Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or urlSchool Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views
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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!
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His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
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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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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.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy - 3 views
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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
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The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
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When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
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Stanford 1st year students - check the applicant profile - http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/profile.html These are among the top tiered students in the country.
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IXL Math | - 63 views
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This is a vast resource site with activities covering the whole maths curriculum. There is a 'paid for' section, but most of the activities are free and can be used without signing in. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/maths
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If your school can afford the pay version, do it! My 5th grade students practiced and answered over 5000 questions in the first 4 weeks of school!
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Online math practice and lessons
Online Courses Should Always Include Proctored Finals, Economist Warns - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 34 views
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Online economics students do not absorb much material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam.
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she has noticed that her online students perform much worse than their classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored, closed-book exam at the end of the semester.
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Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their overall grade-point averages.
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"In self-paced courses, many students appeared to cram most of the homework and chapter exams into the final week of the semester. Few of them bothered to do the ungraded practice problems offered by the online publisher." First, where is the teaching? It sounds more like a case of poorly designed instruction...or a complete lack of instruction. Of course these students are not learning...they are not being taught. Also, if they are in classes which are actively taught by a teacher, then where are the formative assessments by the instructors? That teacher should know long before the final exam if the students know the material or not. A good teacher and a well developed online course would have a number of ways to determine this which do not allow for "cut and paste" or cheating. Finally, does this department test a student's memorization of material or the mastery of the concepts and and understanding of how to apply those concepts? Perhaps, there is also a need to reevaluate the assessments. Good teaching is good teaching. If a student is not learning the material, who is really to blame?
The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com - 41 views
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Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
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all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
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“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”
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Digitally Speaking / Blogging - 169 views
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Using Feed Readers
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.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?
It's not! Here's a Commoncraft tutorial explaining RSS Feeds in Plain English:
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:
Student Blogs
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/20982438
This feed list includes several elementary, middle and high school blogs that students can explore during silent reading or while online at home.
Current Events
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16714925
This feed list includes links to several news websites that cover topics that are a part of one teacher's required social studies curriculum.
Global Warming
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/22534539
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 and Google 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 developing a teacher version of their tool just 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:
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2008/02/pageflakes-for.html
For more information on using feed readers to organize and manage information, check out this handout:
A guide to online educational resources. - NYTimes.com - 90 views
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Amazing online resources for education
A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 40 views
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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."
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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?
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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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Getting A Job Is Not The Purpose Of School - 41 views
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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).
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the vast majority of social ills that plague us–as a planet, not just in one country–stem from a surplus of bad work
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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.
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Great Websites for First Grade - 62 views
The First Thanksgiving Student Activities for Grades PreK-12 | Scholastic.com - 71 views
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your Classroom
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Decorate your Classroom
10 Things Every College Professor Hates - Business Insider - 42 views
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1. Don’t use unprofessional correspondence.
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2. Don’t ask the professor if you “missed anything important” during an absence.
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4. Don’t ask a question about the readings or assignments until checking the syllabus first.
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Newsroom | Alliance for Childhood - 1 views
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In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.
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“We have had a politically and commercially driven effort to make kindergarten a one-size-smaller first grade. Why in the world are we trying to teach the elementary curriculum at the early childhood level?”
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Finnish children similarly have a lengthy and playful childhood, not beginning formal schooling until age 7. Yet Finland consistently gets the highest scores on international exams.
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Using Diigo in the Classroom - Student Learning with Diigo - 66 views
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Save important websites and access them on any computer. Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups. Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information. Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time. Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes." View any annotations made by others on any website visited. Share websites with g
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Extended Learning
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Bookmark Lists
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