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When you come across an example of student writing that is particularly well-written, you can share it with other students. However, avoid using negative examples, as most students will hesitate to give permission if they know you plan to use student writing to exemplify poor writing–and not telling them of your intent would be unfair. Furthermore, students will learn as much from positive as from negative analysis. No piece of writing, your own included, is so perfect that constructive criticism cannot be aimed at it. It’s best to ask all students to sign a release form at the beginning of the semester granting permission to use their work for teaching purposes. Note that if you wish to quote their work in an article on teaching, you’ll need specific permission.

It’s not enough simply to show models. Students need to work with models and discuss them to be able to transfer their abstract understanding of the model’s features into their own writing. While you can lecture on the qualities you endorse or admire, it is far more effective to engage students actively in evaluation and analysis through class discussion and peer response groups.

If you do decide to use a student’s paper as a model, you should have him or her sign a Student Contract.

Not all information is created equal. The bottom layers (the most ubiquitous, whose sources are the most ephemeral, and with the least amount of validation) lead to layers with greater dependability, all the way to the highest layers, made up mostly of academic resources maintained and validated by academic publishers that use multiple peer reviews, trained editors, and scholarly reviewers. When the system is effective, the layers serve to reinforce one another through clear pathways that allow queries to move from one layer to another with little resistance.

Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia. That makes perfect sense. Through user-generated efforts, Wikipedia is comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind. It is not the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting. In this unique role, it therefore serves as an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web.

Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia.

Online economics students do not absorb much material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam.

she has noticed that her online students perform much worse than their classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored, closed-book exam at the end of the semester.

Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their overall grade-point averages.

limits students’ sense of isolation and fosters communal feeling among classmates

active learning limits students’ sense of isolation and fosters communal feeling among classmates.

active learning limits students’ sense of isolation and fosters communal feeling among classmates

Most faculty know that active learning is important even though many still lecture pretty much exclusively.

"How can we possibly teach reading when our kids just won't read?"

classrooms are one of the only text-driven environments that our students experience. Beyond school, U.S. students spend most of their time with media consuming digital information from televisions, radios, and computers. Much of this electronic information is visual or is processed passively, in small bites.

So how can you drag the wayward brains in your classroom back to deeper reading? Begin by recognizing that today's students are driven by opportunities to interact with one another. Conversations—whether they are started on Facebook, through text messages, or in the hallways—play a central role in adolescents' lives. Understanding that participation is a priority, the best teachers create social reading experiences and blur lines between fun and work.

While we all agree that the five-year-old unnarrated PowerPoint is a dangerous and ineffective piece of content in an online course, we would also all agree that we can’t redo each narrated piece of content each semester. How do we strike a balance between creating content that is fresh (more on that in a moment) and being able to reuse content that is valuable?

For teachers it makes them participate in the content, revisit the content they created in the past, and make it delivered in a “present” time for the students. For students it tells them that the teacher “was just here,” and that this stuff is happening now. It makes the content seem more relevant, and helps build a sense of community in the course.

By creating content that has elements of real time associated with it, instructors can generate a sense of presence and freshness that are often missing in online courses.

student satisfaction with the immediate feedback

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--

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.

The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing

university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.

Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.

« Thoughts on Collaboration and Developing Higher Level Questioning Skills Twittering with a Purpose: A Starter (or Restarter) Guide » Book In An Hour: A Classroom Strategy April 30, 2009 by Ellsbeth This past winter I had the opportunity to attend a workshop with Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer, Dr. Lendol Calder.   This is the first place where I came across the strategy called Book In An Hour.  Since then I’ve tried to find additional internet resources on this strategy, but they appear to be few and far between.  I know other people would find it useful, so I decided to write up the strategy and post it here on the blog.  If you know of additional resources or ways to adapt this strategy, I would enjoy hearing from you. What: The Book In An Hour strategy is a jigsaw activity for chapter books.  While the strategy can take more than an hour depending on the reading and presentation method you choose. Why: While many teachers view this activity as a time saver, I view it as a way to expose students to more literary and historical materials than I might have been able to do otherwise.  There are many books that I would love my students to read, but I know that being able to do so is not always my reality.  This st

y gives me an avenue to expose them to additional literature and other important historical works without taking much time away from the other aspects of my courses.  It also provides opportunities for differentiation.  This strategy can be adapted to introduce a book that students will be reading in-depth.  Instead of j

ng to divide students up into groups or jigsaw with individual students.  If you are using groups, I recommend making them heterogeneous or creating them in a way that subtly facilitates differentiation.  I also encourage you to give each student in the grou

Russell and Austin (2010) have claimed that in music education, a system of benign neglect in assessment practices has been allowed to endure, even though there has (p. 4) been a long-term, consistent call for reform, for more meaningful assessments, and for policymakers to adapt to laws as they are enacted and court rulings as they are handed down.

ead to the growing body of scholarship in educational law, the evolving and more active role courts are taking in impacting educational practices,

chapter is to inform music teachers about contemporary court cases that have resulted in rulings on assessment issues in educational settings, and how these rulings impact assessment in the music classroom.

if a teacher can do a few basic computer skills (format in MS Word, copy and paste, attach a document to an email or upload a photo, and perhaps add a hyperlink) they should be able to transfer that knowledge across various internet programs.

Teachers sometimes express surprise when a student can’t write a response to a question that is virtually the same as one they answered the day before simply because it is worded differently. Yet teachers can’t apply what they know about Facebook (or shutterfly, gmail, youtube, etc.) to use edmodo or a wiki? I’m not saying they should be able to master a new program immediately – like anything new it takes time, but they should have the flexibility of thinking to apply what they already know. If teachers can’t transfer their knowledge, how are they going to teach students to do so?

Learners are no longer dependent on learning directly from an expert, the information is literally at their fingertips, they just need to know how to access it. And most important, learners of all ages need to be the drivers of their learning. Just like our students, teachers need to seek answers through active exploration. Again, if we are not independent learners, how can we expect our students to be?