computers are not longer at the center of people's digital lives
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Apple Mac OS X 'Mountain Lion' takes more bites out of iOS | Apple Talk - CNET News - 60 views
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Arounder - 44 views
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Virtual field trip! From the site: "AROUNDER gives travelers a vivid sense of what a city has to offer: historical cathedrals and works of art, museums featuring famous artists, local cafes and stores, breathtaking mountain-top views, quiet parks and gardens. Each issue contains a series of interesting panoramas giving you a full immersive view of the cities. Navigation is easy with Google maps of the city and surrounding area. Every issue also links to local merchants with virtual tours of hotels, restaurants, spas and stores."
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Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views
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What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
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We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
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I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
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or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
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In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
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I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
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I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
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A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
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There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
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I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
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versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
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I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
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they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
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step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
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None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
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They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
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I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
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changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
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a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
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Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
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there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
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ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
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I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
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Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
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I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
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I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
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we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
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Resources « Black Mountain SOLE - 27 views
blackmountainsole.org/resources
mooc campus learning resources reference open-education productivity p2p learning-network e-learning
shared by Thieme Hennis on 23 May 13
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Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design Online - 56 views
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Don’t assume that anyone will read anything written in a handout, computer screen, or PowerPoint presentation. Learners today scan and process information differently. Getting through to your audience, designing information that is easy to process, and creating a path for the information to move into the long term memory, is your job (it should be your passion) and it must be approached as a constantly evolving process.
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News From The Rock - 1 views
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SKI CLUB: Attention skiers and snowboarders ... or anyone who would like to learn. Get some friends together, and let’s have some fun! Nordic Mountain is giving Shattuck students a fantastic opportunity at a fantastic price. See Mrs. McConnell in the office for information and forms. It is a first-come, first-served activity, so hurry before the bus is full! Remember, you do not need to know how to ski to join ski club. Forms and payment are due to Mrs. McConnell NO LATER than Wednesday, January 11.
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Immersed In Too Much Information, We Can Sometimes Miss The Big Picture : All Tech Cons... - 48 views
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Although we find ourselves as travelers in the age of over sharing, it turns out we remain quite adept at avoiding the really tough topics.
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Google’s Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who’s got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these Tweets coming in?
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Between reality TV, 24-hour news, and the constant hammering of the stream, I am less likely to tackle seriously uncomfortable topics. I can bury myself in a mountain of incoming information. And if my stream is any indication, I’m not alone. For me, repression used to be a one man show. Now I am part of a broader movement — mass avoidance through social media.
Rainy Mountain Project - 0 views
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Moving beyond "mountains of dead and mulched - 28 views
clatoolbox.ca/...291doctorow.html
libraries literacy information technology Cory Doctorow adolescents privacy cataloging e-books civil rights human
shared by Derrick Grose on 01 Mar 11
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Don't confuse data with intelligence | TechRepublic - 49 views
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"Facts, figures, and complex calculations based on data are important, but they are not intelligence. The amazing recent events in the Middle East have brought home an important distinction between data and intelligence that is particularly relevant for IT and organizations as a whole"
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Good reasons why we need to be careful with just drilling down into our data mountains whilst ignoring that the rules have changed.
Mickey Hart: There's a Fire on the Mountain - 51 views
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Soviet Psychology: Psychology and Marxism Internet Archive - 14 views
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we expected that they would display a predominance of those forms of thought that come from activity that is guided by the physical features of familiar objects.
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Therefore we began, as most field work with people does, by emphasizing contact with the people who would serve as our subjects. We tried to establish friendly relations so that experimental sessions seemed natural and non-threatening. We were particularly careful not to conduct hasty or unprepared presentations of the test materials.
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As a rule, our experimental sessions began with long conversations which were sometimes repeated with the subjects in the relaxed atmosphere of a tea house, where the villagers spent most of their free time, or in camps in the field and in mountain pastures around the evening campfire. These talks were frequently held in groups. Even when the interviews were held with one person, the experimenter and other subjects made up a group of two or three who listened attentively to the person being interviewed and who sometimes offered remarks or comments on what he said. The talk often took the form of a free-flowing exchange of opinion between participants, and a particular problem might be solved simultaneously by two or three subjects, each proposing an answer. Only gradually did the experimenters introduce the prepared tasks, which resembled the “riddles” familiar to the population and therefore seemed like a natural extension of the conversation.
