1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
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5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views
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2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
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3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
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4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
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5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
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I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
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Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
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Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
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Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
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One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
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shared by Suzanne Nelson on 23 Oct 11
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Get the Most out of Online Quizzes « classroom2point0 - 156 views
classroom2point0.wordpress.com/...the-most-out-of-online-quizzes
education2.0 quiz assessment onlineclassroom
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Unfortunately, life is not multiple choice; it’s a story problem. If we want to prepare our students for the demands of college and the real world, we cannot afford to whittle away their knowledge to a, b, c, d, or e: all of the above. At the same time, our time as teachers is at a premium and very few of us can afford to spend hours grading essay tests.
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Fortunately, the powers that be are aligning in the classroom teacher’s favor, and there are two great tools you can use to reduce your grading time.
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So what does QuizStar have that other sites don’t? My favorite feature of QuizStar by far is the “choose all that apply” option. You can create a
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Edmodo’s quiz feature allows you to create a quiz that mixes multiple choice, short answer, true/false, and fill in the blank.
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Rules for ALL Online Quizzes 1. Never, ever, EVER copy a question from a textbook or a quiz you found online. I can almost guarantee that some enterprising student somewhere has copied the question and placed an answer key online.
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Getting the Most out of Formative Assessments 1. Set a time limit that will simultaneously allow students enough time to an
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Getting the Most out of Open Note Formal Assessments 1. If you are going to permit students to use notes and worksheets from class, design your questions so that they must apply the information they have at their fingertips. I
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Getting the Most out of Closed Note Formal Assessments 1. If no notes are permitted, reduce the amount of time students have to take the test. For multiple choice at the high school level, 45 seconds per question is fairly standard.
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Experimentation and Feedback As you play around with online quizzes, ask your students to give you feedback. They’ll let you know what’s working and what isn’t.
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shared by Steve Ransom on 20 Jul 11
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Revisiting Extra Credit Policies | Faculty Focus - 3 views
www.facultyfocus.com/...visiting-extra-credit-policies
exam test extracredit highered evaluation grades
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ere’s how it works. The instructor attaches a blank piece of paper to the back of every exam. Students may write on that sheet any exam questions they couldn’t answer or weren’t sure they answered correctly. Students then take this piece of paper with them and look up the correct answers. They can use any resource at their disposal short of asking the instructor. At the start of the next class session, they turn in their set of corrected answers which the instructor re-attaches to their original exam. Both sets of answers are graded. If students missed the question on the exam but answered it correctly on the attached sheet, half the credit lost for the wrong answer is recovered.
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Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Five Questions to Ask ... - 29 views
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Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006).
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Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
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Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills.
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A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for individual exploration and experimentation
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I think the problem lies in seeing this as an either-or question. Any system that relies solely on testing as the measure of success is short-sighted and archaic. Having no identified common ground puts at risk the learners who most need a firm starting point. To say that the current system allows "more room for individual exploration and experimentation" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. Where in test-crazed American schools do you see this happening??
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quietube | Video without the distractions | Youtube, iPlayer, Viddler, Vimeo and more - 6 views
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Video without the distractions To watch web videos without the comments and crap, just drag the button below to your browser's bookmarks bar. On any of the supported video pages, click the bookmark button to watch in peace. You can then make short URLs too, to send the quietube version to your friends. Easy as.
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views
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at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
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What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
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students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
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As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
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Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
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Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
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It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
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Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
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Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
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Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
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Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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shared by Tanya Hudson on 28 Jan 10
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Storybird - Create and share beautifully illustrated digital stories! - 91 views
storybird.com
edtech library digital storytelling content creation ELA_writing primary uppergrades tools
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This site is wonderful for younger students and older ELLs. Using exquisite art graphics from an extensive library of images children create online storybooks. The fanciful and beautiful graphics inspire the creator to write a story. The program then publishes the online book with a default "private" setting. This site appears to be carefully monitored and supervised. Excellent for ELA.
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This site is wonderful for younger students and older ELLs. Using exquisite art graphics from an extensive library of images children create online storybooks. The fanciful and beautiful graphics inspire the creator to write a story. The program then publishes the online book with a default "private" setting. This site appears to be carefully monitored and supervised. Excellent for ELA.
