I agree with everything, but the "free" part. Haven't we all heard the saying, "you get what you pay for?" The best textbook I know about is Campbell's Biology. It was written by tons of experts in the field. Did they all volunteer to write it? Shouldn't experts be compensated for their time in the creation of quality textbook content? I know we would all like everything to be free, but writing (or producing audio or video) GOOD content takes skill and expertise. Are all these people supposed to do this for free? I just don't understand the idea behind this.
Since it is through communication
that we exercise our political, economic and social power, we risk contributing
to the hegemonic perpetuation of class if we fail to demand equal access to
newer technologies and adequately prepared teachers for all students
They can benefit
their students by developing and then teaching their students to develop expertise
in evaluation of search engines and critical analysis of Web site credibility.
Well-prepared teachers, with a deep and broad understanding of language, linguistics,
literature, rhetoric, writing, speaking, and listening, can complement those
talents by studying additional semiotic systems that don’t rely solely
on alphabetic texts.
Not only will teachers need to understand
“fair use” policies, they are likely to need to integrate units
on ethics back into the curriculum to complement those units on rhetoric.
Students should be counseled not only on the risks to their
physical safety, but also on the ways that the texts they are composing today,
and believe they have eliminated, often have lives beyond their computers, and
may reappear in the future at a most inopportune time.
learn methods of critically analyzing
the ways in which others are using multiple semiotic systems to convince them
to participate, to buy, to believe, and to resist a wide range of appeals
It also implies the process of uncovering one’s
own cultural, social, political and personal (e.g. age, gender) backgrounds
and understanding how these backgrounds can and often do influence one’s
own ways of communicating and interacting with others in virtual and face-to-face
encounters.
nstances of anti-social behavior in online communication such
as using hurtful language and discriminating among certain members of virtual
communities have been reported.
allows their members
to construct and act out identities that may not necessarily be their real selves
and thus lose a sense of responsibility toward others
Professional development for teachers and teacher educators must be ongoing,
stressing purposeful integration for the curriculum and content, rather than
merely technical operation. It also needs to provide institutional and instructional
support systems to enable teachers to learn and experiment with new technologies.
Offering release time, coordinating student laptop initiative programs or
providing wireless laptop carts for classroom use, locating computer labs
in accessible places to each teacher, scheduling lab sessions acceptable for
each teacher, and providing alternative scheduling for professional development
sessions so that all teachers can attend, are a few examples of such systems.
Finally, teachers and students must be provided with technical support as
they work with technology. Such assistance must be reliable, on-demand, and
timely for each teacher and student in each classroom.
educators must address plagiarism, ownership, and authorship
in their classrooms.
strategies to
assess the quality of information and writing on the Web
help students develop netiquette
Such netiquette is thus not only about courtesy;
more importantly, it is about tolerance and acceptance of people with diverse
languages, cultures, and worldviews.
Teachers and teacher educators must examine with students the social processes
through which humans grow individually and socially, and they must expose
the potentially negative consequences of one’s individual actions. In
doing so, teachers and educators will be able to reinforce the concept of
learning as a social process, involving negotiation, dialogue, and learning
from each other, and as a thinking process, requiring self-directed learning
as well as critical analysis and synthesis of information in the process of
meaning-making and developing informed perceptions of the world.
E-learning is a growing trend at community colleges, according to survey results from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
E-learning is already used at 47 percent of community colleges and is expected to increase to 55 percent within two years. The survey of 578 community college faculty was conducted by Eric Liguori, an assistant professor at California State University.
Eighty-four percent of respondents believe e-learning is a valuable educational tool.
The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are:
It increases access through location and time-flexible learning.
More resources and information are available to students 24/7.
Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching.
It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum.
It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”
When asked about the barriers to adopting online learning, faculty cited such concerns as doubt about its capability and reliability, acceptance by students and teachers, and lack of resources, such as time and technical support.
Twenty-three percent of respondents said the effectiveness of e-learning depends on the resources available, including the format and features of courses. For example, e-learning is best when teachers are adequately trained to use it, there is high-quality content and curriculum design, it’s used in conjunction with real-world situations and there is opportunity for student-teacher interactions, discussion boards and collaborative projects.
“Our survey looked at how community college faculty members are using e-learning as a cost-effective means” to increase completion rates and ensure that “students walk away with credentials that are meaningful in the workplace and that they are prepared for the careers they hope to pursue, including, for many, the start of entrepreneurial endeavors,” said NACCE President and CEO Heather Van Sickle.
