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Mariusz Leś

The Nerdy Teacher: What Makes Project Based Learning Effective? #Edchat #EngChat - 132 views

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    1. OWNERSHIP is key. For this project, the students were not listening to me on why Twain was or was not a racist, they were showing me and the rest of class what they thought. They were invested in winning their argument. They knew that their work was going to determine if he was guilty or not. Although I gave the assignment, the students were in charge the rest of the way. It was their project and they wanted to do it win. When students feel they own what they are doing, they will work harder. When the audience is larger, they want to impress everyone. These are not crazy ideas, they are the results of owning the work they are doing. OWNERSHIP is a major factor in the value of PBL. 2. CREATIVITY is the another major part of the PBL and is closely linked with OWNERSHIP. Students were allowed to be creative in their work as a lawyer or witness. Witnesses needed to stay within character, but could add their own elements on the witness stand. Allowing the students to create gives them a bigger sense of OWNERSHIP. 3. Another part of the PBL is the COLLABORATION. Students were working with each other trying to decide the best plan of attack. Witnesses would meet with their lawyers and discuss how the questions they were going to ask and how they should dress. The Jury worked on group projects researching the previous public opinions on Twain and his writing. Students were sharing ideas freely with one another. I had three sections of American Lit at the time, so I had three trails running. Lawyers would help others in the other classes and trash talk the opposing lawyers as well. It was all in good fun, but the collaboration had students working hard with one another to accomplish this goal. 4. Depending on how you set up your project, CRITICAL THINKING, is also an important part of PBL. With my Twain Trail, students needed to think about both sides of the argument. Students needed to prepare their witnesses for potential cross-examination questions. They needed to
Peter Beens

Education Week Teacher: Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents - 1 views

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    Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent
Doreen Stopczynski

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

  • 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
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    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.
tapiatanova

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of High... - 98 views

  • Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
    • trisha_poole
       
      Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
  • External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
    • tapiatanova
       
      yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
  • Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
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  • back-channel conversations
  • While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
    • trisha_poole
       
      An effective use of Twitter that can be translated to classrooms.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      All classrooms?
    • John Dorn
       
      classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
  • Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
  • A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
  • Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
  • Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
  • Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
  • The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
  • Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
D. S. Koelling

Views: What's High School For? - Inside Higher Ed - 35 views

  • In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
  • In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
  • The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.
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  • As a result, classes that used to be termed “college-prep” are now seen as college proper.
  • In practice, however, courses covered in a high school setting on a high school calendar are often vastly different in practice.
  • This is not a criticism of high school teachers. Many are excellent educators and care deeply about students. But they often teach more classes than college faculty do, have myriad extracurricular responsibilities, and lack the requisite training that enables college faculty to introduce best practices in the field. In contrast, college faculty members expect a higher level of work from students, including having them study independently, write in the discipline and be exposed to the latest research. They are less likely to offer extra credit, or evaluate students based on an inflated high school norm.
  • High school students, especially sophomores and juniors, are not like college students. A collection of 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds are normally at a different stage of intellectual and moral development than are college students. Treating a high school student like a college student does not always do them a favor.
  • This student, as a sophomore in high school, earned a “C” in a “college” English course, which exempts her from our basic English 111 College Writing class. Even though her ACT score indicates her writing skills are deficient, we are limited in what we can do. Like many students who have already passed a “college” class, she thinks she already has the necessary writing skills to be successful in college. We know she very likely does not. Our willingness to increase student access by accepting transfer credit means that, without taking this student’s credits away, we cannot help her with her writing. Instead, by virtue of an average performance as a high school sophomore, this student will be placed into college classes for which she is unprepared.
  • Most colleges willingly accept credits from like institutions because we trust that our courses are equivalent and that our faculty are credentialed. I doubt that same trust applies to high schools. The best service a high school can provide is to prepare students for college, not substitute for it.
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    High school dual enrollment programs may not be helping students succeed in college.
Clint Heitz

