for a while and I am very acquainted with its uses. Note - video was created in 2009...four years ago!
There is NO WAY it is acceptable to friend our students on facebook. I agree that we should not make social media the elephant in the room. I just do not see how it is appropriate to be friends with a student on facebook.
I would challenge kids to use their OWN digital devices (iPhones, etc) and see if they can make connections with what they see to what they are learning in school!
Globe on Wii for Geography is obviously a HUGE engagement for kids! Internet browser...so what...they can do that on a computer. Wii Sports....of course the kids enjoy it, but who has time for it?
At schools where standardized tests aren't being given that day, the exams may be looming. Student test scores have become increasingly important to public schools since the 2002 No Child Left Behind law was enacted, linking standardized test results to federal funding
Is this statement really accurate? How much would/could kids' test scores be affected by missing one day of school?
But McKecuen, from the Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation, said the event gives students a chance to see the connection between what they learn in school and the skills they will need as adults. He said it also can spark children's interest in careers they might not have considered or known about.
"Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world."
The basic principle of The Flat Stanley Project is to connect your child, student or classroom with other children or classrooms participating in the Project by sending out "flat" visitors, created by the children, through the mail
The shift into the distributed ICT [Information and Communications Technology] revolution, however, and the proliferation of social networks and collaborative forms of engagement on the Internet are creating deep fissures in the orthodox approach to education. The result is that a growing number of educators are beginning to revise curricula by introducing distributed and collaborative learning models into the classroom.
that media use among kids is so pervasive that it is time to stop arguing over whether it is good or bad and accept it as part of children's environment
Many observers such as Rifkin believe there are positives in the desire of kids to be electronically connected all the time. Concealed in this behavior, they say, is a need for acceptance and to be liked and loved, which is a healthy desire that has always been a part of the maturational process.
trisha_poole on 08 Nov 11Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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