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:
The drawings from the famous "Real Beauty Sketches" campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix this year. At left, a woman as described to a sketch artist by the woman. At right, the woman as described by a stranger.
WOW! Even more powerful! This shows the impact media has made on us. The left is the woman describing herself and the right is a STRANGER describing her!!! INSANE!
Fake ads cleverly pushed for better literacy rates in France
thumbs-up means nothing in this brutal campaign pleading for more tangible charity support than a like on Facebook.
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.
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.
it turns out that the one thing present in every successful person is one consistent trait. It’s not a person’s education or lack of it, or their IQ, their upbringing, their financial abundance or lack, their test scores, their birth order or their gender. It’s one odd, rarely mentioned quality: Grit.
But grit is more than just an attitude. It’s about the actions we take when faced with doubt and obstacles. In 2006, Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman discovered that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement.
A clear goal
Determination despite others’ doubts
Self-confidence about figuring things out
Humility about knowing it doesn’t come easy
Persistence despite fear
Patience to handle the small obstacles that obscure the path
A code of ethics to live by
Flexibility in the face of roadblocks
A capacity for human connection and collaboration
A recognition that accepting help does not equate to weakness
A focus and appreciation of each step in the journey
An appreciation of other people’s grit
A loyalty that never sacrifices connections along the way
An inner strength that helped propel them to their goal
“… Grit may be as essential as IQ to high achievement. In particular, grit, more than self-control or conscientiousness, may set apart the exceptional individuals who … made maximal use of their abilities.”
Finland recently made the news for its decision to shift away from a focus on handwriting. Beginning in 2016 students will not be required tl learn cursive handwriting and instead will be taught typing skills. If this was anywhere other tan Finland the decision might be ignored or ridiculed but the Finnish Education systems reputation for producing quality learning backed by innovative practice makes this hard to ignore.
Gates told the Times article’s author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, that after he watched it: “I just loved it. It was very clarifying for me. I thought, ‘God, everybody should watch this thing!’”
And there you have it. Bill Gates likes something; Bill Gates pays to get it into schools. It may be a good idea. It may be a bad idea. It doesn’t matter, because Gates has the money and clout to inject it into wherever he wants to inject it.
Don't dismiss Big History Project! The article, given another angle, could have illuminated the team behind the project, the teachers in the project, and the quality of the resources. Do give it a look.
Great teachers tend to be good-natured and approachable, as opposed to sour or foreboding; professional without being aloof; funny (even if they’re not stand-up comedians), perhaps because they don’t take themselves or their subject matter too seriously; demanding without being unkind; comfortable in their own skin (without being in love with the sound of their own voices); natural (they make teaching look easy even though we all know it isn’t); and tremendously creative, and always willing to entertain new ideas or try new things, sometimes even on the fly.
Passion. Of all the qualities that characterize great teachers, this is the most important, by far.
Don’t think, by the way, that students don’t pick up on the disdain. They absolutely do. And my experience with evaluating faculty members over the years suggests that the teachers who are most widely disliked are the ones who most dislike students.
I like the idea of concentrating on one thing -- let the kids know what I'm looking for during the week. Eg. on the board it could say "conference focus"
Gradual Release of Responsibility: Student learns to do heavy lifting
Ask another adult to give feedback.
defeated. Here you will find 20 ideas and techniques on how to give effective learning feedback that will leave your students with the feeling they can
I cannot say enough good things about this website. They offer SO many great resources for teachers and students. They have worksheets, lesson plans, and interactive tools for all to enjoy.
Here at ReadWriteThink, our mission is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials.
By calling it “school” (rather than learning), and “a job” (rather than work), we’re unwittingly creating a tone of drudgery and compliance that centers the institutions and their processes (grades, academic success and performance), and de-centers the end result (skills–>understanding–>creativity–>wisdom).
the vast majority of social ills that plague us–as a planet, not just in one country–stem from a surplus of bad work
And because we’ve all had jobs that sucked, it’s easy to shrug it off as a necessary evil in life, but it’s not. Work that demeans, dehumanizes, mechanizes, and depersonalizes individuals also, by design, demean, dehumanize, mechanize, and depersonalize society at large, and telling people to “be thankful they have a job” is an antiquated response that misses the point.