Edu Leadership:Tech-Rich Learning:The Basics of Blended Instruction - 38 views

  • Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.
  • Tip 1: Think big, but start small.
  • Tip 2: Patience is a virtue when trying something new.
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  • Tip 3: Technology shouldn't be just a frill.
  • Tip 4: Weaving media together makes them stronger.
  • Tip 5: Students need to know where they can get online.
  • Student-centered classrooms are the goal of my teacher-designed blended learning model. Giving students control over the learning process requires that they know how to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems in groups, pairs, and individually. This work can be messy, loud, and disorganized, but in the end, the learning is much more meaningful.
  • Then I found Collaborize Classroom, a free, dynamic discussion platform. I used it to replace many of my pen-and-paper homework assignments with vibrant online debates, discussions, writing assignments, and collaborative group work.
  • Remember that mistakes lead to learning. The best resources I've designed and the most effective strategies I've developed were all born from and refined through mistakes.
  • I anticipated that students might hit some bumps as they navigated their first TED-Ed lesson, so I set up a TodaysMeet back channel so students could ask questions, make comments, and access a support network while going through the online lesson. A back-channel tool makes it possible for people to have a real-time conversation online while a live presentation or real-time discussion is taking place.
  • I asked students to reference specific details to support their assertions, as did one student who commented on the town's poverty by noting that the local doctor often took potatoes as payment for his work. She also showed how the characters nevertheless reflected the country's "cautious optimism" about its future: That same doctor was still able to support himself, she pointed out, and he enjoyed his work. Students posted their responses, complimenting strong points made, asking questions, and offering alternative perspectives.
  • I asked students to analyze examples of strong discussion posts and revise weaker posts. I also realized that I needed to embed directions into our discussion topics to remind students to respond to the questions and engage with their peers. I started requiring them to thoughtfully reply to at least two classmates' posts, in addition to posting their own response to the topic.
  • It's crucial for students to see that the work they do in the online space drives the work they do in the classroom so they recognize the value of the online conversations.
  • For example, during the To Kill a Mockingbird unit, we researched and discussed the death penalty in preparation for writing an argument essay. The students debated online such issues as cost, morality, and racial inequality and then delved into these topics more deeply face-to-face in class.
  • In the classroom, the teacher might give small groups various topics to research. Then he or she could ask students to go online to research and discuss their topic on a shared Google Doc and create a presentation using Glogster, Prezi, or Google Presentation Maker.
  • When we read Romeo and Juliet, I use this strategy to encourage students to research such topics as the monarchy, entertainment, and gender roles in Elizabethan England so they have a better understanding of the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote. Back in the classroom, each group then presents its findings through an oral presentation.
  • Compared with traditional in-class group work, which typically yields a disappointing finished product, online work provides the time necessary for students to complete quality work together.
  • Some teachers think that incorporating online work means they have to be available 24 hours a day. This is not the case. When students are connected online, they have a network of peers they can reach out to for support, and they begin to see one another as valuable resources in their class community.
  • I've embedded a Google map in my website that has pins dropped in all the locations on our campus and in our community where there are computers with public access to the Internet.
  • I even wrote the local computer recycling center to request a computer for my class.
maureen greenbaum

The Future of Learning: An Interview with Alfred Bork - 82 views

  • nteraction should be frequent
  • as in human conversation
  • active environment maintains student interest for a long period of time, even with difficult learning material.
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  • the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented to the student.
  • In our traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not. It is this second group of students that we want to help.
  • problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive way of learning
  • , on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the student knows and just what learning problems are occurring
  • It begins immediately with a question, with no preceding text.
  • experience the joy of discovery.
  • tutorial approach to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.
  • critical factor is that we can react to individual student problems
  • key concept for structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom concept of mastery learning.
  • goal is for everyone to learn everything to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful
  • A student who has not learned in one way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.
  • In such an environment, learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.
  • highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating. Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment, since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are available.
  • mastery-based computer segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together, either locally or remotely via electronic communication.
  • existing authoring systems. Since they were, and still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate for creating highly interactive software.
  • Bertrand Ibrahim at the University of Geneva,
  • omputer stores much of the information as the students progress through the material.
  • Teaching faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will be important in the design of learning modules.
  • High costs of development can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.
  • $30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning material
  • highly effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses, and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students
  • The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely, almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this way.
  • Universities are too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and so are not prepared for these future directions.
Marc Hamlin

