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Peter Beens

PIPEDREAMS - Seeing with New Eyes - International Perspectives on Trust and Regulation ... - 16 views

  • This year, I was asked to attend as a Canadian Teacher Representative, along with Ontario Ministry Officer, Colette Ruduck and our Ontario Deputy Minister of Education, George Zegarac.
  • the theme of “Trust and Regulation”
  • my Canadian values of equality, diversity, safety and choice
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  • high degree of trust for teachers, administrators and district decision makers
  • Our regulations are meant to encourage equality and diversity, choice, opportunity, innovation – fundamental values in our society.
  • In contrast to many of the other countries represented, our Canadian context was unique in that the regulations (organizations, federations, policies, curriculum) imposed actually tie in Trust and Relationship building and partnerships as key factors to increase capacity building with a wide range of stakeholders.
  • We need our profession to be respected, which includes paying us well, treating us fairly, supporting us with resources, nurturing our learning and leadership opportunities
  • systems of education can achieve and can be highly ranked without the use of formalized testing
  • We need to feel safe to make mistakes because we too are learners, especially in a profession that is changing so drastically in the 21st Century
  • We need to feel trusted and with that, we want our skills, our education, our talents and our passions to be respected so we -together – can become the creators of our own pedagogies
  • these passionate and experienced leaders agreed that such tests don’t work when used to rate, or punish teachers
  • can even sometimes do more harm then good
  • such tests are not always authentic
  • First and foremost, teacher voice needs to be heard and respected
  • As principals, we need to empower our teachers and community
  • the importance of the teacher/principal relationship came up over and over and over
  • Trust – allows me to teach in my style, developing my own curriculum
  • I wonder if there is a correlation between that supportive, trusting principal and the fact that we have incredibly dynamic teachers here, at Van Leer from all over the globe
  • We too need to think different because change can start with us
  • We need to make our voices heard by be socially active
  • By sharing and reflecting our learning openly and even by sometimes being vulnerable and asking for help and challenging the status quo
  • we need to recognize that our learning environments are changing and are very different from how we were once trained and educated
  • We need to remind our leaders that we are not just teachers of academics but we teach the whole person
  • Many of us struggle, without supports – to help impoverished families, students with mental health disabilities, learning disabilities, students that speak a different language, large class sizes, violence, inequalities
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    The conference in Jerusalem, Israel that Van Leer hosts each year  is intended to encourage professional dialogue among educators, academics, representatives of the Third Sector, and policymakers from diverse areas and places in Israel and abroad.    This year, I was asked to attend as a Canadian Teacher Representative, along with Ontario Ministry Officer, Colette Ruduck and our Ontario Deputy Minister of Education, George Zegarac. With the theme of "Trust and Regulation" at the center of our discussions, it did not take long to realize that my context, as a Canadian Educator, a parent, and a student -  was one of privilege and opportunity.
Peter Beens

10 Twitter Tips for Teachers | PlanbookEdu Blog - 50 views

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    Using Twitter is a brilliant way for teachers to connect to their students, classroom parents, and the global community. If you are a teacher, you can use Twitter in a variety of ways, from staying updated on new trends in education to encouraging idea sharing in the classroom. The following list of tips can help you get the most out of your Twitter experience.
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    I recently had a teacher declare that Twitter was "a waste of time" during one of our meetings. It's good to see resources that will help our teachers understand the value of tools like Twitter.
mgranger

Media and Technology Resources for Educators | Common Sense Media - 15 views

  • gital driver's license
  • with complete confidence. Our online trainings show you how. More about parent professional development Research Credentials Check out our DNA. Our programs are built on respected digital ethics research. More about parent research credentials Turn wired students into great digital citizens Get all the tools you need with our FREE Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum and Parent Media Education Program. The relevant, ready-to-use instruction helps you guide students to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world where they live, study and play. Every day, your students are tested with each post, search, chat, text message, file download, and profile update. Will they connect with like minds or spill ... read more Get started Browse our classroom lessons and parent education resources by grade level or topical area. select gradeK123456789101112 select topicCell phones & digital communicationCyberbullying & online relationshipsDigital creation, plagiarism & piracyFamily media managementGaming & online worldsInternet safetyMedia's influence on kidsOnline privacy and securityOnline research & learningSocial networking & communityViolence in media Get Started 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 more about our plans for interactive curriculum modules
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    Digital citizenship curriculum targets 4th, 5th graders
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    Lesson plans, articles, and tools to teach Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety
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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.
Jason Finley

Diigo in Education - 108 views

Marie, my primary use and focus with Diigo is the social networking aspect that you mentioned. There is definitely truth to the statement that "Chance favors the connected mind." I've created a g...

Diigo

anonymous

Why Schools Must Move Beyond One-to-One Computing | November Learning - 139 views

  • I’m concerned that most one-to-one implementation strategies are based on the new tool as the focus of the program. Unless we break out of this limited vision that one-to-one computing is about the device, we are doomed to waste our resources.
    • Michael Stocks
       
      I don't think this idea applies to just 1 to 1 but many other school implementations.
    • DON PASSENANT
       
      It is not the devices but the inability to create and implement standards that lead to 21st century skills.  Too much buying stuff without expert advice and guidance.
  • Then, teachers are instructed to go! But go where?
    • anonymous
       
