a collection of Online Resources by
Subject Area. This list is NOT
exhaustive, but is a great start for
incorporating stimulating (online)
exercises into your teaching
Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable (Pink, 2006).
YES! We need to address these things. I don't see them as incompatible w CC, however.
international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which are mostly left-brained cognitive skills.
Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills.
Is this any different from the current situation? Is this author arguing that we should not have common standards, or that we should maintain our current status quo of a patchwork of test-driven standards?
A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for individual exploration and experimentation
I think the problem lies in seeing this as an either-or question. Any system that relies solely on testing as the measure of success is short-sighted and archaic. Having no identified common ground puts at risk the learners who most need a firm starting point. To say that the current system allows "more room for individual exploration and experimentation" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. Where in test-crazed American schools do you see this happening??
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:
This is a fab suite of programming tools and toys from Microsoft Research. The site using HTML 5 which means that it works across most devices from PCs, Apple, Android and more. It has a get tutorial section to get you started and you are able to pick apart coding from other public projects. You can share your finished scripts and programmes with a link to play on most devices and even export it to the Windows Store.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Pacing and organizing the content in a way that allows students time to interact with the content and classmates is important in content-retention.
Using too many visuals. Digital flipchart pages were awash with visual stimuli; it was hard to identify the important content.
Paying too much attention to reinforcing features. For example, when teachers who had worse results with the technology used the virtual applause feature to signal a correct answer, the emphasis seemed to be on eliciting the applause rather than on clarifying the content.
They should group information into small, meaningful segments before they start developing the digital flipcharts.
To ensure that they don't run through the flipcharts too quickly, teachers can insert flipcharts that remind them to stop the presentation so students can process and analyze the new information.
Digital flipcharts should contain visuals, but those visuals should clearly focus on the important information. Also, no single flipchart should contain too many visuals or too much written information.
the teacher should typically discuss the correct answer along with the incorrect answers, making sure to elicit opinions from as many students as possible.
When using reinforcing features like virtual applause, teachers should make sure that students focus on why an answer is correct or incorrect.
n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.
Ideally, teaching kids how to think critically becomes an integral part of your approach, no matter what subject you teach. But if you're just getting started, here are some concrete ways you can begin leveraging your students' critical-thinking skills in the classroom and beyond.
t Classroom converts a ten step (or more) workflow down to one simple step. She made several references to Classroom eliminating many stressors for teachers, especially those who may not be “Google savvy.”
Teachers will have the ability to create multiple, if not unlimited, classes in Classroom. Heidi and Paul explained the process is intuitive and within ten minutes students were in Classroom and were able to start using it.
Every day that first week, even in the first meeting, teach something substantive in the curriculum. Make it something that is brand new, not something reviewed from the previous year. Students are hungry for intellectual engagement after a summer off, and they want to think great thoughts and do great works.
Mix academics with administrative and Get-to-Know-You activities. It should be about 50-50: half engagement with interesting academics, half focused on forms, announcements, or activities meant to build classroom community. Keep the ratio: students will grow impatient and disillusioned if too much time is spent on get-to-know-you activities. It sounds weird, but most students are not looking for continued summer camp experiences so much as they are seeking confidence and engagement.
choose poems related to growing up or modern culture, or read share the lyrics of powerful songs of any generation.
Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,”
For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous.
According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.”
one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot
1961, in Cambridge, J. C. R. Licklider, a scientist at the technology firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, began a two-year study on the future of the library, funded by the Ford Foundation and aided by a team of researchers that included Marvin Minsky, at M.I.T.
Licklider envisioned a library in which computers would replace books and form a “network in which every element of the fund of knowledge is connected to every other element.”
Licklider’s two-hundred-page Ford Foundation report, “Libraries of the Future,” was published in 1965.
Kahle enrolled at M.I.T. in 1978. He studied computer science and engineering with Minsky.
Vint Cerf, who worked on ARPAnet in the seventies, and now holds the title of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, has started talking about what he sees as a need for “digital vellum”: long-term storage. “I worry that the twenty-first century will become an informational black hole,” Cerf e-mailed me. But Kahle has been worried about this problem all along.
