Think of a time when you were completely immersed in a learning challenge. A time when you became aware of the need to master a new skill or concept. A situation that took you outside of your comfort zone, when there were times that you became frustrated, when you thought of quitting, downed tools and walked away, but came back time and time again. Maybe it was a problem you had to solve. Maybe it was a challenge you wanted to overcome.
Collaborative annotation tools, such as Diigo, Reframe It, MyStickies, and Google Sidewiki, expand the concept of social bookmarking by allowing users not only to share bookmarks but also to digitally annotate web pages. Rather than simply pointing to particular web pages, collaborative annotation lets users highlight specific content on a web page and add a note explaining their thoughts or pointing to additional resources. Users highlight text or images, add their own comments, and share those annotations with colleagues and friends of their choosing.
This is a neat way to start a writing class with the creating plot ideas....
One of the goals I ask teachers to set after my training is to find new ways to push students to analyze and evaluate as they learn to write.
As part of my teacher workshop on the writing process, we investigate multiple uses of student samples. One of my favorite techniques involves having student compare and contrast finished pieces of writing. During both pre-writing and and revision, this push for deeper student thinking both educates and inspires your students.
The handout has student writers analyze two fifth graders' published writing with a compare and contrast Venn diagram.
Revision is hard, and most teachers recognize it as an area of deficiency; the truth is, a lot of really great writing teachers I know still freely admit that revision is where they struggle the most.
revision shouldn't be the first of the seven elements to work on
When students like what they've written in rough draft form, they're ready to move to revision. My other six elements aim at helping students increase their pre-writing time so they both like and see more potential in their rough drafts
I believe in the power of collaboration and study teams,
Professional development research clearly cites the study team model as the most effective way to have learners not only understand new ideas but also implement them enough times so they become regular tools in a teacher's classroom.
Below, find three examples created by study teams during past workshops. I use them as models/exemplars when I set the study teams off to work.
My students learn to appreciate the act of writing, and they see it as a valuable life-skill.
In a perfect world, following my workshop,
follow-up tools.
I also use variations of these Post-its during my Critical Thinking Using the Writing Traits Workshop.
By far, the best success I've ever had while teaching revision was the one I experienced with the revision Post-its I created for my students
During my teacher workshop on the writing process, we practice with tools like the Revision Sprint (at right), which I designed to push students to use analysis and evaluation skills as they looked at their own drafts
I used to throw my kids into writing response groups way too fast. They weren't ready to provide critical thought for one another
The most important trick learned was this: be a writer too. During my first five years of teaching, I had assigned a lot of writing but never once had I written something I intended to show my students.
I have the following interactive plot element generator (which can be replicated with three coffee cans and index cards) to help my students feel in control of their options:
If you want to hear my take on graphic organizers in detail, you're going to have to hire me to come to present to you. If you can't do that, then I'll throw you a challenge that was thrown once at me, and completing the challenge helped me become a smarter designer of graphic organizers. The challenge came in two parts: 1) learn how to use tables and text boxes in Microsoft Word; 2) for practice, design a graphic organizer that would help students be successfully with the following trait-based skills:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, etc," which is an interesting structure that students can borrow from to write about other topics, be they fiction or non-fiction.
Asking students to create daily journals from the perspective of other animals or even inanimate objects is a great way to borrow this book's idea.
it challenges students to analyze the author's word choice & voice skills: specifically his use of verbs, subtle alliteration, and dialogue.
Mentor Text Resource Page here at my website, because this topic has become such a big piece of learning to me. It deserved its own webpage.
Here are seven skills I can easily list for the organization trait. Organization is: 1) using a strong lead or hook, 2) using a variety of transition words correctly, 3) paragraphing correctly, 4) pacing the writing, 5) sequencing events/ideas logically, 6) concluding the writing in a satisfying way, 7) titling the writing interestingly and so that the title stands for the whole idea. Over the years, I have developed or found and adapted mini-lessons that have students practice these skills during my "Organization Month."
Now, let's talk differentiation:
The problem with focusing students on a product--instead of the writing process--is that the majority of the instructional time is spent teaching students to adhere to a formula.
the goal of writing instruction absolutely should be the helping students practice the three Bloom's levels above apply: analyze, evaluate, and create.
Click here to access the PowerPoint I use during the goal-setting portion of my workshop.
Improving one's ability to teach writing to all students is a long-term professional development goal; sticking with it requires diligence, and it requires having a more specific goal than "I want to improve writing
"Trying to get better at all seven elements at once doesn't work;
strive to make my workshops more about "make and take,
Robert Marzano's research convinced me years ago of the importance of having learners set personal goals as they learn to take responsibility for their own learning.
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.
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!
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'...
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,"
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'.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
You probably saw the title of this post and thought 'okay there's no friggin' way he's going to assemble a list of the best 50,000 education apps. But thanks to a partnership between Edudemic and FindTheBest, we've done just that. We've been working hard behind the scenes to build a robust directory of, as of this writing, about 56,000 education apps.
But it's not just a list… it's a finely tuned directory capable of sorting out all the apps in ways not even available in the iTunes or Mac App stores. For example, you can now find out the average price of all education apps to see where your app falls. (Hint: the average price of an education app is $2.66)
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.
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.
