Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, is our anchor text for a unit of study examining the archetypal hero’s journey, which speaks to teenagers’ process of self-discovery (Campbell 1972). It is also the book I am using to teach students how to question and visualize. Our essential question is, “How do trials in our journey through high school shape us?” We use that question as we talk about Speak and our own high school lives.
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Reading Approaches and Elements - 63 views
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Young students use Facebook in the classroom - 80 views
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Poor idea. First of all, it models disrespect for terms of service: One item on Facebook's terms of service page says "You will not use Facebook if you are under 13." Second, we know from a growing body of psychological and neuroscience research that once people (esp young people) have developed friends networks, that they spend hours and hours of their time at home doing facebook, at the expense of real-time face-to-face socializing, exercise, and homework. The quality of work they do goes down dramatically when they switch back and forth from Facebook to their homework (the Facebooking activity impairs their ability to remember what they were doing before they switched). This can also contribute to sleep deprivation, which itself results in a whole host of poor health/cognitive problems. A better alternative: teaching kids alternative exciting ways of social networking and working collaboratively online that don't have the massive distraction factor of Facebook: teach them how to make flip videos and post them on drop box; teach them how to make wikis; use a Ning social network; teach them how to use Google Docs, forms, etc. Teach them how to use Diigo! Even teaching them how to twitter is a wiser idea. . . just.
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Organisational Learning - The Learner's Way - 2 views
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Certain conditions are critical for the establishment and success of a learning organisation and there are parallels here to the practices of effective pedagogy in an inquiry based learning environment. If our goal is to have every member of an organisation contribute to the learning that occurs then we must establish a culture that allows this to occur. Feelings of safety, acceptance of diversity and risk taking must become parts of the culture. In our classes we establish the conditions where our students feel safe sharing their ideas even when they do not conform with the majority. We establish a belief that there are often multiple correct answers and in doing so foster creativity. The same conditions are required in our learning organisations. Nurturing a learning organisation is a little like nurturing a garden and Tim Brown echoes this sentiment ""It's about nurturing the conditions in which creativity is most likely to happen, That's really about culture, environment, rituals—the sorts of things that give people permission to explore, that encourage open-mindedness, collaboration, experimentation, and risk taking."
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For schools the concept of a learning organisation should make perfect sense, after all learning is our core business, or it should be. Perhaps that almost three decades after Peter Senge identified the importance of learning within organisations the idea is only now gaining traction in schools tells us something about the approach taken to learning and teaching within schools. With an increased focus on the development of professional learning communities as a response to the complex challenges that emerge from a rapidly changing society, it is worth looking at what a learning organisation requires for success.
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Emoji vs Language - 22 views
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Apple in its next release of its iOS operating system for mobile devices will introduce a new feature called 'Emojification' that aims to make this new style of communication easily accessible to all. So, what does this mean for the language arts and how might the emojification of language alter the way in which we communicate.
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Sugata Mitra - the professor with his head in the cloud | Education | The Guardian - 16 views
www.theguardian.com/...itra-professor-school-in-cloud
hole in the wall SOLE Mitra children learning school teaching education
shared by Maureen Greenbaum on 05 Jul 16
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“A generation of children has grown up with continuous connectivity to the internet. A few years ago, nobody had a piece of plastic to which they could ask questions and have it answer back. The Greeks spoke of the oracle of Delphi. We’ve created it. People don’t talk to a machine. They talk to a huge collective of people, a kind of hive. Our generation [Mitra is 64] doesn’t see that. We just see a lot of interlinked web pages
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“Within five years, you will not be able to tell if somebody is consulting the internet or not. The internet will be inside our heads anywhere and at any time. What then will be the value of knowing things? We shall have acquired a new sense. Knowing will have become collective.”
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if you imagine me and my phone as a single entity, yes. Very soon, asking somebody to read without their phone will be like telling them to read without their glasses.”
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Twenty children are asked a “big question” such as “Why do we learn history?”, “Is the universe infinite?”, “Should children ever go to prison?” or “How do bees make honey?” They are then left to find the answers using five computers. The ratio of four children to one computer is deliberate: Mitra insists that the children must collaborate. “There should be chaos, noise, discussion and running about,” he says.
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. Year 4 children (aged eight to nine) were given questions from GCSE physics and biology papers. After using their Sole computers for 45 minutes, their average test scores on three sets of questions were 25%, 26% and 13%. Three months later – the school having taught nothing on these subjects in the interim – they were tested again, individually and without warning. The scores rose to 57%, 80% and 16% respectively, suggesting the children continued researching the questions in their own time.