Reintroducing students to Research - 144 views

  • First, we think research, broadly defined, is a valuable part of an undergraduate education. Even at a rudimentary level, engaging in research implicates students in the creation of knowledge. They need to understand that knowledge isn’t an inert substance they passively receive, but is continually created, debated, and reformulated—and they have a role to play in that process.
  • we recognize that research is situated in disciplinary frameworks and needs to be addressed in terms of distinct research traditions.
  • research is a complex and recursive process involving not just finding information but framing and refining a question, perhaps gathering primary data through field or lab work, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and composing some kind of response, all activities that are not linear but intertwined.
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  • learning to conduct inquiry is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout a research project and throughout a student’s education.
  • the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.
  • Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think they’ll get in trouble.
  • In reality, students doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question. This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels. They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re looking for.
  • she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society in that time period.
  • For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful” that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society. Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.
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    What are our assumptions about how students get research done in the humanities? How do those assumptions affect our instruction, and what really is our students' approach to research?
anonymous

Rethinking the Way College Students Are Taught - 52 views

  • But here's the irony. "Mary is more likely to convince John than professor Mazur in front of the class," Mazur says. "She's only recently learned it and still has some feeling for the conceptual difficulties that she has whereas professor Mazur learned [the idea] such a long time ago that he can no longer understand why somebody has difficulty grasping it." That's the irony of becoming an expert in your field, Mazur says. "It becomes not easier to teach, it becomes harder to teach because you're unaware of the conceptual difficulties of a beginning learner."
  • To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.
  • Mazur begins class by giving a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur's laptop. Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn't figure out what else to do. Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.
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    • anonymous
       
      Why do we continue to do things the same way we always have and expect different results from what we have always gotten?
    • anonymous
       
      How true this statement is!  If students want to learn, they are going to learn in spite of who the teacher is or what the teacher does - no teacher is really needed!
  • So Mazur gave what he thought was a thorough and thoughtful explanation of the concept. He went slowly, putting all kinds of helpful diagrams up on the board. "I thought I'd nailed it," he says. "I thought it was the best explanation one could possibly give of this question." Mazur triumphantly turned around. "Any questions?" he asked. The students just stared at him. "Nobody raised their hand and said, well but what if this and what if that, simply because they were so confused they couldn't," he says. "I didn't know what to do. But I knew one thing. I knew that 50 percent of the students had given the right answer."
    • anonymous
       
      How many times have we done this when we are providing direct instructions to students and then felt frustration when we assess what they know?  ARGH!
    • anonymous
       
      Watch this video!
    • anonymous
       
      The same probably goes for info that is simply read and not annotated or discussed.  It is probably also true for info gained from a video or movie...
    • anonymous
       
      This would be an effective use of Socrative or WallWisher!
Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Martin Leicht

Treehouse teaching and laundry art: Educators find creative ways to reach kids - 5 views

