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Part 3: Are we medicating a disorder or treating boyhood as a disease? - The Globe and ... - 18 views

  • Last year, more than two million prescriptions for Ritalin and other ADHD drugs were written specifically for children under 17, and at least 75 per cent of them were for young males. Part 3 of a 6-part series.
  • taking a drug for attention deficit disorder each morning has become as commonplace as downing a vitamin.
  • prescriptions for Ritalin and other amphetamine-like drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder shot up to 2.9 million in 2009, a jump of more than 55 per cent in four years.
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  • 75 per cent of them were for young males
  • “It certainly suggests the drugs are being abused,” says Gordon Floyd, president and CEO of Children's Mental Health Ontario. “There's a desire for the quick fix … the idea that – ‘oh, we'll fix this with a pill' – rather than spend a few months in counselling, is pretty appealing.”
  • ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders of childhood, with core features that include an inability to focus, and hyper and impulsive behaviour. Increasingly, it's seen as a chronic condition that 60 per cent of kids never outgrow and one that experts estimate affects five per cent of children worldwide.
  • Boys are four times more likely to develop autism, three times more likely to suffer dyslexia, and two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
  • IMS figures show ADHD prescriptions for males have increased 50 per cent since 2005.
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    Last year, more than two million prescriptions for Ritalin and other ADHD drugs were written specifically for children under 17, and at least 75 per cent of them were for young males (Canadian data). Part 3 of a 6-part series.
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Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design - 11 views

  • Instructional Designer - $28.00 hour (based on salary of $60,000 per year) eLearning designer - $37.00 hour (based on salary of $78,000 per year) Organizational Specialist - $38.46 (based on salary of $80,000 per year)
  • 200 to 500 man-hours for each instructional hour of IMI
  • Simple Asynchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 117 hours Simple Synchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 86 hours Average Asynchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 191 hours Average Synchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 147 hours Complex Asynchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 276 hours Complex Synchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 222 hours
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  • Course is five days or less, then 3 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is between five and ten days, then 2.5 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is over 10 days, then 2 hours of preparation for each hour of training.
  • research generally shows that there is at least a 50% reduction in seat time when a course is converted from classroom learning to elearning. Brandon Hall reports it is a 2:1 ratio.
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $1,901.00 to $2,170.00
  • If your organization is inexperienced, expect your average developmental man-hours to be closer to 450-500 man-hours per instructional hour.
  • 1995 August/September issue of CBT Solutions Magazine reported that 221 hours was the average development time.
  • Category 1: Baseline Presentation
  • 34:1 -- Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc. (Chapman, 2007). 33:1 -- PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion (Chapman, 2006a, p20). 220:1 -- Standard e-learning, which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity (Chapman, 2006a, p20) 345:1 -- 3rd party courseware. Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware (Private study by Bryan Chapman 750:1 -- Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content (Chapman, 2006b)
  • Category 2: Medium Simulation Presentation
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $3,768.00
  • Category 3: High Level Simulation Presentation.
  • Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $7,183.00
  • Verizon says once they develop enough learning objects, they will be able to build courses in five hours or less ($10,000 to $15,000)
  • includes the instructional designer, project manager, and outsourcing fees (the instructional designer takes the content that is written in instructional design format to three other companies and an in house group for bids)
  • They use a content management system from OutStart
  • between 40 to 80 hours and costs $15,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of elearning (George & Mcgee, 2003)
  • If the elearning looks more like a PowerPoint presentation, then a 1:1 is probably close, however, the more elearning moves away from looking like a Powerpoint presentation and looks more like an interactive package, then the more the ratio starts to increase.
  • Outside Consultant - $90.00 hour
  • Chapman
  • Category 1: Baseline Presentation
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Out-of-tune plans should hit a shorter note - News - TES Connect - 47 views

  • All an experienced teacher needs is one big plan and short prompts for lessons
  • Far from being scientific, as the word "evidence" implies, this faith in the written plan is almost superstitious
  • Teaching has become a plan-centred profession. The things you do are only validated by written evidence that you intended to do them. It makes no sense, yet is widely accepted
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  • Respond to the child, not the plan.
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    "If I could have your detailed lesson plans for next week, that would be great. Thanks!" Why? We plan too much. Long-term plans, in-depth plans, planning per week, per lesson, per pupil. Yet we work with unpredictable children, so we revise our plans because the lesson didn't go according to plan.
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Two-thirds of new teachers can't find full-time work - - Macleans OnCampus - 26 views

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    Few other graduates in Canada have as much reason for pessimism as those who finished teacher's college this spring. A study from the Ontario College of Teachers shows that two-thirds (67 per cent) of education graduates from Ontario's class of 2009 found themselves unemployed or underemployed in the following year. And, the unemployment rate among new teachers has exploded to a staggering 24 per cent - up from just three per cent in 2006.
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Twitter vs. Zombies - 33 views

