Since it is through communication
that we exercise our political, economic and social power, we risk contributing
to the hegemonic perpetuation of class if we fail to demand equal access to
newer technologies and adequately prepared teachers for all students
They can benefit
their students by developing and then teaching their students to develop expertise
in evaluation of search engines and critical analysis of Web site credibility.
Well-prepared teachers, with a deep and broad understanding of language, linguistics,
literature, rhetoric, writing, speaking, and listening, can complement those
talents by studying additional semiotic systems that don’t rely solely
on alphabetic texts.
Not only will teachers need to understand
“fair use” policies, they are likely to need to integrate units
on ethics back into the curriculum to complement those units on rhetoric.
Students should be counseled not only on the risks to their
physical safety, but also on the ways that the texts they are composing today,
and believe they have eliminated, often have lives beyond their computers, and
may reappear in the future at a most inopportune time.
learn methods of critically analyzing
the ways in which others are using multiple semiotic systems to convince them
to participate, to buy, to believe, and to resist a wide range of appeals
It also implies the process of uncovering one’s
own cultural, social, political and personal (e.g. age, gender) backgrounds
and understanding how these backgrounds can and often do influence one’s
own ways of communicating and interacting with others in virtual and face-to-face
encounters.
nstances of anti-social behavior in online communication such
as using hurtful language and discriminating among certain members of virtual
communities have been reported.
allows their members
to construct and act out identities that may not necessarily be their real selves
and thus lose a sense of responsibility toward others
Professional development for teachers and teacher educators must be ongoing,
stressing purposeful integration for the curriculum and content, rather than
merely technical operation. It also needs to provide institutional and instructional
support systems to enable teachers to learn and experiment with new technologies.
Offering release time, coordinating student laptop initiative programs or
providing wireless laptop carts for classroom use, locating computer labs
in accessible places to each teacher, scheduling lab sessions acceptable for
each teacher, and providing alternative scheduling for professional development
sessions so that all teachers can attend, are a few examples of such systems.
Finally, teachers and students must be provided with technical support as
they work with technology. Such assistance must be reliable, on-demand, and
timely for each teacher and student in each classroom.
educators must address plagiarism, ownership, and authorship
in their classrooms.
strategies to
assess the quality of information and writing on the Web
help students develop netiquette
Such netiquette is thus not only about courtesy;
more importantly, it is about tolerance and acceptance of people with diverse
languages, cultures, and worldviews.
Teachers and teacher educators must examine with students the social processes
through which humans grow individually and socially, and they must expose
the potentially negative consequences of one’s individual actions. In
doing so, teachers and educators will be able to reinforce the concept of
learning as a social process, involving negotiation, dialogue, and learning
from each other, and as a thinking process, requiring self-directed learning
as well as critical analysis and synthesis of information in the process of
meaning-making and developing informed perceptions of the world.
Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
"It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
"Conversation is
key
. Sawyer succinctly
explains this principle: "Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to
creativity." When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich
conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found
that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other
activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction
lead to richer collaborative conceptualization.
Set a clear but
open-ended goal
.
Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their
interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This
is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a
group's final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put
students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative
thinking from finding an entry point.
Try not announcing time
limits.
As teachers we
often use a time limit as a "motivator" that we hope will keep group work
focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work.
Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality
results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a
need to "keep one eye on the clock," the group's focus can be fully given to the
task.
Do not appoint a group
"leader."
In research
studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an
equal, listening and
allowing the group's thoughts and decisions to guide the
interaction.
Keep it
small.
Groups with the
minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more
efficient and effective.
Consider weaving
together individual and group work.
For additive tasks-tasks in whicha group is
expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another-research suggests that
better results develop
"Picturing the 1930s," a new educational web site created by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with the University of Virginia, allows teachers and students to explore the 1930s through paintings, artist memorabilia, historical documents, newsreels, period photographs, music, and video. Using PrimaryAccess, a web-based teaching tool developed at the university's Curry Center for Technology and Teacher Education, visitors can select images, write text, and record narration in the style of a documentary filmmaker. They can then screen their video in a virtual theater. PrimaryAccess is the first online tool that allows students to combine their own text, historical images from primary sources, and audio narration to create short online documentary films linked to social studies standards of learning, said Glen Bull, co-director of the Curry Center. Since the first version was developed in collaboration with U.Va.'s Center for Digital History and piloted in a local elementary school in 2005, more than 9,000 users worldwide have created more than 20,000 short movies. In creating digital documentaries, students embed facts and events in a narrative context that can enhance their retention and understanding of the material, said Curry research scientist Bill Ferster, who developed the application with Bull. Besides increasing their knowledge about the period, "Picturing the 1930s" enhances students' visual literacy skills, Ferster noted, adding that PrimaryAccess "offers teachers another tool to bring history alive."
