The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities and design around them. To do that, we have to clarify our purpose. In education, learning is the focus, and we know that multitasking is not helpful. So it’s up to us to actively choose unitasking.
A moment of boredom is an opportunity for new thinking.
Research shows that when people watch online educational videos, they watch for six minutes,
ake class notes by hand.
he saw that students taking notes with computers suffered from more than inattention.
"They were trying to establish transcripts of the class."
tudents in online classes do better when they include face-to-face encounters.
f you ask people where their love for learning comes from, they usually talk about an inspiring teacher. The most powerful learning takes place in relationship.
But for all its flaws, the lecture has a lot going for it. It is a place where students come together, on good days and bad, and form a small community. As in any live performance, anything can happen.
Children are influenced by everything around them, the way their parents act, what their parents say and do, and increasingly as they spend more time ‘with’ celebrity figures how these role models act.
A study by the Royal Economic Society, to be presented this week, finds that parental effect on test results is five times that of teachers' influence. This comes in the wake of warnings by Sir Michael Wilshaw last week that teachers were unable to properly do their own jobs because parents were expecting them to cover their own parenting skill shortfalls and to become surrogate family for the students.
It all happens well before school comes into the equation. If a child grows up in a literature rich, engaging environment with adults that spend quality time giving opportunities for great learning experiences in the world, the worst teachers still can't decoy that child's enthusiasm for learning. He can always learn at home. But if the child grows up neglected, not nurtured with rich learning experiences ( and I'm not talking about helicopter parents spending every waking moment ramming study down their throats - just quality conversation and hands on experiences )l doesn't get read to or taken out to shop, teachers are fighting an uphill battle with a disengaged individual. Parents, don't wait for school teachers to teach your kids. Start straight away..
Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social
William M. Ferriter
One great tool for creating social reading experiences is Diigo (www.diigo.com), a free online application that allows users to add highlights and comments onscreen to any Web-based text. These comments can be seen by anyone using Diigo and are identified with the commenter's user name. Diigo also enables users to bookmark and "tag" with keywords any online articles that they find fascinating. Classes studying topics together can share their reading. Articles tagged by one user become instantly available to another, providing a source for continued study and ongoing conversations.
The best news is that creating secure student accounts in Diigo is easy. Teachers can form a classroom group that enables students to see only the articles bookmarked and the annotations shared by their teachers and peers—instead of the comments of the entire Diigo community.
a significant minority (36.1%) of the teachers who were asked this question indicated that they had used SNS for educational purposes, including communicating with their students about schoolwork.
These educational activities should be aimed primarily at equipping children and young people with the skills required to be effective digital citizens, and not focussed on rare or hypothetical fears.
the importance of SNS in the lives of students, and the potential significance of social media for future digital citizenship, suggests that room should be found for these issues to be directly addressed.
Research findings like these will support our use of new technologies in classrooms. What is evident from their recommendations is that further teacher professional development is required to ensure that we have teachers with the skill set to produce the ‘effective digital citizens’ we need in society today.
Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers’ control can influence student performance from year to year — or even from classroom to classroom during the same year.
there’s a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.
Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.
There was no secret to their success: the efficient teachers hewed closely to the curriculum, maintained strict discipline and minimized non-instructional activities, like conducting unessential classroom business when they should have been focused on the curriculum.
A focus on relevant instructional time also implies several further reforms: Lengthening the school day, week and year; adopting a near-zero-tolerance policy for disruptive behavior, which classroom cameras would help police; increasing efforts to reduce tardiness and absenteeism; and providing as much supplementary and remedial tutoring (the most effective instructional model known) as possible.
paraprofessionals were taught to initiate games and age-appropriate activities
understanding the 'hidden' curriculum
Those types of interventions can work if they're embedded in a systematic framework for addressing a school's climate
One-shot approaches—such as a school rally or asking students to sign pledges promising not to engage in bullying—"have relatively little impact
teach bullies different ways to behave
supports schoolwide approaches that spell out clear behavior expectations and schoolwide monitoring, such as the models of positive behavioral supports
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.
"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.
learning is a process which occurs within the mind of the individual as they process stimuli arriving from their sensory buffer from their environment (broadly speaking), into working memory and onward into long-term memory.
The emphasis does not have to be on the individual, as is common. The social group learns by means of individual, but joined and synchronized, learning.