      VISION first! You have the device. You know how to access some cool interactive tools. But now what? This is the key!!
  • I believe every student must have 24-7 access to the internet.
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  • it is a simplistic and short- sighted phrase that suggests if every student had a device and if every teacher were trained to use these devices, then student learning would rise automatically.
  • Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.
  • Let’s drop the phrase “one-to-one” and refer instead to “one-to- world.”
  • The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.
  • As soon as you shift from “one- to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support
  • Perhaps the weakest area of the typical one-to-one computing plan is the complete absence of leadership development for the administrative team
  • Craft a clear vision of connecting all students to the world’s learning resources.
  • Model the actions and behaviors they wish to see in their schools.
  • Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology.
  • Move in to the role of systems analyst to ensure that digital literacy is aligned with standards.
  • Ensure that technology is seen not as another initiative, but as integral to curriculum.
  • support risk- taking teachers
  • creating cohorts of teachers across disciplines and grades who are working on innovative concepts
  • Mathtrain.TV.
  • how much responsibility of learning can we shift to our students
  • How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world?
  • How can we engage parents in new ways?
  • How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?
  • publishing their work to a global audience.
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.
Martin Burrett

UKEdChat Session 318: Modern & Effective Homework Strategies - 13 views

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    Following on from the result of the #UKEdChat poll on Twitter, the chat this week focuses on: Modern and Effective Homework Strategies. The questions to be asked are below, which will then be released for discussion during the session. What are the greatest issues for teachers in setting homework? How do you communicate to parents your expectations of pupils completing homework? Does you school have a homework policy? How often is it updated? Homework and technology - How can we ensure all pupils have access to resources? Research about homework - John Hattie argues that homework in primary has zero effect (Radio 4 link). Do you agree / disagree? What is the most effective (and positive) homework strategy that you have experienced?
Margaret Moore-Taylor

SchoolNotes 2.0 - 102 views

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    "Post assignments, announcements, and links to important resources Notify parents and students each time you update your classroom page Create an online calendar of class events and activities Use our free storage to upload documents and add images to your page(s) Access practical tips and other resources from EducationWorld.com Use our handy tools to create flashcards and other learning materials"
ride4life1983

The Role of Learning Management Systems in Middle Schools - 14 views

  • a
  • ll learning styles and levels can be met. Teachers can organize their classes and post different documents, assignments, tests, etc. for their students to work on without the students knowing they are receiving something that has been specifically developed for their own level.
  • many benefits in middle level education
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  • paper copies of their absent work; now teachers post worksheets, links, videos, and other resources
  • flipped classrooms can be created
  • communication increases. Groups are developed within the system for sharing resources, sending messages, and connecting with staff and students.
  • attracted to technology outside school;
  • built-in reward system in which teachers can give badges to students for good attendance, participation, etc. to reinforce positive behaviors.
  • opportunity to communicate
  • Class participation and collaborative work increases
  • Parents
Warren Apel

Scholastico - 35 views

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    EdTech startup created by teachers (Apple Distinguished Educator, Google Certified Innovator) offering parent-teacher conference registrations and other tools to make schools run more efficiently.
Martin Burrett

Patronage For Teachers - 3 views

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    "Schools achieve amazing things everyday, especially when educators and students have the right resources and experience. However, with funding at chronically low levels in many education systems around the world, schools are looking for innovative ways to invest more funds into the classroom, beyond simply asking parents to make up the shortfall.  The idea of patronage for scholars and artisans by philanthropists is nothing new and has its roots in the ancient past."
Deborah Baillesderr

Education.com | Printable Worksheets, Online Games, and More - 12 views

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    An Education & Child Development Site for Parents | Parenting & Educational Resource
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    A vast website with thousands of pages of tips and ideas for teachers. Browse hundreds of beautifully made and printable worksheets. Ask educational questions and get involved with the huge site community. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular
deb loftsgard

Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 76 views

  • Sustained
    • deb loftsgard
       
      Level 3  research using I can statements as the funnel toward the driving question
  • students ask questions,
    • deb loftsgard
       
      Creation of Need to Know questions - level 2 knowledge
  • Authenticity
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  • solve problems like those faced by people in the world outside of school (
  • eal-world processes, tasks and tools, and performance standards,
  • address a need in their school or community
  • own concerns, interests, cultures,
  • Student Voice & Choice
  • Students can have input and (some) control over many aspects of a project, from the questions they generate, to the resources they will use to find answers to their questions, to the tasks and roles they will take on as team members, to the products they will create
  • Reflection
  • We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.
  • Critique & Revision
  • ddition to peers and teachers, outside adults and experts can also contribute to the critique process, bringing an authentic, real-world point of view.
  • product” can be a tangible thing, or it can be a presentation of a solution to a problem or answer to a driving question.
  • resent or display their work to an audience beyond the classroom, the performance bar raises, since no one wants to look bad in public
  • aking student work public is an effective way to communicate with parents, community members, and the wider world about what PBL is and what it does for students.
  • people need to be able to think critically and solve problems,
Matt Renwick

What Reflects a Great School? Not Test Scores - Education Week - 79 views

  • These gains often turn out to be an achievement mirage
  • Three interconnected factors are as essential for whole-school achievement as knowing how to teach well: trust, collaboration, and authenticity.
  • professional learning is ongoing and embedded
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  • They let parents know through social media, a phone call, or an email when a child has done something well
  • observe, coach, and co-teach
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Teacher Rounds/Peer Observations
  • rich and extensive classroom libraries
  • students choice and easy access to books
  • they partner with teachers to ensure that all resources and texts used in the classroom are well written and are crafted by notable authors
  • the quality of relationships within the school and across the community
Katt Blackwell-Starnes

using diigo with students - 568 views

I'm interested to see where this conversation goes next. There's some great information and pointers here. Thanks for the blog link, Andy. I'll be keeping up with what you're writing. In just ove...

diigo students bookmarking

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