allow learners to solve relevant issues that matter to them
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DragonBox Algebra 12+ for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd ge... - 4 views
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Educators as Agents for Educational Policy - The Learner's Way - 6 views
thelearnersway.net/...-agents-for-educational-policy
educators agents policy learner teaching change
shared by Nigel Coutts on 20 Jan 19
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Education exists in an uneasy domain and the teaching professional is forced to navigate between a multitude of conflicting tensions. Our education systems are dominated by abundance of voices all shouting for attention and offering a solution to the problems they have diagnosed. Each individual claims expertise and insights gained from years as a student is sufficient experience to allow one to speak with authority. - Educators need to find their voice.
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Well-being School Proposal, by @Mrs_Educate - 2 views
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Why we need to move our technology use beyond substitution - The Learner's Way - 27 views
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Mere substitution is not going to help our learners maximise the affordances of technology. The challenge is to find ways by which technology can enhance learning. We can be certain that technology is not going to go away and that those who maximise the affordances that it brings are likely to gain the most from it.
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Purposeful Professional Learning (Professional Learning That Shifts Practice- Part 1) -... - 10 views
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the team determined a specific goal that they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day
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To guide the work time, we observed some classrooms and discussed what we noticed. Based on our goals, we set clear targets and some time boundaries to check in on progress.
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each teacher shared what they had learned, what they had created, and their actionable next steps.
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The more you empower learners, the more they will be invested in the work.
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society evolves and schools work to meet the needs of learners
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I think one of the keys here is to acknowledge that society is evolving and we need to evolve to meet the needs of society - for example, just because research shows that, for some things, handwriting helps people remember something better or reading a hard copy is easier for comprehension than a digital copy - just because research at this point confirms these concepts, that doesn't mean we don't need to provide opportunities for practice and teach learners to recall digitally written info or comprehend digital text. If that is the trend the world is moving toward, we have to move in that direction as well - or be left behind.
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purposeful
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Free resource to support Biology A-level from @ThePhySoc - 10 views
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"A free resource to help teachers and students to gain a deeper understanding of how the body works has been launched by The Physiological Society in partnership with the University of Liverpool. The resource, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), has been specifically designed to support the A-level Biology curriculum, with a focus on the respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems."
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The art of modern writing - The Learner's Way - 53 views
thelearnersway.net/...the-art-of-modern-writing
writing learner education technology teaching collaboration
shared by Nigel Coutts on 28 May 17
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Learning to write is one of the fundamental skills we gain from our time at school. Writing is one of the cornerstones of learning and we devote significant time and energy towards its mastery. Skilled writing is a mark of an educated individual and a skill required for academic success. But in the modern world what makes a skilled writer? What has changed about writing and what literary skills should we focus our attention on.
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(32) (PDF) Gamification in Education: A Systematic Mapping Study | Gennady Agre - Acade... - 11 views
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"While gamification is gaining ground in business, marketing, corporate management, health insurance,ecology and wellness initiatives, its application in education is still an emerging trend. This article presents a study of the published empirical research on the application of gamification to education.The study is limited to papers that discuss explicitly the effects of use of game elements in specificeducational contexts. It employs a systematic mapping design. Accordingly, a categorical structure forclassifying the research results is proposed based on the extracted topics discussed in the reviewed papers. The categories include gamification design principles, game mechanics, context of applyinggamification, consisting of type of application, educational level, and academic subject,implementation and evaluation. By mapping the published work to the classification criteria andanalyzing them, the study highlights the directions of the currently conducted empirical research onapplying gamification to education. It also indicates some major obstacles and needs, such as the needfor a proper technological support, the need for controlled studies demonstrating reliable positive ornegative results of using specific game elements in particular educational contexts, etc. Although mostof the reviewed papers report promising results, more substantial empirical research is needed todetermine whether both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of the learners can be influenced bygamification"
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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views
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"bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
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According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
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A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
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It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
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combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
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By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
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They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
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from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
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the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
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as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
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a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
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brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
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virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
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the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
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Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
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Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
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the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
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appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
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"In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
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such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
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accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
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"What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
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"It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
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As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
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Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
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In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
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Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
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Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
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The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
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Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
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create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
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Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
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Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
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This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
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On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
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shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
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Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
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One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
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While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
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Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
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It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
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It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
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In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
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However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
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Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
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Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
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Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
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In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
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Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
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it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
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Should Students and Teachers Be Online "Friends"? | Education.com - 2 views
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“A teacher needs to be a role model, mentor, and advice giver – not a ‘friend.’” When a high school student gains access into a teacher’s network of friends and acquaintances and is able to view their family photos, for instance, the student-teacher dynamic is altered.