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    Inspired by the popular campus game Humans vs. Zombies, join @Jessifer and @allistelling for an epic zombiefied experiment in Twitter literacy, gamification, collaboration, and emergent learning. Part flash-mob. Part Hunger-Games. Part Twitter-pocalypse. Part digital feeding frenzy. Part micro-MOOC. Part giant game of Twitter tag. Band together your most trusted Twitter allies to defend against a virtual Zombie horde. Collect canned goods, store water, watch your hashtags, and sleep with one eye open. THE RULES TO JOIN THE GAME: Register on this page. Commit to posting at least 10 tweets per day. THEN, TO PLAY: 1. A ZOMBIE can #bite (to attack) once every 30 minutes. A bite will turn a HUMAN to a ZOMBIE in exactly five minutes. A #bite can only be sent to a player who has been active on Twitter in the last five mins. 2. A HUMAN can #dodge (protect yourself) once per hour and #swipe (protect someone else) once per hour. 3. When you are bitten, you have five mins to reply to the ZOMBIE with #dodge or have another player reply to you and the zombie with #swipe. A turned HUMAN must update the Twitter vs. Zombies Scoreboard by changing his/her status to ZOMBIE. 4. The rules are emergent. There will be challenges, amendments, and rule adaptations as suggested by the community and implemented by administrators. Keep your eyes on the blog and #TvsZ for updates. Anatomy of an action tweet: [@name(s)] [body of tweet with action tag #bite, #dodge, or #swipe playfully inserted] [game tag: #TvsZ] Example of a bite/dodge: @DigiWriMo attacks: "@moocmooc I want to #bite your lovely flesh. #TvsZ @moocmooc dodges: "@DigiWriMo No you don't. I have not used #dodge in an hour. #TvsZ Example of a bite/swipe: @DigiWriMo attacks: "@moocmooc What's that lump on your neck? Is that some kind of #bite? #TvsZ @Jessifer defends: "@DigiWriMo @moocmooc I #swipe your hungry beak. [pets @moocmooc] #TvsZ The game is beta, and we will be crowd-sourcing the rules as it's played.
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Ideas Trump Resources When it Comes to City Growth - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

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    important for all us educators to remember: knowledge and extractive industries do not mix. "Across all U.S. metros, the share of workers in resource and extractive industries had no correlation whatsoever to four key measures of regional development: economic output per capita, average wages per capita, income, or median household income (the correlations range from -.08 to .09, none being statistically significant). Conversely, the share of workers employed in idea-based knowledge and creative industries was strongly associated with all four regional development measures (with correlations ranging from .53 to .74). In line with the resource curse hypothesis, the share of employment in resource and extractive industries was negatively associated with share of employment in knowledge industries and also with the share of adults with college degrees, a key measure of skill and human capital which economists uniformly find to be a key driver of short and long-run economic prosperity."
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The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views

  • I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
    • anonymous
       
      this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
  • the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
    • anonymous
       
      Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
  • They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
    • anonymous
       
      PROFOUND!!!
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  • always evolving
    • anonymous
       
      Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • outside ears, and eyes, are important
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
    • anonymous
       
      So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
  • 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.
    • anonymous
       
      Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
  • they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
    • anonymous
       
      Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
  • The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
    • anonymous
       
      The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
  • teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
    • anonymous
       
      This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
  • must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
  • most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
    • anonymous
       
      Progression
  • The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
    • anonymous
       
      The coach also makes you aware of where you are excelling!
  • So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
  • “What worked?”
    • anonymous
       
      Great way to open any coaching conversation!
  • “How could you help her?”
  • “What else did you notice?”
    • anonymous
       
      These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
  • something to try.
    • anonymous
       
      Suggestions of something to try! Any colleague can offer this - so why don't we ask colleagues for ideas of something to try more often?
  • three colleagues on a lunch break
  • Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
    • anonymous
       
      I probably need this printed out and stuck to the monitor of my computer or tattooed on my hand!
  • “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
    • anonymous
       
      patient, engaged listening
  • coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is
  • trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
    • anonymous
       
      Encouraging people to think - it is important to teach and encourage thinking rather than teaching them WHAT to think!
  • a whole list of observations like this.
  • one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
  • watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
    • anonymous
       
      This is one of the greatest strategies to promote growth - ever!
  • routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
    • anonymous
       
      I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
  • I know that I’m learning again.
  • It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
    • anonymous
       
      But it still works and is effective at nudging even those who are fabulous to be even better!
  • modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
  • coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
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    Valuable points about coaching - makes me want my own coach!
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WeVideo - Collaborative Online Video Editor in the Cloud - 3 views

