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Nigel Coutts

The power of powerful ideas shared simply - The Learner's Way - 15 views

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    Some statements stand out in your memory for the power with which they resonate through you mind. I recall the first time I encountered the question posed by Alan November "Who owns the learning?" on the cover of his book of the same name. In four words, Alan poses a question that strikes at the heart of education and encourages us to re-think our approach. If we believe that the learner should own the learning, what are the implications of this for our teaching? Like a stone dropped on the surface of a calm pond, the ripples from a powerful idea spread, expand and gain strength. 
sanford arbogast

Learning on the Move: Mobile Learning Devices « The Power of Us - 36 views

  • Whyville , What does it take to build a sustainable, green energy community? 8th Graders are showing us how using WhyPower, an interactive learning game within the largest interactive learning world, WhyVille. Here is an interactive game. http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/projects/whypower-interactive-game Energy Game:  WHYPOWER Whyville is a thriving community with its own economy, newspaper, government and much more.  It now has its own power grid!  As part of the WhyCareers program, we are “electrifying” Whyville with a power grid that uses traditional and renewable energy sources.  Students will manage the power grid to select the right mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind energy. They will build homes in Whyville!  They will observe and measure power use in Whyville, and form good energy behaviors and habits. Finally, they will explore the math, science and career topics related to energy.  Just like in real life, success in Whyville is not pre-programmed!  Students skill, initiative, creativity and teamwork determines the rewards they receive and the “virtual money” they earn in WhyPower. Whyville. Run a city using energy reources.
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    interesting article on mobile learning bridging the digital gap plus a link ot a great site for learning about renewable energy"whiyville" and its place in the "power grid"
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
victoria waddle

How books can sap the soul and poison readers with i... - 28 views

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    Novels have power and influence. Interesting look at the darker side of the author's power over the reader in an age when we insist that all reading is goodness and light. Not a call for censorship by any means--just a reflection on how truly powerful literature is.
Steven Engravalle

18 Ways to Power Search Google - 123 views

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    Google power users know the tricks, and they aren't hard to pick up at all. Using Google's built in features helps you find what you're looking for faster, and that's always a good thing. Here's 18 ways to power search Google that you can use today to improve your Google experience.
pjimison

Technology is Too Powerful | infuselearning - 38 views

shared by pjimison on 25 Oct 13 - Cached
  • We want to: promote educational change through empowering teachers and bringing students to the center of the learning conversation through simple, easy to use technology.
  • Technology is too powerful to not allow teachers to provide unique and differentiated learning opportunities and effective questions to meet the variety of students in today’s classrooms.
  • Technology is too powerful to not provide accessibility features that fill in the gaps where a different learning style or special need or other exceptionality would typically or potentially impede learning.
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  • Technology is too powerful to be confined to the walls of one classroom and not connect and reach a global audience and link learners across oceans and cultural differences and languages.
  • Technology is too powerful to continue in a failed system of bubble sheets and a single “right” answer; our kids deserve better systems of teaching and learning.
  • Technology is too powerful to not be leveraged for the benefit of our students.
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    I love their vision - to promote educational change through empowering teachers and bringing students to the center of the learning conversation through simple, easy to use technology. Amen?!
trisha_poole

Wikis in the Classroom: Three Ways to Increase Student Collaboration - Faculty Focus | ... - 200 views

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    I've long said that professors who want to explore teaching with technology should begin with a social media tool rather than a Learning Management System. Web 2.0 tools are simple to use, invite student collaboration, and are usually less administratively clunky and complex than an LMS.One of the easiest and most powerful tools is the regular old wiki. Wikis are simply web pages that can be edited by their users. Instead of only carrying content from the administrator, they harness the power of crowdsourcing to create a powerful communal resource.
Nigel Coutts

