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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.
Sharin Tebo

Teaching Metacognition - 78 views

  • Step 1: Teach students that the ability to learn is not a fixed quantity The key to a student's ability to become a self-regulated (i.e., metacognitive) learner is understanding that one's ability to learn is a skill that develops over time rather than a fixed trait, inherited at birth.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      Carol Dweck's book on having a Growth Mindset comes to mind here...
  • Step 2: Teach students how to set goals and plan to meet them
  • Step 3: Give students opportunities to practice self-monitoring and adapting Accurate self-monitoring is quite difficult.
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  • In particular, students are encouraged to think about the key points of the lecture as they listen and take notes. At the end of the lecture, students write what they think the three most important ideas of the lecture were on an index card.
  • Example: lecture wrappers
  • Teaching Self-Monitoring Strategies Monitoring and adapting strategies can be taught as learning habits. A wrapper is one tool for teaching self-monitoring behavior. A wrapper is an activity that surrounds an existing assignment or activity and encourages metacognition. For example, wrappers can be used with lectures, homework assignments, or exams. Wrappers require just a few extra minutes of time, but can have a big impact.
  • Example: homework wrappers Before beginning a homework assignment, students answer a brief set of self-assessment questions focusing on skills they should be monitoring. Students complete the homework as usual, and then answer a follow-up set of self-assessment questions.
  • Example: exam wrappers When graded exams are returned (as soon as possible after the exam was given), students complete an exam reflection sheet. They describe their study strategies, analyze the mistakes they made, and plan their study strategies for the next exam.
  •  
    "Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:"
  •  
    Really useful reminder of how we need to address very basic ideas about how to absorb new information and ask students to self-monitor and push themselves. I appreciated the information and plan to incorporate the wrappers!
Matt Renwick

Educational Leadership:Faces of Poverty:Boosting Achievement by Pursuing Diversity - 19 views

    • Matt Renwick
       
      This is a critical point. Allowing middle class families to pick and choose where there kids should go without valid reasons (i.e. work) can hurt high poverty schools.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Have we?
  • Residential poverty tends to be concentrated, and successful school integration requires either a district with enough socioeconomic diversity within its boundaries or a group of neighboring districts which, when combined, have enough diversity to facilitate an interdistrict integration plan.
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  • A weighted lottery is the simplest way for schools to ensure that they enroll a diverse student body while still relying on choice-based enrollment.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      A possible solution?
  • ndividual success stories and a review of research suggest that it is possible, by offering all students a single challenging curriculum, to reduce the achievement gap without harming the highest achievers (Burris, Wiley, Welner, & Murphy, 2008; Rui, 2009).
  • In the middle grades, students at City Neighbors start their day with half an hour of highly specialized, small-group instruction called intensive. Intensive provides an opportunity for extra support or enrichment in different subjects, allowing teachers to meet different students' needs while still teaching most of the academic time in mixed-ability classrooms.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Sounds like an intervention block, something many buildings have or are looking at.
  • small but growing number of schools are attempting to boost the achievement of low-income students by shifting enrollment to place more low-income students in mixed-income schools. Socioeconomic integration is an effective way to tap into the academic benefits of having high-achieving peers, an engaged community of parents, and high-quality teachers.
  • A 2010 meta-analysis found that students of all socioeconomic statuses, races, ethnicities, and grade levels were likely to have higher mathematics performance if they attended socioeconomically and racially integrated schools (Mickelson & Bottia, 2010).
  • Research supporting socioeconomic integration goes back to the famous Coleman Report, which found that the strongest school-related predictor of student achievement was the socioeconomic composition of the student body (Coleman et al., 1966).
  • nd results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress in mathematics show steady increases in low-income 4th graders' average scores as the percentage of poor students in their school decreases (U.S. Department of Education, 2011).
  • a number of studies have found that the relationship between student outcomes and the socioeconomic composition of schools is strong even after controlling for some of these factors, using more nuanced measures of socioeconomic status, or comparing outcomes for students randomly assigned to schools (Reid, 2012; Schwartz, 2012).
  • Rumberger and Palardy (2005) found that the socioeconomic composition of the school was as strong a predictor of student outcomes as students' own socioeconomic status.
  • Socioeconomic integration is a win-win situation: Low-income students' performance rises; all students receive the cognitive benefits of a diverse learning environment (Antonio et al., 2004; Phillips, Rodosky, Muñoz, & Larsen, 2009); and middle-class students' performance seems to be unaffected up to a certain level of integration.
  • A recent meta-analysis found "growing but still inconclusive evidence" that the achievement of more advantaged students was not harmed by desegregation policies (Harris, 2008, p. 563).
  • he findings suggested that, more than a precise threshold, what mattered in these schools was maintaining a critical mass of middle-class families, which promoted a culture of high expectations, safety, and community support.
  • istricts have chosen to let school boundaries reflect or even amplify residential segregation.
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.
  •  
    High school dual enrollment programs may not be helping students succeed in college.
Sarah Scholl