5 fantastic ways to use Wallwisher in the classroom:
Writing activities – Wallwisher has a 160 character limit for each comment/post that you leave on the wall. Which is, in a way, a good thing! It allows for short story/collaborative projects, essay plans, note-taking, memos, poems, etc… the writing possibilities are endless!
Brainstorming activities – This is a great ice breaker for the beginning of class! And better yet, it’s a great way to post a homework assignment/food for thought for that evening and then discuss it the next day.
Vocabulary/Grammar Activities – You could easily use Wallwisher for practicing tenses, definitions, vocabulary matching (you can even use audio or video!), or even find a theme and have the students fill the sticky notes with their ideas for the vocabulary theme!
Speaking activities – I was never one to love speaking in front of people so Wallwisher is a great way to create short speaking activities to help students feel more comfortable in front of a group of people. These activities could be to talk about a photo or video for X minutes, create a story based upon X number of photos, or even put debate topics on a sticky note for the student to create.
Notifications – That is the original thought, right? You could use Wallwisher for orientation information, classroom rules, student profiles, daily/weekly plan, or even fun messages to other students who might be out sick or on trips with their families.
Bio-Cube is an interactive tool that invites students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read or to gather details to write their own autobiographies or biographies.
Want to show your students how a digital tattoo works? I follow Pondexter's tweet about God's will and the tsunami over a 72 hour period. The real issue, as I see it, is about the state of American education not the thoughts of a member of the WNBA.
This points to stark differences - what about subtle differences between cultures. Do our symbols affect brain development - do our tools affect brain development?
Other
Gestalt psychologists emphasized the common properties of mind in all
cultures
in the
basic forms, as well as in the content of people's thinking.
The early 1930
had experienced the conditions
necessary to alter radically the content and form of their thought.
we expected that they would
display a predominance of those forms of thought that come from activity that is
guided by the physical features of familiar objects.
Therefore we began,
as most field work with people does, by emphasizing contact with the people who
would serve as our subjects. We tried to establish friendly relations so that
experimental sessions seemed natural and non-threatening. We were particularly
careful not to conduct hasty or unprepared presentations of the test
materials.
As a rule, our experimental sessions began with long
conversations which were sometimes repeated with the subjects in the relaxed
atmosphere of a tea house, where the villagers spent most of their free time, or
in camps in the field and in mountain pastures around the evening campfire.
These talks were frequently held in groups. Even when the interviews were
held with one person, the experimenter and other subjects made up a group of
two or three who listened attentively to the person being interviewed and who
sometimes offered remarks or comments on what he said. The talk often took the
form of a free-flowing exchange of opinion between participants, and a
particular problem might be solved simultaneously by two or three subjects,
each proposing an answer. Only gradually did the experimenters introduce the
prepared tasks, which resembled the “riddles” familiar to the population and
therefore seemed like a natural extension of the conversation.
He characterized primitive
thinking as “prelogical” and “loosely organized.”
Primitive people were said to
be indifferent to logical contradiction and dominated by the idea that mystical
forces control natural phenomena
We conceived the idea of carrying out the first far-reaching study of
intellectual functions among adults from a non-technological non-literate,
traditional society
hamlets
nomad
1. Women living in remote villages who were illiterate and who were not
involved in any modern social activities. There were still a considerable
number of such women at the time our study was made. Their interviews were
conducted by women, since they alone had the right to enter the women's
quarters.
2. Peasants living in remote villages who were in no way
involved with socialized labor and who continued to maintain an
individualistic economy. These peasants were not literate.
3. Women who
attended short-term courses in the teaching of kindergarteners. As a rule,
they had no formal schooling and almost no training in literacy.
4. Active kolhoz (collective farm) workers and young people who had taken short
courses. They were involved as chairmen running collective farms, as holders
of other offices on the, collective farm, or as brigade leaders. They had
considerable experience in planning production, distributing labor, and taking
stock of output. By dealing with other collective farm members, they had
acquired a much broader outlook than isolated peasants. But they had attended
school only briefly, and many were still barely literate.
5. Women students admitted to teachers school after two or three years of study. Their
educational qualifications, however, were still fairly low.
Short-term psychological experiments
would have been highly problematic under the field conditions we expected to
encounter
During the last
six or so years I have created a number of 'how-to' documents and presentations
for a variety of web based and related technologies. They are available from the
various workshop web pages however I thought it might prove helpful to link to
all the documents from a single page. Some of my workshop participants have referred to
these documents as 'cheat sheets'.
~ www.larkin.net.au
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Presentation and workshop documents
During the last
six or so
years I have created a number of 'how-to' documents and presentations
for a
variety of web based and related technologies. They are available from
the
various workshop web pages however I
thought it might prove helpful to link to
all the
documents
from a single page. Some of my workshop participants have referred to
these
documents as 'cheat sheets'.
Web
2.0Read~Write Web Overview Information
sharing
Nigel Coutts on 02 Dec 18Think of a time when you were completely immersed in a learning challenge. A time when you became aware of the need to master a new skill or concept. A situation that took you outside of your comfort zone, when there were times that you became frustrated, when you thought of quitting, downed tools and walked away, but came back time and time again. Maybe it was a problem you had to solve. Maybe it was a challenge you wanted to overcome.