The Internet Archive is also stocked with Web pages that are chosen by librarians, specialists like Anatol Shmelev, collecting in subject areas, through a service called Archive It, at archive-it.org, which also allows individuals and institutions to build their own archives.
Illien told me that, when faced with Kahle’s proposal, “national libraries decided they could not rely on a third party,” even a nonprofit, “for such a fundamental heritage and preservation mission.”
screenshots from Web archives have held up in court, repeatedly.
Perma.cc has already been adopted by law reviews and state courts; it’s only a matter of time before it’s universally adopted as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.
It’s not possible to go back in time and rewrite the HTTP protocol, but Van de Sompel’s work involves adding to it. He and Michael Nelson are part of the team behind Memento, a protocol that you can use on Google Chrome as a Web extension, so that you can navigate from site to site, and from time to time. He told me, “Memento allows you to say, ‘I don’t want to see this link where it points me to today; I want to see it around the time that this page was written, for example.’ ”
I start my English classes with "Observations". Students can state anything they have observed since the last class (as long as it's appropriate). We then explore how the observation can be used in writing. Not just as plot/narrative, but any aspect of English- as a metaphor, a character note- whatever we want to emphasize, and that the observation suggests.
It not only gets kids past writer's block, but it promotes a mindset of finding the unique in the ordinary.
We would also like to share this DISCUSSION RUBRIC (2007) that you can use as students submit annotations and begin to draw conclusions about what their evidence is pointing to.
Start off modeling what you expect students to do. Then, move more toward asking students to look at a text with a certain set of questions in mind. Finally, just share a simple short list of terms or words which will guide student reading/annotating.
These annotations, rather than being on paper, can be collected with different web tools so that students can collaborate
Students submit their annotations via their smart phones or other digital devices, and then analyze each other’s notations collectively. They could be looking for main ideas, thematic and literary elements, or big ideas from the work. They could be looking for evidence of connections to other texts, their own experiences, or world issues. They could simply be searching for meaning to support them when reading complex texts.
Anytime something is shared and ideas are discussed and shared, there seems to be more of a 'real-life' purpose for digging in and completing the task.
In order to get students to own this process, we have to relinquish some control. Let them think, let them make mistakes and respond. Let them draw conclusions even they are not the conclusions we would have drawn. We can be there to coach them through misconceptions.
Step back! It is amazing to learn from the student's perspective. Then, if the thinking is not focused toward the goal or objective of the teacher's lesson, a bit of guidance and coaching is all that is needed to steer students toward that goal/objective.
Just because students are not at school doesn't mean the learning stops. What instead of mandating kids have internet access at home, there are pre-made activities that don't foresee the dependency on the Internet and instead, can be approved by a parent/guardian signature that such learning activities took place during the day off school for whatever reason.
Online learning also helps teachers reduce their stress load. It provides a predictable avenue for educators to budget their curriculum goals with available teaching days. Finally, e-learning days provide students with academic consistency and predictability, eliminating any snow day confusion.
This reminds me of the Dual Language observations each month as part of the Principal PLCs. Very powerful experience and what an awesome amount of feedback for the classroom teacher and data to start conversations about instructional practice!
Could we in the United States create school cultures in which instructing colleagues on how they might improve performance is not a rare and emotion-laden event, but rather an accepted and valued mechanism in the development of desirable professional practice?
I think RARE is part of the issue. The fact that we don't often have observers in our classrooms, and we don't often talk about the practices that are effective makes for a feeling of being singled out if criticism is offered.
Did you receive a gift of a new iPad this year? If so, you’re probably
spending this holiday vacation week trying out all kinds of new apps. Here are
ten that I recommend getting started with.
Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. I use
Evernote for
a little bit of everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to
myself. The app automatically syncs with my online Evernote account so that I
can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files from any computer or device that
is connected to the web. Learn more in the video below.
Evernote
is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. I
use
Evernote
for
a little bit of
everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to
myself. The app automatically syncs with my online
Evernote account so that I
can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files
from any computer or device that
is connected to the web. Learn more in the video
below.
Checklist to use before embarking on a blogging project with students
