Thank you! This is great information! James McKee wrote: > Shannon, > > I was recently referred to this video of Michael Wesch who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. He ...
"AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15.
05.04.15
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM.
7:00 AM
INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION
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Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED
SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it.
At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird.
On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about.
Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say.
And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
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Educator Updates
Common Sense announces di
gital driver's
license
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.
Read
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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.
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:
IXL
Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun! IXL allows teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students and motivate them through interactive games and practice questions. Widely recognized as the Web's most comprehensive math site, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment for children to practice math. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.
Quia Web
Quia Web provides educators with learning tools to create, customize, and share their curriculum online. Quia Web pioneered and brought the "create-your-own" concept to educators around the world-giving them the freedom to go beyond publisher-provided materials and create their own interactive, online experiences for their students.
Quia Books
Quia Books are Web-based versions of workbooks and textbooks, and are produced in partnership with the world's leading publishers. Built on our award-winning technology platform, Quia books engage students and make the learning process more satisfying through interactive exercises replete with vibrant color, sound, and images. Educators reap the timesaving benefits of computer-based grading and tracking and can fully customize Quia books based on individual course materials.
This resource is your online partner for teaching the core curriculum:
English, history, science, mathematics, Spanish
Learner-centered tools, lessons, and resources with measurable outcomes
Interactive components that foster higher-order thinking skills
Twenty-first century skills integrated into content
Most educators agree that the one-size-fits-all curriculum needs addressing
emergence of technology in education has certainly created a renewed interest in personalizing learning and providing teachers with the tools necessary for differentiating curriculum.
True personalization requires more than just looking at achievement levels and trying to compensate for deficiencies
differentiation of content requires adding more depth and complexity to the curriculum rather than transmitting more or easier factual material.
achievement levels, information about student interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression allow us to make decisions about personalization that take multiple dimensions of the learner into account.
Respect for learning-style variations can be achieved by using instructional strategies such as simulations, Socratic inquiry, problem-based learning, dramatizations, and individual and small-group investigations of real problems. Expression-style preferences can be accommodated by giving students opportunities to communicate visually, graphically, artistically, and through animatronics, multimedia, and various community-service involvements.
Our obsession with content mastery and Skinner's behavioral theory of learning are slowly but surely giving way to an interest in personalization and differentiation.
While it is understandable that our early use of technology was mainly an adaptation of Gutenberg-online and a teaching-machine mentality of what learning is all about, we now have both the pedagogical rationale and technological capability to use the many dimensions of student characteristics that clearly and unequivocally result in higher engagement, enjoyment, and enthusiasm for learning.
E-learning is a growing trend at community colleges, according to survey results from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
E-learning is already used at 47 percent of community colleges and is expected to increase to 55 percent within two years. The survey of 578 community college faculty was conducted by Eric Liguori, an assistant professor at California State University.
Eighty-four percent of respondents believe e-learning is a valuable educational tool.
The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are:
It increases access through location and time-flexible learning.
More resources and information are available to students 24/7.
Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching.
It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum.
It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”
When asked about the barriers to adopting online learning, faculty cited such concerns as doubt about its capability and reliability, acceptance by students and teachers, and lack of resources, such as time and technical support.
Twenty-three percent of respondents said the effectiveness of e-learning depends on the resources available, including the format and features of courses. For example, e-learning is best when teachers are adequately trained to use it, there is high-quality content and curriculum design, it’s used in conjunction with real-world situations and there is opportunity for student-teacher interactions, discussion boards and collaborative projects.
“Our survey looked at how community college faculty members are using e-learning as a cost-effective means” to increase completion rates and ensure that “students walk away with credentials that are meaningful in the workplace and that they are prepared for the careers they hope to pursue, including, for many, the start of entrepreneurial endeavors,” said NACCE President and CEO Heather Van Sickle.
proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
inductive reasoning
Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
fellow edu-nauts
Lectures are banned
attending class on Apple laptops
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
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Trainers and facilitators need to remember these numbers:
90, 20, 8, 6.
90 minutes is the ideal chunk of time for participants can learn and understand
20 minutes is how long participants can listen and retain information
8 minutes is the length of time you can talk for before before they stop listening. We are trained to focus for just eight minutes due to decades of TV watching, where ad breaks occur approximately every eight to ten minutes.
6 is the ideal number of times to present information to make sure a learner remembers the content.
the challenge for facilitators is to keep things changing so that learners’ RAS keep firing so they stay alert to the learning
It’s essential that trainers and facilitators keep learning themselves, to acquire new tools that will help them keep ensuring the training sticks!
And if you’ve been ignoring social media, now’s the time to reconsider because it’s clearly here to stay.