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he says the main benefit of his methods is that children’s self-confidence increases so that they challenge adult perceptions.
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the propositions that children can benefit from collaborative learning and that banning internet use from exams will get trickier, to the point where it may prove futile. It’s worth remembering that new technologies nearly always deliver less than we expect at first and far more than we expect later on, often in unexpected ways.
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Two Billion Miles: interactive video story - 76 views
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Why Men Fail - NYTimes.com - 42 views
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This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social position. When there’s big social change, the people who were on the top of the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They’re going to explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically.
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But, in her fascinating new book, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin posits a different theory. It has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.
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Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.
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Process vs Product in Maker-centered Learning - The Learner's Way - 42 views
thelearnersway.net/...uct-in-maker-centered-learning
creativity lifelong learning expansion instruction
shared by Dan Bench on 06 Nov 16
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by ‘Making Thinking Visible’ (MTV) can help here. MTV strategies offer two advantages to teachers and learners. Importantly they provide structure to thinking and encourage a deeper engagement with concepts and ideas. They also allow the thinking that is occurring to be made visible and thus a part of the assessment process
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mastery of the process that students are utilising as they solve the problems they encounter in their making. How do they deal with obstacles? How did they plan their solution? How effectively do they collaborate? What did they do to understand the problem and how did they monitor their progress?
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Students move through phases of thinking that include empathy, needs analysis, ideation, planning, prototyping and evaluation in patterns both linear and non-linear as needs require.
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Failing is a part of the process and failing disrupts output based assessments. At the core of the maker philosophy is a process of ideation, iteration and emergence.
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their Personal Passion Projects. Many of the projects fit neatly into the description of maker-centered learning. These are the projects where the students have identified a need and the solution is a product which they design and then prototype.
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The maker movement and with it maker-centered learning brings new possibilities and challenges into the classroom. It has spawned makerspaces and students are busy designing and making products. The danger with all this frenzied making is that it is very easy to miss the point, to focus on the product and not the journey.
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Google Drive and Dropbox Cloud Storage Services Compared - 92 views
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It’s early in the life of Google Drive, but Gmail has so many users that I think a lot of them will switch, or at least add Google Drive to their digital tools. Google Drive is a new player in file syncing, but the user base and integration of Google Docs gives Google’s new service an edge. Factor in the cheaper storage upgrade pricing and Google Drive is a better fit for users that need more than 5GB of storage. Dropbox still has an edge thanks to iPhone and iPad apps, but Google promises that Google Drive for the iPhone and iPad is just weeks away. With both services offering free storage, there’s no reason not to try both. Stream your music from Dropbox and store your documents and images in Google Drive. You get 10GB for free that way.
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I just started using Sugarsync which offers more flexibility for sharing individual folders. I am right now using a single subscription (I liked it so much!) to syn my Mac at home with my PC and my Mac at work as well as my wife's Mac at work to my personal Mac (with her login on it). It does all that without problems. I dropped Dropbox when I found, using it as a teacher, that students could take files OUT of Dropbox if they had shared access :( That caused a couple problems ... I like Google Docs "can see but not edit" option to prevent that. I like Google Drive for the potential to make your Google Docs work offline - though I have not tried that yet. However it is frustrating that if you rename or Move the Google Drive folder that Google loses track of the folder; kind of wimpy for a Google Application.... Jay
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Education 2011: A case study in seniority-and burn-out - Buffalo Spree - September 2011... - 74 views
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The following year teachers are required to “map” curriculums, a long process with no apparent functional use. Teaching for Understanding and Cross Curriculum Literacy are two trendy new programs promoting the latest hot topic. Everyone reads Active Literacy before author Heidi Hayes Jacobs arrives amidst great fanfare to promote her comprehensive program, which administrators cherry-pick, then forget. By 2008 the latest buzz-phrase is Professional Learning Communities. The high school adopts this concept at considerable cost and strife. Three years later Principal Power moves on, and PLCs fizzle. With each new initiative Sara’s enthusiasm diminishes. She has twenty-two years of books, binders, and workshop folders stacked in a file drawer, representing hundreds of hours of abandoned work. Sara digs through the strata like a scientist noting geologic eras. She ponders the energy spent on each new program, technological advance, and philosophical shift, and decides the only way she’ll make it to retirement is to stop caring so much. President Obama introduces the Race to the Top Fund, and by 2010 New York has successfully secured its slice of the cash cow. Common Core Standards are developed in 2011, and a system is put into place to rate teachers based on student test scores. Epilogue In 2013 the anti-union movement hits NY State and teacher unions lose the right to collectively bargain. With the help of key Assembly members, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo push through legislation they had endorsed for years eliminating the time-honored practice of laying-off teachers by seniority—“last hired, first fired.” A new math teacher is hired at Sara’s school. Being young and unattached, Bob impresses the new principal, who sees to it that he is not assigned the “problem” kids. Sara remains a competent and dedicated teacher, but the fire is out. She is asked to mentor Bob, but feels no motivation to train the competition. Bob can’t help but notice that Sara shows little interest in the newest reform initiatives. In 2014 a math position is cut due to budget constraints. At half the pay, Bob is clearly the better choice. Sara is laid off, and at age fifty, with a son in college, she joins the unemployed.