Understanding the power of stories - The Learner's Way - 28 views

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    We are the stories that we tell and it is the stories we share which unite us. This was the seed of an idea planted by a day with author, artist, musician and story teller Boori Pryor. Understanding the power that our stories have allows us to better value their role in our lives, to see them as more than recounts of the past or imaginings of the future. Stories should be viewed as the powerful agents that they are with the force to shape who we are as much as we shape them.
Linda Morosko

Diigo's Android Power Note App - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 28 views

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    Two weeks ago I described the Diigo bookmarklet that lets you annotate websites directly within the iPad's browser. Android users will be happy to know that Diigo also has an Android app called Power Note
anonymous

Art Project, powered by Google - 123 views

  • Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
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    Visit Art Museums virtually. Zoom in on the Art.
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    Take virtual tours of art museums all over the world.
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    View virtual art galleries from around the world with this great Google resource. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art,+Craft+&+Design
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    "Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces."
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    Museums from around the world. Nice place to view art work from multiple locations quickly.
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    The Art Project powered by Google features interior tours of seventeen world famous art museums. Select a museum from the list on the homepage & you can virtually tour it using the same interface style you experience in Google Maps Streetview. Inside the museum, just double click to zoom to a location. You can also open a floor plan overview & click on a room to navigate to that part of the museum. The best part of the Art Project powered by Google is the option to create your own artwork collection while visiting each museum. As you're touring a museum click on the "+" symbol on any work of art see it in greater detail, to add it to your collection, & to open background information about that work of art. To create a collection you must be signed into a Google account. This is a great way to start a story or writing prompt, or to explore history & cultures.
Margaret Moore-Taylor

ImageQuiz - 6 views

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     ImageQuiz, a website that uses the power of images (1 image = 1000 words) to help you learn. The website contains a variety of quizzes, that you can try out.  It is really easy to make a quiz with an uploaded image of your choice from clip art or your computer.  Be creative and use power point to make an image and develop a quiz.  It worked on the android tablet and is free.  
Michael Sheehan

Learning Never Stops: Annenberg Learner Interactives- A Powerful Education Resource - 3 views

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    Powerful and engaging interactive lessons for students and teachers. Must see!
Glenn Hervieux

This Teacher Taught His Class A Powerful Lesson About Privilege - 124 views

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    Great, easy lesson on how to teach the power of privilege to young people in the school environment (and other settings, as well).
Marc Patton

WISE - Web-based Inquiry Science Environment - 0 views

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    Harness the power of the Internet... wisely. WISE is a simple yet powerful learning environment where students examine real world evidence and analyze current scientific controversies.
Roland Gesthuizen

19 Bold Ideas for Change in Education - 89 views

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    "What do you believe is needed to change in Education? Powerful Learning Practice believes in the power of educators and challenges you to re-envision what you do in your school and classroom this upcoming year."
Judy Robison

Easy classroom computing - 46 views

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    "The ubermix is an all-free, specially built, Linux-based operating system designed from the ground up with the needs of education in mind. Built by educators with an eye towards student and teacher empowerment, ubermix takes all the complexity out of student devices by making them as reliable and easy-to-use as a cell phone, without sacrificing the power and capabilities of a full operating system. With a turn-key, 5 minute installation, 20 second quick recovery mechanism, and more than 60 free applications pre-installed, ubermix turns whatever hardware you have into a powerful device for learning."
Michael Sheehan

Learning Never Stops: Newsela - A Powerful Common Core Literacy Tool - 40 views

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    Check out Newsela - a powerful literacy tool.
Brianna Crowley

TEDxEast - Nancy Duarte uncovers common structure of greatest communicators 11/11/2010 ... - 40 views

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    How an idea can change the world through powerful presentation. Outlines and analyzes Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King Jr.'s most powerful speeches. Amazing for rhetorical devices and/or presentations.
Steve Ransom

Kindergartners and iPads-Part 2 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 36 views

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    With parent perspectives like this, 1:1 initiatives had better do things right and ensure that powerful learning is going on in conjunction with powerful tools. Such perceptions must be challenged and teachers must be ready for the challenge
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