This site is designed for English as an additional language, native English speakers and MFL learners with some great ready-made resources, including videos. There is also a collection of downloadable resources for making customised games and activities which can be used in a wide range of subjects.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
This is an important paragraph - most of this research is beyond K-12. It doesn't diminish the promise that 2.0 and future techs can assist in creating individualized learning opps - and it soundly heralds the death of "learning by lecture" - an approach that has both failed and bored generations of students!
More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.
I agree that it needs to be more personal and not about checking off a task as complete. In 2 online courses I took this summer, the discussion board comments were mostly insipid. I wish the teacher had thought about how to facillitate the online discussion to push our thinking. Perhaps to redirect false comments into real analysis and reflection of the questions posted.
This leaves out many special populations of students. My English Language Learners need exposure and modeling in how to negoticate online course. My school district discourage them from taking the summer courses. I can't think of an example in which my student knew more than I did about web2.o.
Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho’s schools as a high-tech vanguard.
To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.
“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation’s teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. “They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning.”
What a pity, a sign of how little respect people actually give to the profession of teaching; the only profession where people don't take the comments of practitioners seriously. Can you imagine saying to your doctor, "I know this is your diagnosis, but I'm going to go with my Great Aunt's diagnosis."
They complain that lawmakers listened less to them than to heavy lobbying by technology companies, including Intel and Apple.
under the state’s plan, that teacher will not always be in the room. The plan requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits.
I actually find this somewhat troubling...so little research exists as to how students are actually learning online. Are they using Facebook or are they going through MIT's Open Courseware? I'm inclined to think the former. I'm slowly adding more and more technology to my classes and frankly, I'm surprised that students are not more technologically savvy... the first and second digital divides are increasingly evident...
Interesting article, however, you can't ignore that students today will be doing a significant amount of learning on a computer. If our high school students can't master managing an online class in high school, how will they fare later on? It's another learning tool. 2 classes out of 47 credits? How is that detrimental to the development of lifelong learners?
We can research until the cows come home, but at some point if we don't dive in, we miss the boat. While we can all wish for all our students to graduate high school and then go on to college, the reality is that most of them won't. That's reality... Preparing our kids for future learning and building those skills necessary to be successful to master online courses is a skill they will need to succeed in their digital world.
the following eight actions have a positive impact on the blended learning culture among our students.
1. Identify Online Learning Behavior You Want To See
128 27 Romain Bertrand · May 15, 2014Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class CultureHow to get students to value and care about the work they do onlineRomain Bertrand
Over 42,000 spelling words with customizable sentences and
definitions
A REAL person who says each word and sentence
Free home pages for teachers and parents to save lists
Teacher
training videos
Free printable handwriting worksheets
Free teaching resources with lists and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print such as
Over
Over
42,000
spelling
words with customizable sentences and
definitions
A
REAL
person
who says each word and sentence
Free home pages
for
teachers and parents to save lists
Teacher
training
videos
Free printable
handwriting worksheets
Free teaching
resources
with lists
and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print such
as
:Alphabetical
Order, Unscramble, Parts of Speech, HangMouse, Crossword Puzzle, WordSearch, and Vocabulary Test.
A free forum and newsletters
Over
42,000
spelling
words with
customizable sentences and
definitions
A
REAL
person
who says
each word and sentence
Free home pages
for
teachers and parents to save
lists
Teacher
training
videos
Free printable
handwriting worksheets
Free teaching
resources
with
lists
and lesson plans
Twenty-five games to play online or to print
such
as
:
Alphabetical
Order
,
Unscramble
,
Parts of
Speech
,
HangMouse
,
Crossword Puzzle
,
WordSearch
,
and
Vocabulary
Test
.
A free
forum
and
newsletters
SpellingCity.com has:
- Over 42,000 spelling words and ten learning games!
- A REAL person who says each word and sentence.
- Free home pages for teachers and parents to save lists.
- How To Videos to explain to teachers and parents how to use SpellingCity.com.
- A free forum and newsletter with more vocabulary and spelling resources!
- Ten spelling and vocabulary games to play online or to print.
- Free printables for handwriting practice with your saved lists.
- A Resources Section which highlights features and existing lists for Dolch words, compound words, sound-alikes (their, there, they're), contractions, possessives, and more.
After taking the online spelling test, students can print out a report, retake the entire test, or get tested only on spelling words that they got wrong the first time.
TeachMe spells and displays the word in ways that stimulate memory for visual and verbal learners.
Printable Games include WordSearch, UnScramble, WhichWord?, Sentence UnScramble and MissingLetter.
Printable Handwriting Worksheets for combined spelling and handwriting practice can be created from any saved list (this feature only works if the list is saved). Choices includes three sizes of lines, capitals or small letters, script or cursive, and with directional arrows on or off. How cool is that?
All you have to do is type in the list of words and bam! at least 10 games are generated for the students! It also teaches and tests the students on the words. You can save the lists as a teacher and have students search for your lists or you can have students input their own lists without saving them.
A superb resource where teachers can sign in and input spelling lists for pupils to learn by playing games. Give pupils the link and they don't need to sign in to use it. Site only recognises US spelling when generating example sentences, but you can input your own easily. Free option should be enough for most users, but 'paid for' option is available.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
Blogging the Learning Process
Just as blogs can help foster conversation among students and faculty, instructors are discovering that they can also serve a more personal role, as a tool of reflection and self-appraisal. “The blog’s biggest strength is in the development and authentication of the student voice in learning,” notes Ruth Reynard, associate professor of education and the director of the Center for Instructional Technology at Trevecca Nazarene University (TN).
Reynard uses blogs as a way to get students to reflect on their coursework–essentially by keeping an online journal in which they track their learning. As opposed to a traditional journal that is read only by the instructor, student
When used as a tool for reflection, blogs allow students to write at length about their own experiences as learners, and to read and comment on the insights posted on their classmates’ blogs. This type of public, shared self-reflection is difficult to achieve in other forms of collaborative online writing, such as discussion boards. “If the
Reynard has also found that blogs are a great tool for helping her graduate students learn to write academically. She requires her graduate students to embed hyperlinks to online sources that are influencing their thinking in their reflective blog posts.
proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
inductive reasoning
Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
fellow edu-nauts
Lectures are banned
attending class on Apple laptops
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Don’t assume that anyone will read anything written in a handout, computer screen, or PowerPoint presentation. Learners today scan and process information differently. Getting through to your audience, designing information that is easy to process, and creating a path for the information to move into the long term memory, is your job (it should be your passion) and it must be approached as a constantly evolving process.
Reading Bear, a project of WatchKnowLearn.org, is the first free program online to teach beginning readers vocabulary and concepts while systematically introducing all the main phonetic patterns of written English, all using innovative rich media. We spent an enormous amount of time developing 50 presentations, covering even more phonics principles and illustrating over 1,200 vocabulary items. There is nothing else like it, free or otherwise.
The online learning paradigm grid from Stephenson and Coomey’s meta-analysis of online learning research articles identifies 4 quadrants where the opportunities for learning range from teacher-controlled to learner-managed and from specified tasks through to open-ended and strategic activities.
"Pedagogically I needed a way to describe the diversity of pedagogical approaches and how they could all have a place within the practice of a teacher. It certainly lead to a lot of thinking and reflection .."
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.
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:
Dallas McPheeters on 04 Jan 11Great resource for students and teachers to present current events and cultural nuances. Language learners?
