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Judy Robison

Free Practice Tests - Varsity Tutors - 44 views

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    Assessment | News Varsity Tutors Debuts Free Test Question Site By Dian Schaffhauser 11/07/13 Varsity Tutors, a providor of private tutoring to students online, has launched a new, free service with the intention of becoming the "Khan Academy" of practice tests. The company has introduced a Web-based assessment system intended to replace other forms of educational content such as SAT or ACT preparation books or online subscriptions to assessment materials. Varsity Learning Tools, as it's called, makes hundreds of free practice tests available in 95 subjects. Currently in open beta testing, the site lists assessment tests by subject and allows the user to choose to answer a single test, flashcards, or a question of the day. Each question can be shared through social network services. When the student answers it, a second page displays with an assessment and explanation and data on how much time was spent on the question, and how many others answered it correctly." (Read more at http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/11/07/varsity-tutors-launches-free-test-question-site.aspx?=THEEL#8hQzr0oig6X2IZmS.99)
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.
Gregory Louie

Students tap into technology - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - 1 views

  • use their laptops to read "Don Quixote" and Dante's "Divine Comedy" on the Internet
  • Technology is the wave of the future
  • a computer program
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  • "Most jobs require computers," noted Brittnee Stephen, 16, as she assembled a slideshow on her HP Mini laptop. "It's good that we're learning it now."
    • Ed Webb
       
      The technology is still very visible, if students are talking in terms of 'computers' rather than the skills involved. We don't talk about 'paper' but writing, critical reading etc. Yet here the platform itself is emphasized. Early days, I guess.
  • has just begun incorporating technology
    • Ed Webb
       
      Uh, no. They have been using 'technology' forever, in the form of, say, books.
  • students seem far more interested in learning via interactive technology than they had been with a chalkboard and an overhead projector
    • Ed Webb
       
      Well, the problem here is that some of that can be ascribed to novelty. Once every class uses 'interactive technology' (yuk) then how much difference will there be? The tools are great. All tools can be useful. But focus on the pedagogy, people!
    • Scott Merrick
       
      I'm for focusing on understanding. I love the word "pedagogy" because most lay people don't really know what it entails--theory (which can be anything institutional or community deems effective or correct), practice (which, as we know, can be summed up with the phrase "mileage will vary"), and some third thing which if I could come up with it I'd have the magic 3 elements in an effective argument. I think effective tools used effectively by effective teachers (there! 3 uses of one adjective!) will remain effective as long as they are used to promote understanding. No argument here, Ed, just sayin'...
    • Ed Webb
       
      Perhaps the magic third thing would be 'attitude' or 'state of mind'? Alternatively, perhaps another of those non-transparent terms, 'praxis'. The point I was trying to make, of course, was that it ain't what you use, it's the way that you use it.
  • "I think the kids that have turned school off because it's boring to them will come here and see something familiar,"
    • Ed Webb
       
      Boring and familiar seem to me to be closely related, not opposites. I suspect that often when students say their learning environment is 'boring' they mean 'challenging'.
  • Educational technology does not come cheaply
    • Ed Webb
       
      The cost of books is astronomical!
  • "Learning is changing,"
    • Ed Webb
       
      Was it EVER the case that we could "just deliver a lecture and expect all the kids to get it"?
    • Gregory Louie
       
      Computer technology in my classroom has revolutionized my teaching of biology. Instead of static images on a printed page, or talk and chalk, my students can manipulate 3-D images of DNA, RNA and proteins. These have even been embedded in a research-based learning progression that leads the students to a robust understanding of the foundational elements of molecular literacy. 1. Atoms and molecules are constantly in motion. (A visualization is not possible on a 2-3 printed page.) 2. All atoms and molecules have a 3-D structure that determines how they interact with other particles. 3. Charges and other intermolecular forces play a role in atomic and molecular interactions. My students can see these for themselves, change the number of particles in a box, or the distribution of charge on a large particle or the temperature of the box and other thought experiments which they can follow in real-time. There is no way, I could do that without the computer!
Susanna Livingston

yolink - About yolink: the Web's finest find tool - 102 views

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    Great tool for teaching students how to become efficient online researchers! Download the installation guide, sign up for webinars, check out minilessons... Don't pass this one up!
Aly Kenee

Days Like This… | alytapp - 132 views

  • Instead of scribbling marks in the margins of printed papers, I opened each student’s paper in Google Docs, highlighted text and inserted comments to clarify my thoughts, and then turned on the screen recorder (Jing) to record my voice as I scrolled through the paper and pointed to items with my mouse. Right after recording, I uploaded the finished recording to Jing’s companion hosting site, and then I simply copied and pasted the link to the recording directly into the Google Doc.
    • brianhammel
       
      Adding value in context rather than providing repetitive written comments in the summation.
  • After about four minutes, they began the next task, copying and pasting my reflection questions into the bottom of their docs, and then responding to those prompts as they reflected on their work and my feedback.
  • As I watched them, I couldn’t help but remember the way that I used to provide feedback. Students would receive their graded papers, flip past the comments I had scribbled in the margin, glance at the final grade, and then forget all about it.
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  • I always knew there was more I wanted to convey to them about their writing, about how they had or had not created meaning for the reader.
  • It took me about 10 minutes per paper, times 68 papers, so the last week and a half have been intense. If you’re doing the math, that’s over 11 hours of paper grading. If I am going to put in that kind of time for grading, I must see my students growing as writers. Period.
    • brianhammel
       