  • was also concerned about her students’ lack of engagement — so few were completing the assignments she emailed to parents
  • Playing with her family’s laundry marked the first time Maliah seemed happy — actually happy — since the start of the pandemic.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - happy - happy is good. Happy kids want to learn or are more likely to learn.
  • Nobody should ever be penalized or put at a disadvantage for the supplies they don’t have,” Dillingham thought to herself. “But everyone’s got laundry!”
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  • Clark started an online fundraiser to pay for bikes. He raised more than $10,000, and neighbors donated dozens of bikes and helmets for the rides.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - a little digital citizenship too mixed in with online fund raising.
  • She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.
  • He decided he would take his students on socially distanced bike rides across the city. “It was a leap of faith. I got extremely nervous. I was trying to find a way to connect with kids,” Clark said.
  • her young students are musical detectives, in search of learning. She teaches most grade levels and the school chorus.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - musical detectives searching for music.
  • t he’s found other ways to keep his students engaged and cycling the city. He invited students to a weekly entrepreneurship class for which they rode their bikes uptown from Dunbar to the gym where Clark works, Sweat DC. The students met with the owner of the gym and the owners of a nearby bar, Hook Hall, and the bagel shop Call Your Mother Deli to learn what it takes to run a business.
  • She wanted them to create their own composition, their own snowy-day song.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - used flipgrid for this
  • When Clark wanted to teach them about resilience, he took them through the hilly streets of Georgetown.
  • In lessons for older students, some days there were makeshift drums involved or recorders that students had taken home.
  • she was able to use the treehouse as a key part of her lessons.
  • She lugged a bookshelf, desk and heater into the 5-by-7-foot space, and ran an Ethernet cable from the house so she’d have Internet.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - properly set up
  • before climbing into what passes for her classroom in 2020: her daughters’ decade-old treehouse.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - different locals - maybe something with changing backgrounds.
  • So as one class studied architecture this fall, Daney, 54, encouraged them to walk in their neighborhood to take photos of houses of different styles: ranch, colonial, Victorian.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - use what you have around you.
  • nd he stuck with his usual method of helping students learn about the design process, asking them to prepare a meal. They started with ideas and research, made a plan, carried it out and evaluated it. The result: soups and pastas and pastries.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - edTech class on engineering and design
  • Kids need connection, he said. “I think they’re starving for conversation,” including with adults.
  • In fifth grade, students are expected to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide with whole numbers, decimals and fractions. Through a computer application the students have, they can program the robot to move a certain distance, stop, maybe even turn.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - use a robot or technology to achieve the same result.
  • With learning all-virtual, he packs a big Ziploc bag — for each student, each quarter — with things like fishing line, foam board, pipecleaners, magnets, Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Whatever they will need for their projects.
  • And a lot of the math is a little sneaky. They think they are trying to get the robot to move, when they are actually measuring the angles to get it to move.”  
  • Others complete their math problems directly on the computer, which can lead to some troubles as they try to show their work.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - will share screen be viable.
  • When Kristin Gavaza interviewed for the music teacher position at Dorothy I. Height Elementary in the summer, she told the principal she had some ideas for how to create a festive concert while students were scattered and learning from home.
    • Martin Leicht
       
      NOTE - picture references a complete teacher set up of a large screen and standing desk. Sure, she's video editing yet the concept carries to teaching class too.
  •  
    Numerous creative examples to how educators promoted learning on line and worked to build engagement.
maureen greenbaum

BetaKit » Is Adaptive Learning the Future of Education? - 2 views

  • adaptive learning will adjust every question based on a student’s previous answer.
  • Knewton is working on having educational content tagged so it can be placed into a “Knowledge Graph.” This system determines what concepts need to be learned before a student can move on to others, and how they all fit together.
  • The company recently parterned with Pearson to tag every textbook under their imprint work with the Knewton Knowledge Graph.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ata mining and take various inputs, like test question results, activity on the system, what links students clicked, etc. to make a prediction of the next best piece of content for a student to learn.
  • The technology seems to be working. After a pilot project at Arizona State University with 5,000 remedial math students, pass rates improved from 66 percent to 75 percent, with half the class finishing four weeks early
  • “The professors are much better prepared for a single class so that they can give much more individualized instruction,” Lui said. “The practical effectiveness of this means that teachers are now able to use their time more efficiently to hone in on the things that are most troublesome or useful for different groups of students. You’re not teaching to the mean or bottom quartile.”
  • Analyzing and collecting big data is really what Junyo is about, enabling everyone in the education sector to make the learning experience more personal.
  • The students also have their own dashboard to see recommended content.
  • Teachers don’t have the time to do detailed reporting of a student’s progress and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to provide one on one tutoring for every single student at different stages of learning.
  • students are learning more outside the classroom than in the classroom, and educators are finally starting to acknowledge that.
  •  
    "The professors are much better prepared for a single class so that they can give much more individualized instruction," Lui said. "The practical effectiveness of this means that teachers are now able to use their time more efficiently to hone in on the things that are most troublesome or useful for different groups of students. You're not teaching to the mean or bottom quartile."
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views