The gradual release of responsibility model of instruction suggests that cognitive work should shift slowly and intentionally from teacher modeling, to joint responsibility between teachers and students, to independent practice and application by the learner
Constructivism is one of those ideas we throw around in educational circles without stopping to think about what we mean by it. They are the terms that have multiple meanings, are at once highly technical and common usage and are likely to cause debate and disagreements. Constructivism in particular carries a quantity of baggage with it. It is a term that is appropriated by supporters of educational approaches that are in stark contrast to the opposing view; constructivism vs didactic methods or direct instruction. The question is what are the origins of constructivism and does a belief in this as an approach to understanding learning necessitate an abandonment of direct instruction or is this a false dichotomy?
California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
The current structure of the school day is obsolete, most would agree. Created during the Industrial Age, the assembly line system we have in place now has little relevance to what we know kids actually need to thrive
Yet therein lies the paradox. It’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, she said. In education, although there are great new models of learning and schooling, they are the exceptions, and the progressive movement has not gained much momentum.
“One thing we know for sure is that kids learn better when teachers are invested and paying attention and showing they care,” she said. “The biggest impact you’ll have as a teachers is the relationship you establish with your student.”
The five criteria that Challenge Success brings to schools attempts to modernize the obsolete system in place today: scheduling, project based learning, alternative assessment, climate of care, and parent education.
Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school.
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.
Zotero is an open-source program developed by George Mason University's Center for History and the New Media. You have to teach your students how to use it, but it is time well spent. They can create individual and group libraries, automatically create bibliographies and citations in CMS, MLA, APA, etc., and grow research skills. You can learn how to use this powerful free program by checking out the numerous free YouTube videos, or check out my step-by-step guide at: http://drkblog.wordpress.com/resources/using-zotero/
We all want to see our students and our children grow into happy, balanced and successful adults but exactly what that means and how it is to be achieved are areas of uncertainty. Into this debate comes Carol Dweck's research into 'Mindsets' and how individual differences in our approach to the world dictate our ultimate experiences of success or disappointment.
Studies with teenagers show that students who excel at estimating quantities also did well on standard math achievement tests, going as far back as kindergarten.
excessive use of the internet and other forms of technology diminishes our capacity for deep, meditative thinking, "the brighter the software, the dimmer the user", a counter-revolution may be required.
curricula must be developed not only with the potential benefits of technology linked to every learning outcome in mind, but also the costs.
Of greatest importance, however, is the status of our thinking, understanding how we think and the effect new technologies have on our cognitive processes. This debate extends beyond the neuroscience to questions relating to what is worth knowing and what mental functions are worth preserving at their present level of development
As a senior high school teacher, one of my greatest bugbears is the reluctance of students to reflect on the information they have collected and plan their essays. Rather, some expect to Google their entire essay, often skipping from one hyperlink to the next until they find something that appears to be relevant, then pasting it into their essay, frequently oblivious to academic honesty and coherence of argument. The ability to discern reliability of sources is also severely lacking
This is a by-product of failing to address and teach good research methods in a digital world and assigning work that can simply be cut and pasted. We must move beyond "reporting" in a digital, information-rich, and connected world.
A primary role of educators is to foster qualities that are distinctly human: our ability to reflect, reason and imagine
No- it should begin with teachers establishing and negotiating meaningful, interesting, and powerful learning opportunities with access to all available tools. The computer as a learning tool is meant to extend physical human capabilities, not weaken them. It is the low-level, rote tasks that we require that weaken them. It's time to recognize this and wake up. Blaming the technology does little more than preserve the status quo.
So why do I use Diigo?
I like its ability to enhance my bookmarking with highlights and sticky notes, that are retained with the page when I go back to it.
I like that you can highlight and publish easily from Diigo to you blog or an email, and a reference appears automatically along with the posting.
I like the ability to create lists on specific topics that can be shared.
I like the ability to create groups to pool resources for specific subjects. I recently joined a few Diigo groups and have had some very useful sites brought to my attention.
I like that you can access and search the bookmarks anywhere by full-text and tags.
I like to search for the most popular bookmarks on a particular subject.
I like the different ways to share and aggregate information that Diigo offers. I have set it up so that a list of my new bookmarks appears on this blog on a weekly basis but this is just one option. You can now choose to automatically
The tool bar is easy to download and makes it easy to use and aspect of Diigo whenever you are on line.
Of course you can keep things private if you choose to but that is really defeating the purpose of Diigo in the first place.
Diigo also began offering, on Sept 19th, a Diigo Education Account Facility. I haven’t investigated this yet but a post about it was put onto the SLAV Bright Ideas blog. It is worth looking at. From Diigo
‘The Diigo Educator Accounts offer a suite of features that makes it incredibly easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful web annotation and social bookmarking technology.’
For an educator account, you do have to apply and fill out how/why you want to use Diigo in your school.