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While students may be eager to find and friend their teachers on Facebook, many of them understand the implied rules and boundaries of this virtual environment. “I do understand why my teachers do not want me to add them until I graduate,” says Jegaraj.
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sites like Facebook are social environments. Teachers guide students in a professional capacity, and being social doesn’t seem like part of the job description
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"In the virtual world, the definition of a student-teacher relationship is hazy, particularly on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, where adults and teens share the same forums to connect and keep in touch with friends, classmates, relatives, and co-workers. Chances are, your teen has already found her teachers on Facebook and sent friend requests to join their networks."
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CBI: Our education systems are not delivering - while average performance rises gently,... - 0 views
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UK ranks among the highest spending OECD countries measured in terms of percentage of GDP on education.
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explanation for the conveyor belt comes not from money, therefore, but from other incentives that schools face.
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We should not be surprised that these drive behaviour – but not always the behaviour that the Department for Education wants.
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When we look at whether the improvement on the GCSE metric is general or specific to those close to the grade boundary, it is clear that this measure is driving what is happening in schools.
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intensive targeting of resources on pupils just below the C grade and/or an increase in teachers’ expertise in ‘teaching to the test’ has been behind improvements.
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Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t inspire confidence that the rise in exam grades for average ability candidates really reflects an increase across all groups in mastery of the subjects studied.
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Narrowly-defined targets like these, based only on exam results subtly inhibit the overall education of young people.
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At earlier stages in the system, similar testing frameworks focus school accountability on achieving a certain percentage of pupils reaching a defined average, rather than a focus on absolute attainment.
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it is possible to dramatically reduce attainment gaps in their primary school populations and raise standards on a broader basis than the UK has managed.
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Can Coaching Help Transform Teacher Quality? | huntingenglish - 68 views
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What we must do is create an engine room of high quality teacher coaching within our schools to drive improvements in pedagogy and teacher quality.
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The psychology of change and actually changing the habits of adult professionals is very complex. What is widely known is that externally imposed change rarely sticks and changes the culture within schools, or indeed any organization.
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Teachers must be emotionally invested in any development of their practice in the school community. Involvement and choice are powerful drivers of habit change. Local knowledge form within the school is powerful and develops a greater degree of trust in what is an emotional and often messy process! Teacher coaches have a better knowledge of the school community; they will invariably gain greater respect than any external figures and they will certainly benefit from higher levels of trust.
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‘Teacher Coaches’ are in a great position to shine a light on existing successes and spread that light across the school. School leaders can do this of course, but staff are more open to their colleagues suggesting and driving improvement. The coaches can become roles models of the best kind: undertaking research; tweaking the school environment; providing evidence of successful pedagogy; supporting underperforming colleagues; embodying a growth mindset and being open to adapting their practice to improve – in effect, becoming leading lights to drive change.
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Rethinking the Way College Students Are Taught - 52 views
americanradioworks.publicradio.org/...rethinking-teaching.html
teaching learning Education pedagogy discussion effective_use_of_multiple_choice
shared by anonymous on 19 Dec 12
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Catherine Hainstock liked it
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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."
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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.
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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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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."
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The Benefits of Failure | Fluency21 - Committed Sardine Blog - 40 views
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Rejection, when looked at positively, can help us work harder in an effort to succeed. The reality is that when we do not prepare students for failure we are doing our students a disservice. They must learn resiliency and how to move forward in the face of failure.
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When looked at correctly, failure can teach us where we went wrong in the first place, and how we can learn to pick ourselves up again in a pursuit to succeed. There are valuable lessons in failing. Too often people keep trying the same solution and keep getting the same result. Failure can teach us that it is not that we are bad at something, just that we have to try a different method to find success.
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As adults, we should share our stories of struggling and failure with our students so they understand that it is a part of life. The resiliency students can gain and the lessons they can learn from failing will help them find success in the future.