  • 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."
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
  • It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
  • 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.
  • Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
  •  
    So many issues here to deal with. Good read.
Mr. Eason

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

  • 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
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • 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.
Don Doehla

Digital Citizenship - 80 views

  •  
    "Digital Citizenship is a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately. Digital Citizenship is more than just a teaching tool; it is a way to prepare students/technology users for a society full of technology. Too often we are seeing students as well as adults misusing and abusing technology but not sure what to do. The issue is more than what the users do not know but what is considered appropriate technology usage. "
  •  
    Digital Citizenship is a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately. Digital Citizenship is more than just a teaching tool; it is a way to prepare students/technology users for a society full of technology. Digital citizenship is the norms of appropriate, responsible technology use.  Too often we are seeing students as well as adults misusing and abusing technology but not sure what to do. The issue is more than what the users do not know but what is considered appropriate technology usage. 
D. S. Koelling

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

  • 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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
dabennett7

Homage or Theft? A Closer Look at the 'Blurred Lines' Verdict - Law Blog - WSJ - 18 views

  • A federal jury in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered singers Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to pay about $7.4 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, after finding the duo’s 2013 hit song “Blurred Lines” copied parts of Mr. Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.”
    • dabennett7
       
      Attribution and intellectual property are a real concern for everyone. Remixing ideas is not a new practice, but in the 21st century it is easier than ever. How do we help prepare our students for careers in the 21st century?
  • only to compare “Blurred Lines” to the sheet music composition of “Got to Give it Up.” So the jury only heard a stripped down version of Mr. Gaye’s song, with his lyrics over a bass line and keyboards.
    • dabennett7
       
      Attribution and intellectual property are a real concern for everyone. Remixing ideas is not a new practice, but in the 21st century it is easier than ever. How do we help prepare our students for careers in the 21st century?
  • substantial copying
    • dabennett7
       
      From the arts to science, remixing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you is not new. In fact, it is a necessary practice that feeds the progress of our world.  Now musicians are haunted by this ghost of copyright. How can we develop and model practices for our students that celebrate the history of attribution and the growth of ideas? Can we elevate the student dreaded practices of citation and attribution to an act of reverence and respect?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Use extreme caution when referencing your forebears in song (without first getting permission, of course)
    • dabennett7
       
      From the arts to science, remixing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you is not new. In fact, it is a necessary practice that feeds the progress of our world.  Now musicians are haunted by this ghost of copyright. How can we develop and model practices for our students that celebrate the history of attribution and the growth of ideas? Can we elevate the student dreaded practices of citation and attribution to an act of reverence and respect?
  • It will cause people who want to want to evoke the past to perhaps refrain from doing so
    • dabennett7
       
      From the arts to science, remixing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you is not new. In fact, it is a necessary practice that feeds the progress of our world.  Now musicians are haunted by this ghost of copyright. How can we develop and model practices for our students that celebrate the history of attribution and the growth of ideas? Can we elevate the student dreaded practices of citation and attribution to an act of reverence and respect?
  • a step backward
    • dabennett7
       
      From the arts to science, remixing and building upon the ideas of those who came before you is not new. In fact, it is a necessary practice that feeds the progress of our world.  Now musicians are haunted by this ghost of copyright. How can we develop and model practices for our students that celebrate the history of attribution and the growth of ideas? Can we elevate the student dreaded practices of citation and attribution to an act of reverence and respect?
anonymous

The Coach in the Operating Room - The New Yorker - 37 views

  • I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages.
    • anonymous
       
      this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
  • the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
    • anonymous
       
      Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
  • They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
    • anonymous
       
      PROFOUND!!!
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • always evolving
    • anonymous
       
      Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • outside ears, and eyes, are important
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
    • anonymous
       
      So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
  • California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
    • anonymous
       
      Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
  • they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
    • anonymous
       
      Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
  • The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
    • anonymous
       
      The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
  • teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
    • anonymous
       
      This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
  • must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
  • most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
    • anonymous
       
      Progression
  • The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
    • anonymous
       