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Wikipedia:FAQ/Schools - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
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It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information
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If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
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It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of Wikipedia.
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Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.
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The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.
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Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.
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The real economics of massive online courses (essay) | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views
www.insidehighered.com/...s-massive-online-courses-essay
MOOC credentials education higher education
shared by Tracy Tuten on 09 Aug 12
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Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.
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The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent: the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.
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In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.
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We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.
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Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid? - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 173 views
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A very worthwhile read, just to remind us that integrating technology into a classroom has to carefully planned.
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You are absolutely right. Moreover, technology exposes the weakness of our teaching methods.
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This seems a little skewed. To say that the students did not do well on the test is to say they did not do well in terms of listening to the lecturer. However, it does not mean they did not deeply understand the topic. Who wrote the test? And what information was tested? While I agree that technology can be a distraction, it is also important for teachers to understand that we must change our pedagogy to keep up with the ways students are learning currently--which may not be through lecture.
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The underlying inequality of MOOCs | OEB Newsportal - 26 views
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There are a variety of mitigating factors that limit access to MOOCs, many of which are the same as those that also exclude disadvantaged groups from traditional educational models and stem from financial, geographical and educational disparity.
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often form a core part of MOOC resources
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Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 36 views
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Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
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The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.
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On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw.
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Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
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There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs.
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Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.
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Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations
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nfection was so prevalent that suppuration—the discharge of pus from a surgical wound—was thought to be a necessary part of healing.
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In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis.
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Lister had read about the city of Carlisle’s success in using a small amount of carbolic acid to eliminate the odor of sewage, and reasoned that it was destroying germs. Maybe it could do the same in surgery.
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During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field.
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Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice.
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It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.
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Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogica
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The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail.
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Robert Scoble slams Microsoft's lack of vision - 1 views
www.theage.com.au/...ert-scoble-20130807-2rgch.html
Microsoft vision innovation trend future creativity
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 12 Aug 13
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He said the company suffered from an ingrained "consensus culture" built to "serve" the desktop PC. Because of it, Microsoft had not been able to catch up to a world in which smartphones, tablets and wearable devices were now the main ways of using computers.
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The Millions : Ask the Writing Teacher: Story Arc(s) - 46 views
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Change should occur, but not necessarily within a character.
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”The greatest story arcs are layered, and conflict us emotionally. I call this falling forward, or using creative destruction as a way to create emotion.”
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hinking about your character’s arc, you might consider your reader’s. What do you want your reader to feel at the beginning of your story? How about at the end? What needs to occur, what information needs to be supplied, in order to make your reader feel such-and-such?
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What if a character doesn’t change, but the reader’s perception of that character does? (I think, in fact, this is what Oryx and Crake does, and does well.)
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On Academic Labor » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 24 views
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we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect
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And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory
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There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls
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In a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it; that’s what they want to do; they’re given the opportunity, they have the resources, they’re encouraged to be free and independent and creative—what’s better?
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OLT project - 21 views
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. This project steps ahead in both substantive and methodological ways. Through literature/context reviews and fieldwork it builds new conceptualisations of Australia's undergraduate students which go beyond stereotypes, generalities and dated assumptions. Through a scan of institutional practices it identifies new and under-utilised empirical options for understanding and enhancing the 21st century student experience. It brings these developments together into a model and enhancement framework. Further engagement activities are deployed to seed sustainable institutional adoption.