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Why Kids Need Schools to Change | MindShift - 118 views
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The current structure of the school day is obsolete, most would agree. Created during the Industrial Age, the assembly line system we have in place now has little relevance to what we know kids actually need to thrive
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Yet therein lies the paradox. It’s exactly during these uncertain times when people must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental, she said. In education, although there are great new models of learning and schooling, they are the exceptions, and the progressive movement has not gained much momentum.
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“One thing we know for sure is that kids learn better when teachers are invested and paying attention and showing they care,” she said. “The biggest impact you’ll have as a teachers is the relationship you establish with your student.”
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The five criteria that Challenge Success brings to schools attempts to modernize the obsolete system in place today: scheduling, project based learning, alternative assessment, climate of care, and parent education.
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Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school.
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Why build a Personal Learning Network? - 51 views
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'Inside the Black Box' was written by Black and William in 1998 and in it they describe the classroom as a black box with inputs and outputs but what occurred inside was a mystery. For many teachers the reality has been that what occurs in their classroom has been both private and isolating, a matter between the teacher and his or her students but a task largely tackled alone. But this isolationist view is, in the age of the social media and networking increasingly challenged and more and more teachers are finding their voice, sharing their ideas and gaining valuable insights from a global community of connected educators.
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Organisational Learning - The Learner's Way - 2 views
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Certain conditions are critical for the establishment and success of a learning organisation and there are parallels here to the practices of effective pedagogy in an inquiry based learning environment. If our goal is to have every member of an organisation contribute to the learning that occurs then we must establish a culture that allows this to occur. Feelings of safety, acceptance of diversity and risk taking must become parts of the culture. In our classes we establish the conditions where our students feel safe sharing their ideas even when they do not conform with the majority. We establish a belief that there are often multiple correct answers and in doing so foster creativity. The same conditions are required in our learning organisations. Nurturing a learning organisation is a little like nurturing a garden and Tim Brown echoes this sentiment ""It's about nurturing the conditions in which creativity is most likely to happen, That's really about culture, environment, rituals—the sorts of things that give people permission to explore, that encourage open-mindedness, collaboration, experimentation, and risk taking."
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For schools the concept of a learning organisation should make perfect sense, after all learning is our core business, or it should be. Perhaps that almost three decades after Peter Senge identified the importance of learning within organisations the idea is only now gaining traction in schools tells us something about the approach taken to learning and teaching within schools. With an increased focus on the development of professional learning communities as a response to the complex challenges that emerge from a rapidly changing society, it is worth looking at what a learning organisation requires for success.
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ASCD Inservice: Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?) - 1 views
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Homework needs to be completed in order to produce the highest achievement gains. Design it with ease of completion in mind. A large amount of homework does not result in better learning. Homework should be academically purposeful, not a punishment or a symbol of the seriousness of study. Homework should be explicitly tied to the current learning goals of the class. Homework should be able to be completed without adult assistance. Parents or guardians should not be expected to act as content experts. Parents should, however, be provided with clear homework guidelines. Assignments that involve using the parents' expertise or personal experiences (such as interviews) are often successful.
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OPINION: Personalization, Possibilities and Challenges with Learning Analytics | EdSurg... - 34 views
www.edsurge.com/...lenges-with-learning-analytics
personalizedlearning learner research personalized SDW analytics challenges possibilities personalization
shared by Sharin Tebo on 02 Nov 14
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Many of these challenges result from trying to personalize within the context of traditional school structures that standardize the curriculum, the assessments, the grouping, and the instructional time.
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a genuine problem: how to achieve the tremendous academic gains that are possible through personalized instructional methods within the constraints of a traditional classroom.
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Knowledge mapsFormalizing a learning map--sequences of connected concepts and skills that define how one masters a domain, such as beginning Algebra--and mapping student mastery on the map, enables intelligent learning systems to recommend the next concept or skill to be learned, propose aligned instructional content, and present appropriate questions and tasks to assess mastery.
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Learning analytics combines data from student models with data on learning behaviors, knowledge maps, and learning outcomes, and mines these data sets to identify patterns that associate student attributes and behaviors with successful outcomes.
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Learning analytics marks a significant departure from traditional data-driven instructional strategies. That’s because so much more data is available to mine, make sense of, and use.
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It is not enough to design cutting edge analytics to shape educational decision making if we do not understand how teachers can apply them to optimize student learning outcomes.