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Story Bird widely used story book maker website. It has great templates picture bank. It's ease to use and the results look wonderful. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
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Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
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Combine your words with high-quality artwork from talented illustrators around the world.
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knitty.com - 25 views
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When used at the hem, they provide extra fabric that, when blocked, creates the shirt-tail like bottom. When used at the bust as shown, they create something of a pocket for the fullness of the bust to fit into without disturbing the side seams.
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15 Surprising Discoveries About Learning - InformED : - 59 views
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participants who held jobs with higher levels of complexity with data and people, such as management and teaching, had better scores on memory and thinking tests
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Students who walked in another experiment doubled their number of novel responses compared with when they were sitting.
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Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar,
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Findings suggest that simply telling learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a test.
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Research Fellowships-Folger Shakespeare Library - 20 views
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Closing the Math Gap for Boys - NYTimes.com - 20 views
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Curriculum21 - Annotexting - 62 views
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We would also like to share this DISCUSSION RUBRIC (2007) that you can use as students submit annotations and begin to draw conclusions about what their evidence is pointing to.
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These annotations, rather than being on paper, can be collected with different web tools so that students can collaborate
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Students submit their annotations via their smart phones or other digital devices, and then analyze each other’s notations collectively. They could be looking for main ideas, thematic and literary elements, or big ideas from the work. They could be looking for evidence of connections to other texts, their own experiences, or world issues. They could simply be searching for meaning to support them when reading complex texts.
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In order to get students to own this process, we have to relinquish some control. Let them think, let them make mistakes and respond. Let them draw conclusions even they are not the conclusions we would have drawn. We can be there to coach them through misconceptions.
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shared by Steve Kelly on 28 Dec 13
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A Game With Heart, Gone Home Is A Bold Step In Storytelling : All Tech Considered : NPR - 53 views
www.npr.org/...is-a-bold-step-in-storytelling
game storytelling npr tech considered grrrl punk videogames gaming
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Let me just get this out of the way: Gone Home is one of the most deeply intimate and emotionally honest gaming experiences I've had in my more than 25 years of playing video games.
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Though more of a story exploration game or a piece of interactive short fiction, Gone Home (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) weaves its touching story with such deft and narrative grace that it is hard not to be sucked in immediately.
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Billed as a "story exploration game," Gone Home has users exploring an empty house and piecing together why no one is home.
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Using Music to Close the Academic Gap - Lori Miller Kase - The Atlantic - 73 views
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Research demonstrates that music doesn't help as such. The same effect can be got from any discipline where practice and persistence are important. The musical component can be duplicated with explicit phonemic instruction in a short time. You would be better off drawing because it is the only non-academic that has a direct academic relationship - with geometry. The evidence for that has to do with the above, plus junction recognition and visualization. The only thing I didn't touch on is openness to new experience which has a strong correlation to measured intelligence. That's a component of the arts in general.
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I'm aware of the studies and also of the garbage science like the "Mozart Effect." While they don't support the correlation, they are also not definitive. This appears to be a valid study and it is working. Whether the reasons are because they learn practice and persistence or something else is irrelevant, a correlation still exists. Maybe it's just that music is fun and the way we learn music--practice, reflect, refine, repeat--is a good model for learning in general. It's certainly better than standardized tests. Personally, I don't feel a need to justify music's existence by its value to other subjects. It represents some of humanity's greatest achievements. That should be enough.
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Building Attention Span - The New York Times - 75 views
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ou toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
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You live in a state of perpetual anticipation because the next social encounter is just a second way.
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xpert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
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Fluid intelligence
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Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
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Crystallized intelligence
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Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.
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WE THE ECONOMY 20 Short Films You Can't Afford To Miss - 75 views
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Economics is a tough subject to learn about, and this website aims to make it easier to understand. We The Economy is a great tool for teaching economics in a flipped classroom. Have students watch one video for homework, and discuss it together in class. Start with "What is the Economy" and make your way to "Supply & Dance, Man!" and "GDP Smackdown."
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Educators Evaluate 'Flipped Classrooms' | Andrew K. Miller - 74 views
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replacing traditional classroom lectures with video tutorials
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criticism from some who believe that flipping is simply a high-tech version of an antiquated instructional method: the lecture
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be intentional about when to flip
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find alternatives for students who lack Internet access
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engage students in the videos