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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- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F

Recording Prompts  For each prompt line, please record your speech as follows: click the Record button, pause for half a second, Read the corresponding prompt sentence, pause for half a second, and then click the the Stop button. If you make a mistake, click Record again to re-record your prompt. Please do not read the punctuation marks out loud. Once you have completed recording all ten prompts the Upload button will activate.  Click the Upload button to upload your entire submission to the VoxForge repository as a single zip file. Repeat the process (multiple submissions are encouraged!)  

ive students a stand up break of 30-90 seconds (the “pause”) to give them mental processing time for the content.

“Fast writes” develop focus (save the editing for later).

Try turning the question around:  How do other people usually get where they need to go on time?  What steps do they take to avoid being late?  First, they check the clock every so often, particularly when they know there's a deadline approaching.  They estimate how much time they'll need to get wherever they're going and thus what time they'll need to leave where they are.  They pause to figure out how long it will take to finish what they're currently doing and get ready for whatever is coming next.  And then they adjust their behavior accordingly

I suspect that those who chronically show up late don't do these things.  Perhaps they have a tendency to lose themselves in whatever they're currently doing and don't discover what time it is until it's too late.

The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.

higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.

Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.

Her presentation contained a slide that said academic dishonesty included plagiarizing yourself—i.e., taking a paper you had written for one course and turning it in for credit in another course. That, she explained, constituted a dishonest representation of your work for a course. "Unless," one of my colleagues chimed in at that point, "you're an academic, and you're presenting the same idea at a bunch of different conferences. Then it's clearly not dishonest."

"Are we allowed to use ideas from our writing exercise to help us write this paper?" she asked. "Of course," I said. "That was the whole point of the writing exercise—to get you a head start in thinking about how you want to approach your paper." "OK," she said. And then after a brief pause: "Because at orientation they told us we weren't allowed to use our own work twice." "Ah," I said. "That doesn't really apply in this case. And anyway, I don't really mind, in this course, if you take a paper that you've written for another course and revise it for an assignment in here. You just have to make sure that what you turn in fulfills my specific assignment. Other professors might feel differently, though. So I would always ask before you tried to do that."

So does the injunction against plagiarizing from yourself fall into the category of one of those hypocritical rules that we like to impose on our children: Drinking soda every day would be bad for your health, honey, but it's fine for me? If a categorical difference exists here between what we do and what we forbid our students to do, I confess, I have a hard time seeing it.

It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!

His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture

large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.

When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.

My work as chief privacy and security officer at a large public university has, however, given me pause to ask if our posture toward risk prevents us from fully embracing technology at a moment of profound change.

Consequently, faculty members are accepting major personal and institutional risk by using such third-party services without any institutional endorsement or support. How we provide those services requires a nuanced view of risk and goes to the heart of our willingness to trust our own faculty and staff members.

The technologically savvy among us recognize that hard physical, virtual, and legal boundaries actually demark this world of aggressively competitive commercial entities. Our students, faculty, and staff often do not.

When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.

how the district was innovating.