After they finished answering the question about the Kashmir conflict via their smartphones and other devices, Harris’ students said the technology allows them to share more information and exchange ideas with each other.
being able to use technology you’ve grown up with just feels natural. “It fits in with what we’re doing at home,”
While the Lewisville school district still restricts regular cellphone use in the classroom, the policy is being loosened to allow the program to be used by the school's teachers when they feel that technology would enhance learning.
The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal
bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs
beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too
little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether.
What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do
children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality.
And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although
surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen
over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of
international academic
rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to
results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last
December.
“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques
that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it
works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as
many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one
evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in
briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach,
students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction
throughout the semester.
“Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,
participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material
raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.
We know this- working with the material, incorporating it with that we already know takes time- time on task - if a weirder font makes us think about the material more, we'll remember more
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:
What did you make today that was meaningful?
What did you learn about the world?
Who are you working with?
What surprised you?
What did your teachers make with you?
What did you teach others?
What unanswered questions are you struggling with?
How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?
What’s something your teachers learned today?
What did you share with the world?
What do you want to know more about?
What did you love about today?
What made you laugh?
In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day at brand new schools. They'll know no one, have all new teachers, new surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I'm not sure they're totally at peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it's the kind of stuff that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10 stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it's a bit scary for them, I'm really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different levels.
“Students can critically read in a variety of ways:
When they raise vital questions and problems from the text,
When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information,
When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience …,
When they examine their assumptions and the implications of those assumptions, and
When they use what they have read to communicate effectively with others or to develop potential solutions to complex problems.
Setting up open office hours via a synchronous tool allows students to reach out in a specific time window with questions and get a real-time answer.
Many synchronous tools allow us to use video or face-to-face chat, allowing the student to see our faces as we speak to them about their direct concern.
Both students and instructors are learning while interacting. Communicating in the online classroom is very different than in a traditional face-to-face classroom.
The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
"Variation in style may have historical explanation but
[End Page 94]
no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
. On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
A great way for children to learn the art of story openings. They have 1 minute to write from a one word stimulus. The site asks for a name & email. I usually just cut and paste the work into Word instead.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Using the quotation below as a jumping off point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. "Some questions cannot be answered./ They become familiar weights in the hand,/ Round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool."
Increase knowledge of types of assessment, Make connections between 21st-century learning and assessment, Explore research to support balanced assessment and technology integration in assessment, Recognize the impact of Higher Order Thinking Skills in effective integration of technology into assessment, Demonstrate activities that integrate technology tools, Discuss questions related to the implementation of assessment supported by technology tools
The author reflects on student evaluations, citing a study that asked students what they expect from their professors (also talks about how it applies to K-12 schools)
For MS students, I believe Robinson and EdPower have the right idea. I attended a public school in which both genders participated but had completely separate classes. A lot more learning was accomplished, even in the backwoods of MS.
The question now," Robinson said, "is do we set a bar of accountability that says, 'This is the level we expect in this city, whether you are a charter school or a traditional school?' "
It's never too early to think about something cool you'd like to experiment with in Science. This project starts with simple questions that children are curious about. We start by doing some research. We investigate, consider, and explain nature around us and the universe. We learn how to protect our environment.
n his book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?
Pasi Sahlberg i
"The central aim of Finnish education is the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person, not the attainment of higher test scores, and the primary strategy of Finnish education is cooperation, not competition."
Standardized testing rewards the ability to find the "correct answer" and thus discourages creativity, which is about asking questions and challenging the status quo.
I also asked myself the question: "What can I do with these devices that would be impossible to do without them?" In other words, I was hoping to create new teaching methods rather than just replacing old ones.
I redesigned my classroom practice around the goals, with iPads as the infrastructure.
Redefine with a goal in mind
Get more app for your money.
student-creation apps
Embrace failure
By creating a safe, open environment and by being clear that this endeavor is as foreign to you as it is to them, you encourage risk taking—and greater achievements.
Enjoy the results, reflect towards the future. A
I saw students become active agents in their own learning—because they now had choices about the methods that worked best for them. Kids who’d professed to hate school were now eager to engage in the classroom. One student wrote in her daily reflection, "[iPads] make me want to come to school every day because I know that Ms. Magiera has a lesson just for me."
While the Lewisville school district still restricts regular cellphone use in the classroom, the policy is being loosened to allow the program to be used by the school's teachers when they feel that technology would enhance learning.