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He characterized primitive thinking as “prelogical” and “loosely organized.” Primitive people were said to be indifferent to logical contradiction and dominated by the idea that mystical forces control natural phenomena
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We conceived the idea of carrying out the first far-reaching study of intellectual functions among adults from a non-technological non-literate, traditional society
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1. Women living in remote villages who were illiterate and who were not involved in any modern social activities. There were still a considerable number of such women at the time our study was made. Their interviews were conducted by women, since they alone had the right to enter the women's quarters. 2. Peasants living in remote villages who were in no way involved with socialized labor and who continued to maintain an individualistic economy. These peasants were not literate. 3. Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of kindergarteners. As a rule, they had no formal schooling and almost no training in literacy. 4. Active kolhoz (collective farm) workers and young people who had taken short courses. They were involved as chairmen running collective farms, as holders of other offices on the, collective farm, or as brigade leaders. They had considerable experience in planning production, distributing labor, and taking stock of output. By dealing with other collective farm members, they had acquired a much broader outlook than isolated peasants. But they had attended school only briefly, and many were still barely literate. 5. Women students admitted to teachers school after two or three years of study. Their educational qualifications, however, were still fairly low.
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Short-term psychological experiments would have been highly problematic under the field conditions we expected to encounter
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Ant Heald liked it
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One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
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Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
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In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
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We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
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And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
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by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
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We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
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A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
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The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
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Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
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If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
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The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
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the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
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If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
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We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
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Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
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But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
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Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
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You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
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if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
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They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
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And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
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They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
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As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
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Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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ASCD Express 13.16 - The Keys to Content-Area Writing: Short, Frequent, and Shared - 17 views
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Examine your students' background knowledge on a new topic of study by asking them to write about it. Pass out index cards and instruct students to fill only one side with their related thoughts and experiences. Provide a minute to write followed by a minute to discuss their ideas with a nearby partner. Collect the cards and set them aside until the end of the unit. Then, ask students to revisit their original notes and, on the backs of their cards, describe how their thinking has expanded or changed on this issue. The initial card writing gives you an insight into background knowledge, while the final card writing offers students insight into their thinking and learning.
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If we continue to believe that we must collect and grade every piece of student writing, our exhaustion will result in students writing far less. Sure, if necessary, we can award points, checks, or stamps, but these should simply be records of whether the students gave a good-faith effort (full credit) or not (no credit), not grades that attempt to assess the writing (Vopat, 2009).
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Offer students an intriguing content-area prompt. For example, if the topic was e-waste, you might ask students to write about the importance of e-devices in their own lives or you might project a photograph of a mountain of discarded, obsolete cell phones. Let students think and write for a minute or two. Then, working with a partner, have each student read aloud what they wrote and discuss their ideas. Another very social writing activity is written conversation. Starting in groups of three or four, students silently respond to a content-related prompt, writing for several minutes until most class members have about a third or half a page of writing. Then, within the group, students pass their papers to their right. Now, each student must read the previous writer's thoughts and expand the conversation by exploring ideas and asking questions. After a few minutes of writing, papers are passed again, and the conversation continues to blossom as more and more ideas and responses are added. When the paper returns to the owner after several passes, each student gets to read a very interesting conversation that began with their initial written response. Of course, this written conversation could continue as an out-loud discussion, as well.
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If you want students to be better readers, writers, and thinkers in every content area, then writing every day in every class is key. Be sure to make that informal and spontaneous writing short, frequent, and shared.
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"Examine your students' background knowledge on a new topic of study by asking them to write about it. Pass out index cards and instruct students to fill only one side with their related thoughts and experiences. Provide a minute to write followed by a minute to discuss their ideas with a nearby partner. Collect the cards and set them aside until the end of the unit. Then, ask students to revisit their original notes and, on the backs of their cards, describe how their thinking has expanded or changed on this issue. The initial card writing gives you an insight into background knowledge, while the final card writing offers students insight into their thinking and learning."