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    Free account includes 1 GB storage, 15 export minutes per month (to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter), 5 invites per project, and 390 licensed music titles. Supports "any" video format.
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Returning slowly…One Device Per Group… | eLearning Island - 29 views

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    Perhaps there is too much emphasis on the possibility of Bringing Your Own Device (BYOD) and not enough on One Device Per Group.
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One Device Per Group | eLearning Island - 26 views

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    ..a continuation of my thoughts on One Device per Group!
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Free Online Typing Test | Test Your Typing Speed | WPM - 1 views

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    This free typing test calculates how fast you type (Words Per Minute) and compares your results with people from all around the world." />Typing Test, Online Typing Test, Free Typing Test, Typing Speed Test, WPM, Words Per Minute, Typing Games, Touch Typing, Test Typing Speed, Qwerty, Dvorak, Flash Games, Typing Software, Practice Typing
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MagCloud - 0 views

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    desktop magazine publishing...approximately 20c per page can it be used for a yearbook?desktop magazine publishing...approximately 20c per page can it be used for a middle school yearbook?
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Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 28 views

  • In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”
  • Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.”
  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
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  • Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
  • Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
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    Highly insightful and developed argument for how Web 2.0 is changing how we process information, learn, and develop opinions. 
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Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "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 Click to Open Overlay Gallery 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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Little Progress in Reducing the Global Out-of-School Rate - @UNICEF_uk - 3 views

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    "With 11.5 per cent of school-age children - or 123 million - missing out on learning today, compared to 12.8 per cent - or 135 million - in 2007, the percentage of 6-15-year-olds who are out of school has barely decreased in the last decade, UNICEF said today."
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How high-school decisions can affect your career - 72 views

  • According to research cited in the book, high-school seniors who worked 20 hours per week had annual earnings as young adults that were 25 to 30 percent higher than those seniors who didn't work.
  • Increased chance of being hired More hours of work over the year Higher hourly or annual earnings Increased benefits offerings, such as health insurance Greater employment stability Better upward mobility Increased chances of employer-supported training
  • four key issues that need to be addressed in high school to help set students up for career success.
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  • t an early age is a dev
  • ge is a deve
  • nvestm
  • "The problem for many students, and even parents, is that they fail to think of high-school education as an investment good," according to the book "College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs."
  • Pay levels can also vary based on how much higher learning is obtained. As the book explains, graduates of two-year degree programs earn 22 percent more per year than high-school graduates with no degree. Bachelor's degree holders earn about 66 percent more per year than their high-school graduate counterparts.
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Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better? : The New Yorker - 10 views

  • 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.
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Teaching Tip: Vocabulary Lesson Your Students will Devour - International Reading Assoc... - 31 views

  • A Juicy Word is a word that has some real substance to it. Juicy Words are special, more so than your everyday, dried-out variety of words.
  • First, I ask students to collect ten Juicy Words per week
  • from text or from speech
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  • note about where they found the word and how it was used
  • uring Week 2, I ask students to continue collecting ten Juicy Words per week, and in addition, to identify their three favorite Juicy Words and to use them at some point
  • In their Week 2 posts, students share their three Juicy Words, information about where they sourced each word, a brief explanation of each word's meaning, and how they used each word in real life.
  • By Week 5, the students are using five of their Juicy Words per week, and collecting an average of 15—five more than the ten words that I require
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    Teaching tip for vocabulary - have students collect 10 "juicy words" each week including where they found them and how each was used.  Then they choose their favorite 3 and are asked to use those 3 throughout the week.
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The Future of Learning: An Interview with Alfred Bork - 82 views

  • nteraction should be frequent
  • as in human conversation
  • active environment maintains student interest for a long period of time, even with difficult learning material.
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  • the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented to the student.
  • In our traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not. It is this second group of students that we want to help.
  • problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive way of learning
  • , on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the student knows and just what learning problems are occurring
  • It begins immediately with a question, with no preceding text.
  • experience the joy of discovery.
  • tutorial approach to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.
  • critical factor is that we can react to individual student problems
  • key concept for structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom concept of mastery learning.
  • goal is for everyone to learn everything to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful
  • A student who has not learned in one way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.
  • In such an environment, learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.
  • highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating. Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment, since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are available.
  • mastery-based computer segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together, either locally or remotely via electronic communication.
  • existing authoring systems. Since they were, and still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate for creating highly interactive software.
  • Bertrand Ibrahim at the University of Geneva,
  • omputer stores much of the information as the students progress through the material.
  • Teaching faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will be important in the design of learning modules.
  • High costs of development can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.
  • $30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning material
  • highly effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses, and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students
  • The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely, almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this way.
  • Universities are too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and so are not prepared for these future directions.
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The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media... - 24 views

  • Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
  • To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
  • But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.
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  • That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.
  • But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.
  • Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.
  •  
    This is facinating!!!
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