Activity 4: Writing comments - What you need to know | Edublogs Teacher Challenges - 88 views

  • Teaching quality commenting skills
  • If commenting skills are not taught and constantly reinforced, students will limit their comments to things like “I like your blog!” or “2KM is cool!”. While enthusiasm is high with these sorts of comments, students are not developing their literacy skills or having meaningful interactions with other members of the blogging community. Conversations in the comment section of a blog are such rich and meaningful learning experiences for students. Conversations begin with high quality comments.
  • Check out improvements in student literacy skills through commenting here.
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  • How to teach quality commenting Kathleen teaches commenting skills through: Modelling and composing comments together with students on the interactive whiteboard. Teaching students about the “letter” format and editing process during writing lessons. Giving examples of a poor/high quality comments and having students vote whether the comment should be accepted or rejected. Example of a Sorting blog comments activity devised for our students here. Having students read and comment on a post on our blog as part of a literacy rotation on the computer each week. Taking students to the ICT room once a week to work on composing a quality comment with a partner. Emailing parents and encouraging them to write comments on the blog with their child.
  • Activities for developing student commenting skills
  • own or facilitate a collaborative discussion with students to create together (you could include this video as part of the process). Develop a quality comment evaluation guide.  Refer to Linda Yollis’s Learning how to comment. Write a blog post about commenting and what you define as a quality comment. Have your students practise leaving a “quality” comment on the post.
  • Create a commenting guideline poster (see poster example below) – develop your
  • “quality” comment on the post.
  • Create a commenting guideline for your blog.  Here’s an example.
  •  
    some good tips on helping students learn how to make appropriate comments on blogs
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 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.
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  • 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.
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.
  •  
    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.
Katt Blackwell-Starnes

using diigo with students - 568 views

I'm interested to see where this conversation goes next. There's some great information and pointers here. Thanks for the blog link, Andy. I'll be keeping up with what you're writing. In just ove...

diigo students bookmarking

Patience Wieland

Innovations in Teaching and Learning Technology Conference - FREE - 0 views

  •  
    In the greater Houston area: this is a free conference occuring in November of this year (so the warmer weather will be a nice break for out of towners) focusing on best practices in teaching and learning, and technology. Also an opportunity to meet other educators!
  •  
    Learning takes place in many locations and within the context of a variety of forums. Instructors are challenged on a daily basis to find innovative ways of enhancing the Net generation of students learning experiences. Our goal is promote greater understanding of cutting-edge approaches, techniques and instructional methodologies online and in the classroom. The Teaching and Learning Technology Conference provides a forum for educators to share effective and innovative teaching and learning models. This conference will explore and showcase excellence and innovation in teaching that facilitates student learning and positively impacts student academic success.
Wayne Holly

Free Social Teaching and Learning Network focused solely on education - 58 views

  • Some people describe Sophia as a mash up of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook — focused solely on teaching and learning. It’s where you can teach what you know and learn what you don’t. Whether you’re a high school student, college student, teacher, professor, tutor or parent, Sophia makes knowledge easier to share, easier to find, and easier to organize. And it’s free.
  •  
    A new startup social networking site focusing on teaching and learning.
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    It will be interesting to see how this site develops. I plan to use it to host some learning modules I'm working on.
  •  
    Sophia hosts free online learning content in multimedia "packets" tied to MN K-12 standards. A blend of Facebook, Wikipedia, Atomic Learning, and Hippocampus.
  •  
    Some people describe Sophia as a mash up of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook - focused solely on teaching and learning. It's where you can teach what you know and learn what you don't. Whether you're a high school student, college student, teacher, professor, tutor or parent, Sophia makes knowledge easier to share, easier to find, and easier to organize. And it's free.
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!
trisha_poole