The curse of social conditioning and norm-referencing here is also at play
Wendell Berry in a letter he wrote responding to the idea of a “work-life” balance
Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.
If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of (the author) and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.”
no matter what sort of values a family promotes, the learning process, by design, changes a person
Doesn’t the quality of a culture rely in part on a deep, dynamic interaction between those who are adults now, and those who will be soon?”
And in that intersection sits education.
Getting a job is not the purpose of school. Good work is a shared core of both education and social improvement. I’m not entirely sure what this means for learning on a practical level, but I keep having the idea of diverse learning forms embedded in authentic local communities as a kind of first response.
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.
If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
The Copyright Office deemed K-12 teachers and students ineligible for the
exemption, and instead indicated that they should use only screen captures of a
film, because K-12 education doesn’t need access to visually high-quality clips,
officials ruled.
Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach.
Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.
Tip 1: Think big, but start small.
Tip 2: Patience is a virtue when trying something new.
Tip 4: Weaving media together makes them stronger.
Tip 5: Students need to know where they can get online.
Student-centered classrooms are the goal of my teacher-designed blended learning model. Giving students control over the learning process requires that they know how to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems in groups, pairs, and individually. This work can be messy, loud, and disorganized, but in the end, the learning is much more meaningful.
Then I found Collaborize Classroom, a free, dynamic discussion platform. I used it to replace many of my pen-and-paper homework assignments with vibrant online debates, discussions, writing assignments, and collaborative group work.
Remember that mistakes lead to learning. The best resources I've designed and the most effective strategies I've developed were all born from and refined through mistakes.
I anticipated that students might hit some bumps as they navigated their first TED-Ed lesson, so I set up a TodaysMeet back channel so students could ask questions, make comments, and access a support network while going through the online lesson. A back-channel tool makes it possible for people to have a real-time conversation online while a live presentation or real-time discussion is taking place.
I asked students to reference specific details to support their assertions, as did one student who commented on the town's poverty by noting that the local doctor often took potatoes as payment for his work. She also showed how the characters nevertheless reflected the country's "cautious optimism" about its future: That same doctor was still able to support himself, she pointed out, and he enjoyed his work. Students posted their responses, complimenting strong points made, asking questions, and offering alternative perspectives.
I asked students to analyze examples of strong discussion posts and revise weaker posts. I also realized that I needed to embed directions into our discussion topics to remind students to respond to the questions and engage with their peers. I started requiring them to thoughtfully reply to at least two classmates' posts, in addition to posting their own response to the topic.
It's crucial for students to see that the work they do in the online space drives the work they do in the classroom so they recognize the value of the online conversations.
For example, during the To Kill a Mockingbird unit, we researched and discussed the death penalty in preparation for writing an argument essay. The students debated online such issues as cost, morality, and racial inequality and then delved into these topics more deeply face-to-face in class.
In the classroom, the teacher might give small groups various topics to research. Then he or she could ask students to go online to research and discuss their topic on a shared Google Doc and create a presentation using Glogster, Prezi, or Google Presentation Maker.
When we read Romeo and Juliet, I use this strategy to encourage students to research such topics as the monarchy, entertainment, and gender roles in Elizabethan England so they have a better understanding of the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote. Back in the classroom, each group then presents its findings through an oral presentation.
Compared with traditional in-class group work, which typically yields a disappointing finished product, online work provides the time necessary for students to complete quality work together.
Some teachers think that incorporating online work means they have to be available 24 hours a day. This is not the case. When students are connected online, they have a network of peers they can reach out to for support, and they begin to see one another as valuable resources in their class community.
I've embedded a Google map in my website that has pins dropped in all the locations on our campus and in our community where there are computers with public access to the Internet.
I even wrote the local computer recycling center to request a computer for my class.
Betzi Bateman on 26 Jun 11I agree with everything, but the "free" part. Haven't we all heard the saying, "you get what you pay for?" The best textbook I know about is Campbell's Biology. It was written by tons of experts in the field. Did they all volunteer to write it? Shouldn't experts be compensated for their time in the creation of quality textbook content? I know we would all like everything to be free, but writing (or producing audio or video) GOOD content takes skill and expertise. Are all these people supposed to do this for free? I just don't understand the idea behind this.
Great list of attributes that new era textbook should have. What should be added? What is missing? Great prompt for kids to answer.