      Technology tool is NOT a time saver. The main goal for using the tool is not increased productivity by the teacher, but instead increased understanding by the student.
    • Aly Kenee
       
      Yes! You state that so eloquently. We often think of tech as nothing more than a tool for expediency.
  •  I liked knowing that my essay got individual attention, individual feedback, and I feel like you cared about what I wrote.
  • A small number of students (actually, fewer than 5) said that they didn’t feel that the verbal comments were all that helpful.
  • hurtful to hear me say out loud what was wrong with their papers
  • Writing is personal, and feedback can feel like an attack.
    • brianhammel
       
      On the flipside, writing is personal, and receiving impersonal and confusing written feedback can also be hurtful. The student spends so much time writing the assignment, but only receives a small amount of scribbled comments in the margin.
  • tried out a new way of assessing student work — screencasting
John Phillips

National STEM Video Game Challenge - 10 views

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    2011 Video game deisgn challenge for students.  Site also includes free game developing tools that are easy to use!
psmiley

Learnist | Share what you know - 2 views

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    Everybody knows enough about some topic - be it English, science, yoga or bourbon - to teach other people about it. And every topic is covered by content scattered around the Web. The idea behind a new site called Learnist is to give everybody a spot to teach through curation. The site, which is also available as an app for iPhone and iPad, features user-created lessons that bring together Web pages, videos, Google Books e-books and other items on a specific topic. At the moment, only a relatively small group of people approved by the site - including some teachers - can create these "learnings," but anyone can check them out. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/09/18/50-best-websites-2012/#ixzz2KnPnZqks
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    Everybody knows enough about some topic to teach other people about it. And every topic is covered by content scattered around the Web. The idea behind a new site called Learnist is to give everybody a spot to teach through curation. The site, which is also available as an app for iPhone and iPad, features user-created lessons that bring together Web pages, videos, Google Books e-books and other items on a specific topic. At the moment, only a relatively small group of people approved by the site - including some teachers - can create these "learnings," but anyone can check them out.
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    Curation
trisha_poole

'absolutely intercultural!' - 21 views

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    Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners.
tom campbell

Banned Unless Required - 59 views

I think the most salient point is to create learning experiences that captivate students and are compelling so that they use the devices as a way to learn what they want to learn. It's about the i...

1:1

Deborah Baillesderr

Vocabulary.com - Learn Words - English Dictionary - 33 views

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    This site is a great way for anyone to expand their vocab. It allows teachers and students to create lists and has thousands of already made lists from literature, speeches, history, current news, plus more.
Nigel Coutts

Between the sprint and the marathon - 12 views

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    The start of a new school year brings with it great excitement and just a little sense of panic and chaos. We have new students, new classes, new teachers and new challenges. We spend time getting to know each other and building trust. But what happens next sets the tone for the year and determines our ultimate success.
Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Ed Webb

edtechteacher - 0 views

  • while informal writing is an integral part of youth culture, teenagers also overwhelmingly understand the importance of good writing: 86 percent of teens consider formal writing skills essential to future success. While today's "screenagers" may offer but cursory glances at web pages that does not mean they discount the importance of a sustained engagement with a Shakespearean drama.
  • in the best-case scenarios, teachers will use these changes to demonstrate to students the power of the written word and the importance of communicating clearly, and teachers will then give students new tools and strategies to improve their command of prose and persuasion.
  • Web pages and accompanying multimedia are now integral primary sources for chroniclers and historians of the 21st century.
Maggie Tsai

Sweeny's Canadawiki Weblog: Make Your Own Wiki Textbook With Web 2.0 - 6 views

  • Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]
Andy Whiteway

Need insight on what school IT depts want to know - 65 views

Great Toby, After we roll out the next major release, Phase II of Diigo Education Network will be next - ie. a dedicated education network only for educators and students! So, stay tun...

school firewall whitelist

eva harvell

Cell phones get top marks in class -- dailypress.com - 1 views

  • four out of five teenagers carry cell phones
  • We spent a lot of time talking about their digital footprint and that what they do can be tracked
  • One of the most common uses is to turn the phone into a response tool similar to clickers used with other software programs. Instead of punching a button to answer a question, students text the answer and send it to a central polling Web site the teacher projects onto a screen. Some of the sites allow students to compare answers, similar to a poll or survey.
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  • Teachers said participation is up and discipline problems are down in classes using cell phones.
Tamara Connors

Educational Leadership:Reading to Learn:Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social - 85 views

  • Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social William M. Ferriter
  • One great tool for creating social reading experiences is Diigo (www.diigo.com), a free online application that allows users to add highlights and comments onscreen to any Web-based text. These comments can be seen by anyone using Diigo and are identified with the commenter's user name. Diigo also enables users to bookmark and "tag" with keywords any online articles that they find fascinating. Classes studying topics together can share their reading. Articles tagged by one user become instantly available to another, providing a source for continued study and ongoing conversations. The best news is that creating secure student accounts in Diigo is easy. Teachers can form a classroom group that enables students to see only the articles bookmarked and the annotations shared by their teachers and peers—instead of the comments of the entire Diigo community.
  • ttp://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/Social-Bookmarking-and-Annotating
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    Explains how Diigo is used in the classroom to make solitary text-based reading social.
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