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:
"The group that only saw social tweets ended up rating that professor higher in credibility than the group that saw only scholarly tweets. Researchers also said there was an especially significant difference in ratings when it came to whether a professor was "caring" or not.
"These results support previous research that shows revealing personal information can increase a professor's perceived credibility," says the paper. "[I]t was interesting to note that the scholarly tweets did not significantly raise competence ratings in the groups that saw the scholarly posts. This could be an indication that caring, not competence, is the most important dimension when it comes to assessing perceived credibility on social networking sites."
Not all students felt good about the social tweets, though. The researchers found that older students tended to rate the professors lower in credibility after having viewed their Twitter accounts. These students were also more likely to think it was a bad idea for profes"
Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps:
*Use it as background information
*Use it for technology terms
*Use it for current pop cultural literacy
*Use it for the Keywords
*Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it)
Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia
20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia
Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica
Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006
And:
Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia
**Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response.
Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.
-0-
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Higher Education
page. Bookmark it!
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Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
"Many teachers have yet to fully embrace the potential for the Internet to transform the social studies curriculum. Whether your class is named History, Government, Civics, Economics or Psychology, there is a great wealth of material available online that will engage your students. We've assembled just a smattering of the best of it here."
All of them responded that Twitter allows them to build connections with educators beyond those in their immediate vicinity. These connections are purposefully made as a way to find and share resources and to provide and receive support. For example, Participant 8 stated, “My primary purpose is to connect with other teachers, so that I can learn from them and share resources that I find.” Similarly, Participant 9 wrote, “I am the only biology teacher at my school. I use it [Twitter] as a means of obtaining advice, resources and collaboration…I also use it to find out about new tech tools.”
Twitter has helped me to build a strong professional reputation
they follow educators. They also follow content experts and others who share professional interests.
Participants explained that they choose to follow people who are open, positive, and constructive.
“If their tweets seem to be of interest - providing ideas or resources, as opposed to just opinion - I will network with them.” Similarly, Participant 6 stated, “I look for people who interact and don't just post links.”
those they trust
Since Twitter is considered to be a social networking website, one aspect of this study looked at dialogue that transpired between followers to show evidence of collaborative conversations rather than unidirectional sharing of information.
Survey results show that nine out of ten of the respondents were able to give concrete examples of collaboration that occurred with fellow Twitter users.
These examples included ideas such as creating units, sharing of resources, students collaborating on projects between classrooms, exchanging professional materials and readings, writing book chapters, and even co-presenting at conferences.
beyond 140-character messages. That teachers moved discussions to forums that allow for deeper discussion and expansion of ideas is encouraging; Twitter does not seem to be a place to collaborate in depth, but rather to make those initial connections - a "jumping off" point.
how using Twitter has benefited them professionally. Four unique themes emerged from their responses:
Access to resources
Supportive relationships
Increased leadership capacity
Development of a professional vision
practical resources and ideas as a benefit.
opportunities for them to take leadership roles in developing professional development, organizing conferences, publishing, and grant writing.
This research study provides new insight into how teachers use social networking sites such as Twitter for professional purposes.
NBC Learn interviews athletes, coaches, and scientists in this original 16-part series, and unravels the physics, biology, chemistry, and materials engineering behind the Olympic Winter Games.
NBC News Archives on Demand (K-12) is a collection of NBC News videos, primary source documents, images, and resources specifically designed for use in the K-12 classroom.
Thousands of searchable and downloadable videos (1930s to Today)
Video content aligned to State Standards
Current Events updated regularly
Sciences, Social Studies, Language Arts, Health and Business
Personalized playlists for teachers and students
Cynthia Sarver on 31 Oct 11What is being done??
