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Doreen Stopczynski

20 reasons why students should blog | On an e-journey with generation Y - 181 views

murcha.wordpress.com/...asons-why-students-should-blog

students education technology web2.0

shared by Doreen Stopczynski on 29 Sep 10 - Cached
  • It is FUN! Fun!….. I hear your sceptical exclamation!! However, it is wonderful when students think they are having so much fun, they forget that they are actually learning. A favourite comment on one of my blog posts is: It’s great when kids get so caught up in things they forget they’re even learning…   by jodhiay authentic audience – no longer working for a teacher who checks and evalutes work but  a potential global audience. Suits all learning styles – special ed (this student attends special school 3days per weeek, our school 2 days per week, gifted ed, visual students, multi-literacies plus ‘normal‘ students. Increased motivation for writing – all students are happy to write and complete aspects of the post topic. Many will add to it in their own time. Increased motivation for reading – my students will happily spend a lot of time browsing through fellow student posts and their global counterparts. Many have linked their friends onto their blogroll for quick access. Many make comments, albeit often in their own sms language. Improved confidence levels – a lot of this comes through comments and global dots on their cluster maps. Students can share their strengths and upload areas of interest or units of work eg personal digital photography, their pets, hobbies etc Staff are given an often rare insight into what some students are good at. We find talents that were otherwise unknown and it allows us to work on those strengths. It allows staff to often gain insight to how students are feeling and thinking. Pride in their work – My experience is that students want their blogs to look good in both terms of presentation and content. (Sample of a year 10 boy’s work) Blogs allow text, multimedia, widgets, audio and images – all items that digital natives want to use Increased proofreading and validation skills Improved awareness of possible dangers that may confront them in the real world, whilst in a sheltered classroom environment Ability to share – part of the conceptual revolution that we are entering. They can share with each other, staff, their parents, the community, and the globe. Mutual learning between students and staff and students. Parents with internet access can view their child’s work and writings – an important element in the parent partnership with the classroom. Grandparents from England have made comments on student posts. Parents have ‘adopted’ students who do not have internet access and ensured they have comments. Blogs may be used for digital portfolios and all the benefits this entails Work is permanently stored, easily accessed and valuable comparisons can be made over time for assessment and evaluation purposes Students are digital natives - blogging is a natural element of this. Gives students a chance  to show responsibility and trustworthiness and engenders independence. Prepares students for digital citizenship as they learn cybersafety and netiquette Fosters peer to peer mentoring. Students are happy to share, learn from and teach their peers (and this, often not their usual social groups) Allows student led professional development and one more…… Students set the topics for posts – leads to deeper thinking
  • Doreen Stopczynski on 20 Oct 10
     
    Good reasons to allow student blogging Point being if it's fun they will love doing it, while enriching their knowledge at the same time.\nA great slant on multitasking.
Ed Webb

How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds - WSJ.com - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...SB124079001063757515.html

bestpractices review cognition styles learning education

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jul 09 - Cached
  • what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy
  • it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time
  • Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • students cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material
  • Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid.
  • what is being taught in most of the curriculum -- at all levels of schooling -- is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form
  • At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Jul 09
       
      But if you learn dancing AND algebra, you may be better at both, or at least approach each in a more interesting way.
djmurph4

Pro-Con Issue site - 2 views

www.procon.org

shared by djmurph4 on 12 May 09 - Cached
  • We are an independent, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity. We provide pros and cons on diverse controversial topics with facts and quotations from thousands of experts. Our sites are
  • Russ Goerend on 12 May 09
     
    Critical thinking.
  • anonymous on 04 Feb 10
     
    Pros and cons of controversial issues. Read pro and con arguments for and against topics such as medical marijuana, euthanasia, prostitution, and more
pkhiker

http://soar.wichita.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10057/254/t06045.pdf?sequence=3 - 18 views

soar.wichita.edu/...t06045.pdf

SSR independent reading

shared by pkhiker on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • pkhiker on 29 Apr 11
     
    research on SRI, gains, 
D. S. Koelling

The Liberal Arts Are Work-Force Development - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Hig... - 35 views

chronicle.com/...128149

student education liberal arts

shared by D. S. Koelling on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.
  • Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.
  • More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.
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  • Require lots of writing. As the management guru Peter Drucker argued, communication is the one skill required of all professionals, regardless of field. "As soon as you take one step up the career ladder," he said, "your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate your thoughts in writing and in speaking."
  • Clearly, one of the best things we can do for students is to require them to write—a lot.
  • Focus on critical thinking. A common complaint of employers, as reflected in the NACE survey, is that many workers have difficulty thinking for themselves. They may be thoroughly trained, having mastered all of the concepts in the textbooks, but, inevitably, situations arise that weren't covered in the books. When that happens, the ability to think critically, independently, and creatively becomes indispensable.
  • Bring the real world into the classroom. Another strategy we can adopt, if we want our courses to be more relevant, is to make our class discussions, case studies, experiments, and assignments as real-world-based as possible. For example, in my composition courses, I not only allow students to choose their own essay topics, but I also encourage them to write about issues related to their prospective majors. I also assign reading (in addition to the old textbook standbys) from newspapers, popular magazines, even the Internet.
  • Make the connection. Take advantage of every opportunity to connect what students are doing in class with what they will be doing some day as employees. My students hear the term "the real world" so much that, by the middle of the term, they're starting to roll their eyes. But it's important for them to understand that the work we're doing now in class isn't just a series of meaningless exercises, another set of hoops for them to jump through on their way to a degree. They're going to have to do these things for real one day—describe processes, do research to find solutions, draw comparisons—and my course may be the last time anyone ever actually teaches them how.
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views

www.ascd.org/...lls@-The-Challenges-Ahead.aspx

21stcenturyskills teaching

shared by Mr. Eason on 11 May 12 - Cached
  • the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
  • Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
  • What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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  • Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
  • some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
  • First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
  • Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
  • inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
  • Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
  • In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
  • At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
  • if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
  • The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
  • first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
  • Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
  • But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
  • We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
  • education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
  • teachers don't use them.
  • Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
  • these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
  • These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
  • constant juggling act
  • greater collaboration among teachers.
  • But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
  • professional development is a massive undertaking.
  • Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
  • The first challenge is the cost.
  • measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
  • When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
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