Blended learning is about mixing up face-to-face learning with webinars, blogging, emails, forums, video, online learning and social media.
trainers must move away from doing things in the same old way, must reach out to learners in new ways, personalise their learning campaigns, and help people connect to each other around issues they care about!
From planning phase to project end, things have to change – become familiar with new styles of presenting using multimedia, and carefully choose visuals to tell your story!
are you trapped in DDD – Dinosaur design and development?
Activity Based Curriculum Design
70% of learning happens on the job
20% of learning happens through coaching and mentoring
10% of learning happens in training room and formal learning
BCF principle – better cheaper faster
no more plan-plan-do, its plan-do plan-do plan-do
Get used to bigger groups
Our community must start the shift by preparing learners for this new way of learning!
Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite
of "highly effective" teaching
Home
Advocacy
Top Ten in '10: ISTE's Education Technology Priorities for 2010
Through a common focus on boosting student achievement and closing the
achievement gap, policymakers and educators alike are now reiterating their
commitment to the sorts of programs and instructional efforts that can have
maximum effect on instruction and student outcomes.
This commitment requires a keen understanding of both past accomplishment and
strategies for future success. Regardless of the specific improvement paths a
state or school district may chart, the use of technology in teaching and
learning is non-negotiable if we are to make real and lasting change.
With growing anticipation for Race to the Top (RttT) and Investing in
Innovation (i3) awards in 2010, states and school districts are seeing increased
attention on educational improvement, backed by financial support through these
grants.
As we think about plans for the future, the International Society for
Technology in Education (ISTE) has identified 10 priorities essential for making
good on this commitment in 2010:
1.
Establish technology in education as the
backbone of school improvement
. To truly improve our schools for the
long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and
skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must
permeate every corner of the learning process. From years of research, we
know that technology can serve as a primary driver for systemic school
improvement, including school leadership, an improved learning culture and
excellence in professional practice. We must ensure that technology is at the
foundation of current education reform efforts, and is explicit and clear in its
role, mission, and expected impact.
2.
Leverage education technology as a gateway
for college and career readiness
. Last year, President Obama established
a national goal of producing the highest percentage of college graduates in the
world by the year 2020. To achieve this goal in the next 10 years, we must
embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates
and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning
through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century
education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous,
interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education.
3.
Ensure technology expertise is infused
throughout our schools and classrooms.
In addition to providing all
teachers with digital tools and content we must ensure technology experts are
integrated throughout all schools, particularly as we increase focus and
priority on STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) instruction and
expand distance and online learning opportunities for students. Just as we
prioritize reading and math experts, so too must we place a premium on
technology experts who can help the entire school maximize its resources and
opportunities. To support these experts, as well as all educators who
integrate technology into the overall curriculum, we must substantially increase
our support for the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT)
program. EETT provides critical support for on-going professional
development, implementation of data-driven decision-making, personalized
learning opportunities, and increased parental involvement. EETT should be
increased to $500 million in FY2011.
4.
Continuously upgrade educators' classroom
technology skills as a pre-requisite
of "highly
effective" teaching
. As part of our nation's continued push to ensure
every classroom is led by a qualified, highly effective teacher, we must commit
that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and
digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student
assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition,
technologically savvy teachers.
5. Invest in pre-service education
technology
Curriki, the online education community, is building the first website to offer free, open-source instructional materials for K-12. We have thousands of free worksheets, lesson plans, exams, project ideas and activities for English language arts, math, science, social studies, technology integration and other subjects. All of our educational material is contributed by teachers and partners and is free and open source.
I agree...While I don't want technology to overtake my classroom, I do want to engage students as much as possible, and I'll use technolgy when it's easy to manage/use and effective.
I feel that our plan right now is to throw a bunch of software applications and hardware at us and let us figure it all out. Not working for me. I need to take one thing at a time and really learn it before I can use it in my classroom.
Diigo is a social network, Gary. The types of discussions you have on here, the learning that you do, that's why we need to be involved in the personalized professional development social networking can give us.
laptop, projector, and internet access.
I recommend investing in low cost laptop carts so students also have devices
If you click on the link just 2 lines below this highlight ('over here') there are clues on how to use wikis in teaching. In Chemical Education, we have been investigating using these both to teach and to build an online living text. See Laura Pence's talk at http://www.softconference.com/llc/player.asp?PVQ=GEDM&fVQ=EKKJFJ&hVQ= (may require ACS membership). Contact me if you are interested in how other chemists are using them.
Educational games are a great tool for building foundation math and language skills that today's elementary school curriculum requires. These online learning games and songs for kids are fun, teach important skills for preschool and elementary school kids and they're free. Want educational games that help build skills in math, language, science, social studies, and more? You've come to the right place!