      The coach also makes you aware of where you are excelling!
  • So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
  • “What worked?”
    • anonymous
       
      Great way to open any coaching conversation!
  • “How could you help her?”
  • “What else did you notice?”
    • anonymous
       
      These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
  • something to try.
    • anonymous
       
      Suggestions of something to try! Any colleague can offer this - so why don't we ask colleagues for ideas of something to try more often?
  • three colleagues on a lunch break
  • Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
    • anonymous
       
      I probably need this printed out and stuck to the monitor of my computer or tattooed on my hand!
  • “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.”
    • anonymous
       
      patient, engaged listening
  • coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is
  • trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.
    • anonymous
       
      Encouraging people to think - it is important to teach and encourage thinking rather than teaching them WHAT to think!
  • a whole list of observations like this.
  • one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years.
  • watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.
    • anonymous
       
      This is one of the greatest strategies to promote growth - ever!
  • routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others.
    • anonymous
       
      I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
  • I know that I’m learning again.
  • It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
    • anonymous
       
      But it still works and is effective at nudging even those who are fabulous to be even better!
  • modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things
  • coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
  •  
    Valuable points about coaching - makes me want my own coach!
Jamie Menshouse

What We Learned: A 1:1 iPad Reflection | Edutopia - 185 views

  • One of the best decisions our team made last summer was to pre-install Casper (5) profiles on all of our iPads. We pulled the student IDs from our ASPEN (6) student information system, logged each student into Casper and installed the four profiles needed for our plan. The profiles took Safari web browser off the iPad.
  • As we progressed through the year, we discovered that these tools took a lot of time to create something we were trying to move away from in the first place. The reason for moving away from textbooks is that they offer a myopic vision of a world that is ever-changing. Simply viewing a textbook on an iPad does not change or innovate learning, nor does it use the iPad to its full potential. If your plan is to digitize a standard textbook, save your money and renew your textbook licenses.
  • This year we are incorporating K-12 digital portfolios along with revised information and digital literacy standards. Every BPS student will have a Google Apps for Education account that they will use in conjunction with the Blogger (15) application to begin creating their Life of Learning portfolio
  • ...8 more annotations...
    • Jeppe Egendal
       
      Digital portfolio og blogger
    • Jeppe Egendal
       
      Begrundelser for anvendelsen af iPads i undervisningen bevæger sig fra en forestilling om at erstatte tekstbøger til en forestilling om at kunne lærerne kan samarbejde med eleverne i skyen ved hjælp af værktøjer, der automatisk synkroniserer med eleverns iPads
  • The students that make it into help desk are those who not only enjoy working with technology in an educational context, but have a desire to serve, support and possibly solve problems in the school on a daily basis.
  • . Aside from simply troubleshooting, our students help their former teachers at the middle and elementary levels as well as create how-to scripts and videos for students, faculty and the Burlington community. Our students have not only helped within the BPS community, but have helped our Tech Team organize two major conferences in the past year:
    • Jeppe Egendal
       
      Eleverne hjælper som ressorucepersoner i skolen
  • You can have the most precisely calculated plan in place before you launch, but if you don't have the right support in place, your launch may stumble. I regard our IT department as one of the best I have ever worked with. I say this in all sincerity because I do "work with" this team. These guys not only manage a robust infrastructure, but they take part in the educational conversation and give our staff the best tools to create dynamic, engaging classrooms.
    • Jeppe Egendal
       
      Teknisk support er en del af løsningen og de skal deltage i den løbende pædagogisk/didaksike debet
  • However, we must work to incorporate information and digital literacy standards into the K-12 curriculum as early as possible. Students in Kindergarten should understand what it means to be nice to someone and how that will translate to writing and living on the Web. As students grow up through the educational pathways, they must be exposed to new and emerging technologies as early as possible in a safe, responsible manner. By doing so, we are preparing them for a global economy that requires these skills.
    • Jamie Menshouse
       
      Our middle school is adding character education to the arts and humanities curriculum. Teaching students at a young age to be thoughtful and responsible with technology will make it a much better experience inside the classroom.
Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
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  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
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