50 Best Education Technology Blogs You Aren't Reading Yet - 173 views

  • Early EFL: Leahn is located in Spain, where she works as a freelance language assistant teacher and as a teacher trainer in workshops for primary and secondary school teachers.
  • Box of Chocolates: Join this EFL teacher from Recife, Brazil, who is very passionate about teaching
  • Neslihan Durmusoglu: This blog reflects on the world of EFL and about being a 21st-century learner and teacher.
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  • Reflections of a Teacher and Learner: David teaches kids at a private college in Turkey and he also is a distance student on the University of Manchester’s MA in EdTech & TESOL programme
  • An A-Z of ELT: This blog is managed by the man who wrote An A-Z of ELT in 2006, Scott Thornbury.
  • Authentic Teaching: This blogger has taught EFL in Brazil, and taught ELT for several years as well. He now is earning an MA in Education in London
  • Jeremy Harmer’s Blog: Jeremy is a writer and teacher/teacher-trainer for English to speakers of other languages, and he blogs about presentation.
  • Marisa Constantinides — TEFL Matters: This blogger runs CELT Athens, a teacher development center based in Greece.
  • Shaun Wilden’s Blog: Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for almost twenty years. He also maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net.
  • So this is English… This blog is filled with ideas, thoughts, discoveries, feedback and more about the teaching and learning of English.
  • Teaching Village: Barbara is an English teacher currently living in Kitakyushu, Japan, and using Web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds.
  •  
    Technology and teaching - two words that seem to fit together perfectly today for most teachers and learners. So much so that a slew of new blogs have come on board to talk about education technology - or, edTech. This list of the 50 best education technology blogs are not inclusive, as there are so many new blogs available; however, if you look at links provided by many of these blogs to other edTech blogs, you may learn about even more blog that you aren't reading yet.
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.
Chuck Baker

How the Flipped Classroom Is Radically Transforming Learning - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education. - 117 views

  • students missed our classes and struggled to stay caught up.
  • As we roam around the class, we notice the students developing their own collaborative groups.  Students are helping each other learn instead of relying on the teacher as the sole disseminator of knowledge.
  • One of the greatest benefits of flipping is that overall interaction increases: Teacher to student and student to student.  Since the role of the teacher has changed from presenter of content to learning coach, we spend our time talking to kids
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  • The beauty of these mini-lectures is we are delivering "just in time" instruction when the students are ready for learning.
  • Flipping the classroom has transformed our teaching practice.  We no longer stand in front of our students and talk at them for thirty to sixty minutes at a time.  This radical change has allowed us to take on a different role with our students.
  • We think the key is for students to identify learning as their goal, instead of striving for the completion of assignments.  We have purposely tried to make our classes places where students carry out meaningful activities instead of completing busy work.
  • Our goal is for them to be the best learner possible, and to truly understand the content in our classes.  When our students grasp the concept that we are on their side, they respond by doing their best.
  • We both remember sitting in parent conferences for years and parents would often ask us how their son or daughter behaved in class.
  • You see, the question is a non-issue in our classroom.  Since students are coming with the primary focus on learning, the real question is now:  Is your student learning or not?  If they are not learning, what can we do to help them learn?  This is a much more profound question and when we can discuss this with parents, we can really move students into a place which will help them become better learners.
  •  
    Highlights of a guest post from two Chemistry teachers writing a book to be released in 2011 about delivering lectures at home and working at school.
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.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • 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.
alexis alexander

Teaching in a Digital Age | The Open Textbook Project provides flexible and affordable access to higher education resources - 70 views

  •  
    The book examines the underlying principles that guide effective teaching in an age when everyone,and in particular the students we are teaching, are using technology. A framework for making decisions about your teaching is provided, while understanding that every subject is different, and every instructor has something unique and special to bring to their teaching.The book enables teachers and instructors to help students develop the knowledge and skills they will need in a digital age: not so much the IT skills, but the thinking and attitudes to learning that will bring them success. [Scroll down for list of contents] Book release date (final version): 1 April 2015
eLearning Consultant

What Students Want: Characteristics of Effective Teachers from the Students' Perspective | Faculty Focus - 135 views

  • 1. Respectful 1. Respectful
  •  
    Conveniently, I was able to watch faculty from the Memorial University of Newfoundland present a study on Students' Perceptions of Effective Teaching in Higher Education at Wisconsin's 26th Annual Distance Teaching and Learning Conference. Researchers had asked their students this question: What characteristics are essential for effective teaching from the student perspective? Analyzing and combining reasonably synonymous characteristics, researchers isolated the top nine for online and for face-to-face students.
  •  
    Essential characteristics for effective teaching from a student perspective!
  •  
    Respect your students.
Florence Dujardin

Embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: A case study - 0 views

  •  
    The benefits of embedding the teaching of writing into the curriculum have been advocated by educators and researchers. However, there is currently little evidence of embedded writing instruction in the UK's higher education context. In this article, we present a case study in which we report the design, implementation and evaluation of an academic writing intervention with first-year undergraduate students in an applied linguistics programme. Our objectives were to try a combination of embedded instructional methods and provide an example that can be followed by lecturers across disciplines and institutions. Through the integration of in-class and online writing tasks and assessment feedback in a first-term module, we supported students' writing development throughout the first term. We evaluated the effects of the intervention through the analysis of notes on classroom interaction, a student questionnaire and interviews, and a text analysis of students' writing and the feedback comments over time. The evaluation findings provide insights into the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. The embedded writing instruction was perceived as useful by both students and teachers. The assessment feedback, whilst being the most work-intensive method for the teachers, was valued most by the students and led to substantial improvements in the writing of some. These findings suggest that embedded writing instruction could be usefully applied in other higher education contexts.
taconi12

fractions idea bank - 141 views

  • Fractions are as easy as pigs
  • One way to help students to understand the basics of adding and subtracting fractions (denominators must be the same; add/subtract the numerators; DO NOT add/subtract the denominators) is to teach the students what the parts of a fraction really are: numbers and names. This also helps combat the frequently-taught but incorrect idea that a fraction and a ratio are the same. A ratio may look like a fraction, but it is not a fraction.
  • FRACTIONS ARE AS EASY AS PIGS What is 2 pigs plus 3 pigs? 5 pigs (Write as a fraction: 2/pigs + 3/pigs = 5/pigs) Notice, we do not end up saying the answer is 5 horses.
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  • The top of a fraction is a NUMBER: 1, 2, 3, etc. The bottom of a fraction is a NAME: half, third, fourth, etc. We can add and subtract numbers. We cannot add and subtract names.
  • Fraction Blackjack
  • Ask each student their "denominator." Don't give it away. Ask each one until one finally says their name. Continue through the room... Their name is their denominator. When you practice adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators, actually say "pigs" instead the fraction name. Then say, "Instead of pigs, we are using ..." and let them answer with the appropriate denominator. It is fun when doing subtraction to say, "If we have 5 pigs and eat 3 pigs, besides a stomachache, what is left?"
  • The transition to unlike denominators is automatic. If the names are not the same, you can't add the fractions. 2/pigs + 3 horses is still 2/pigs and 3/horses (unless we discover a "common denominator" -- a common name: farm animals). Once the students know they must have a common name (denominator) in order to add or subtract, they have a reason to learn about common denominators. By the way, I always begin common denominators without worrying about the Least Common Denominator (LCD). Once they can find a common denominator (multiply the denominators), add or subtract, and then reduce, they can be led to finding "easier" denominators to work with. Students who have too much difficulty with LCD can still get the correct answer; they just have more reducing to do. Those who can find a lower common denominator have less reducing. This is a very basic rendering of "Fractions are as easy as pigs." AWP, 10/12/00 on teachers.net math board
  • Denominate means: to name Political parties nominate (name) their candidates. Religious denominations are identified by their names. The denominations of money are the names of the coins and bills.
  • One game that my students enjoy the challenge of is Blackjack 1. You need a set of fraction cards per student (or you can make them from index cards.) The same rules as Blackjack apply. Instead of trying to get to 21, they want to try and get close to 1 without going over. With this game they practice addition and comparing -- it's great. You can also make it more challenging or bring in mixed numbers with Blackjack 2 or Blackjack 3. (Blackjack 2 means to try to get as close to 2 as possible without going over.) I am not sure where to buy fraction cards. I have one set that I received when I took over a classroom. However, I have always had the students create their own sets and we used them for several games. I gave each students a set of index cards (3 1/2 X 5) and they wrote the fractions in pencil so they couldn't be seen through the cards. These are the fractions we included: all fractions with a denominator of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12. (To challenge the students you may want to use the 7, 9, and 11 denominators as well.) I also had the students include 2 0's such as 0/3 and 0/4 and two 1's such as 3/3 and 4/4. Each game required two sets of cards, so I had the students write their initials in the corner of their set so they would get a complete set back after the game.
  • games
  • I remembered some
  • other
  • Fraction War Fraction War with the fraction cards: It is just like the card game of War, but with the fraction cards instead. This game helps students to compare fractions and encourages them to use number sense in comparison before using the algorithm of making equivalent fractions. Memory Memory with the fraction cards: It is just like the traditional "Memory" game, but any equivalent fractions are considered a match so 1/2 would be a match with 2/4. This game helps them to identify equivalent fractions. You can also play this game with fraction to decimal equivalence by making a set of decimal cards too. Fraction/Decimal Bingo Fraction/Decimal Bingo: The students have game boards with decimals on them. You call out fractions and if they have the decimal equivalence they can mark it on the board. Kimberly, 5/31 and 6/1 on teachers.net math board
Steven Szalaj

Raise the bar with national exam for teachers - chicagotribune.com - 53 views

  •  
    Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
  •  
    Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
  •  
    Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
  •  
    You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
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