But some found that taking the online version and the U-Va. class simultaneously produced a “much heavier workload for them than they were accustomed to in their other courses,” according to Zelikow.
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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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Quality Framework narrative, the 5 pillars | The Sloan Consortium® - 2 views
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Learning Effectiveness Scale Access Faculty Satisfaction Student Satisfaction
Need your help! - 39 views
Need Your Help!! - 35 views
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U-Va. MOOC finds high attrition, high satisfaction - The Washington Post - 14 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...2-9b09-1638acc3942e_story.html
mooc article washpost washington post uva attrition satisfaction
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Teacher Wall - 9 views
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The Teacher Wall is a virtual town hall that gives teachers an opportunity to talk about the things that are most important to them--from challenges to "A-ha! moments," from lessons learned to job satisfaction, from curriculum to parent engagement. The topics tackled on the Teacher Wall showcase a wide range of voices and provide teachers with a chance to interact and share with one another, all while adding to the conversation on America's schools. Backed by the Gates Foundation. Go to the site and click on teacher wall to view some of the features before signing up.
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About Us | Betaversity | Making Room For Creativity - 22 views
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"Betaversity is an education technology company that creates and supports collaborative prototyping spaces for post-secondary schools. We use the latest rapid prototyping technology and design thinking methodologies to help students learn by doing. We are a product-driven company that manufactures, rents, and sells BetaBox Mobile Prototyping Labs. These mobile lab facilities help schools maximize student satisfaction while minimizing expenses."
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Phone-addicted teens are unhappy - 21 views
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"Happiness is not a warm phone, according to a new study exploring the link between adolescent life satisfaction and screen time. Teens whose eyes are habitually glued to their smartphones are markedly unhappier, said study lead author and San Diego State University and professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge."
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Retaining older teachers for secondary education - Lessons from Holland? - 21 views
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"Not all teachers succeed in staying happy with their work until the end of their career. Dissatisfied older teachers will tend to quit before reaching retirement age. Work overload, low status of the profession, disruptive student behaviour, and a poor relationship with students are reasons often mentioned for the declining job satisfaction of older teachers."
Need your help!! - 25 views
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The False Promises of "School Choice" | Common Dreams - 22 views
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State test results showed that students in private voucher schools performed significantly worse in math and about the same in reading as their public school counterparts.
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or has Milwaukee’s voucher program met the promise of increased parental satisfaction. A longitudinal study on achievement, in its final report, noted that only17.5 percent of the voucher students remained in a voucher school after five years. The comparable figure for the public schools was 43.5 percent.
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Vouchers are a vehicle to funnel tax dollars into private schools. Using the false promise of “choice,” they are an unabashed abandonment of public education and of our hopes for a vibrant democracy.
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Self-Assessments - 72 views
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Find out more about yourself. Use these interactive self-assessments to discover what you're good at and where you may have room for improvement. Identify the things that interest you and get some ideas about careers to explore. Based on what you learn about yourself, you can pursue educational and career goals that bring long-term satisfaction.
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Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students - 8 views
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student satisfaction with the immediate feedback
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What is the most cost effective way to provide individualized, immediate feedback? Is it reasonable to do this without paying for subscription services?
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Teachers talked about motivation from a number of different perspectives. Some mentioned motivation with respect to working in a specific subject area, for example, a greater willingness to write or to work on computational skills. Others spoke in terms of more general motivational effects--
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When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast. The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons. Moreover, when technology is used as a tool to support students in performing authentic tasks, the students are in the position of defining their goals, making design decisions, and evaluating their progress.
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Knewton Salon: How has the internet changed the way you think? | Knewton Blog - 20 views
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why school is so important. On a raw level, school can show students what it feels like to concentrate at different levels–what it feels like to write a paper, solve a difficult math puzzle, and synthesize various skills. That way, students develop a taste for cognitive satisfaction and learn to look for it throughout their lives.
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, I don’t think that skills like memorization have decreased in importance. Sure, it may seem like we don’t need to commit facts to memory anymore and that the relevant skills today are navigation, retrieval, and analysis (how quickly you can find something, whether you can find it again later, and absorb what you need from it as quickly as possible). But memorization is still important; even in today’s world, where you have a universe of information at your fingertips, you have to remember how to navigate information, how to find it again, how to use tools to find it again as well as what you found in the past and how that might relate to the information rushing at you in the present. So in this sense, memorization is inextricably linked to navigation, retrieval, and analysis. The more you remember at any given point, the more space you have left in your “working memory” to perform complex cognitive processes.
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The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views
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It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
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At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers. And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself. That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
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And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment. As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude. We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
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Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem. As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average." To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance. Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
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But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering. College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people. The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it. By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
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We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level. Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college. But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
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We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem. It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
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An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem.
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Why Do Teachers Quit? - Liz Riggs - The Atlantic - 41 views
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A range of factors influences teacher retention, according to Ingersoll’s research, but he tells me that the way administration deals with both students and teachers has a “huge effect” on teacher satisfaction.
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Ingersoll has also done extensive research on beginning teacher support and found that teachers who have even just two small initiatives in place (working with a mentor and having regular supportive communication with an administrator) are more likely to stay in the classroom.
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Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery - 3 views
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According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology tha
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According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology that influences the quality of learning.
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However, it is not the computer per se that makes students learn, but the design of the real-life models and simulations, and the students' interaction with those models and simulations. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners (Clark, 2001).
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Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.
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Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.
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The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.
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Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).
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Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.
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Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).
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The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).
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The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.
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Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2. Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3. Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4. Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.
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Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.
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Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.
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Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.
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information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.
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Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).
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Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.
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Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.
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To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997).
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The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences
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The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.
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Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.
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Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.
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Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.
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it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.
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“the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p. 12).
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Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.
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Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.
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Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H
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When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.
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Learners should be given control of the learning process
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Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.
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Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.
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Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.
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Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.
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Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.
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Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997).
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Digital Domain - Computers at Home - Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality - NYTimes.com - 32 views
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Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.
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little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
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few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.
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“Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.
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The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.
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THE one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher-income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.
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How disappointing to read in the Texas study that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”
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Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children | Technology | The ... - 29 views
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If we are to understand the 21st century and the generation who will inherit it, it's crucial that we learn to describe the dynamics of this gaming life: a place that's not so much about escaping the commitments and interactions that make friendships "real" as about a sophisticated set of satisfactions with their own increasingly urgent reality and challenges.
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This is pretty easy to say, and I'm helping to create a NYC Writing Project group to look experiment with games and to study how to bring them into our curriculum. So much of it is theory! And sometimes it feels like another pressure point urging us to do this or do that in the classroom.
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