Watch #UKEdChat After Hours with teacher and author Abbie Mann. She discusses with
Martin Burrett about #Wellbeing and her new book, Live Well, Learn Well.
Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.
We want them to pay attention to course content, to be astonished by what they find there, and to report back to us and the world what they have discovered.
Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.
Close — and I mean really close — reading.
in which practitioners slowly read the sacred scriptures of Judaism aloud to one another, pausing and discussing and questioning at every turn.
Tell about it.
asked what they had learned from the experience, and especially what they had noticed about the text that they hadn’t perceived before
pointed out anomalies and inconsistencies, and wondered
What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes.
So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another.
Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion
Attention through assessments.
For 13 consecutive weeks, she asked students to leave the campus and make a visit to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in order to spend time in front of the same work of art.
As they learned to train their attention on a work of art, their attention brought them insights. They saw more clearly, developed new ideas, and wrote creatively about what they observed.
One of the key ways by which we make sense of our world is by analysing the stories that we and others use to describe it. These stories are a construct of our experiences, our beliefs, our cultural perspectives and the interactions between these things. Even when the context in which the story is set is the same, the details and nature of the story that particular individuals or collective share can differ vastly. Only by listening to each story with empathy and genuine desire to understand each individual's telling of this story do we develop true insights.
Making sense of the stories of education should be a key process for all educators.
On Saturday PZ Sydney Network hosted Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church for a conversation about their new book, "The Power of Making Thinking Visible". What follows is a summary of some of the key messages from this conversation. You can watch the whole conversation above. For more learning opportunities like this visit the PZ Sydney Network or follow @pzsydnetwork on Twitter.
Teachers in Catholic settings can get $6000 scholarships towards certificates in Computational Thinking and Coding, Digital Video, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Literacy Leadership, STEM, Technology Integration, or Special Education for General Education Teachers.
Teachers in traditional settings can get scholarships for the same for up $2500 for certificates or $5000 towards MAED.
This much-maligned question seems so appropriate for education's recent history. All that was normal, everything that was routine, all of our structures, have been turned upside down and hurled into the wind of COVID19. From having spoken of a future dominated by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), we have found ourselves living in it. Innovation and creativity became the new normal as we "Apollo 13" schooling into a model that met the demands of emergency remote learning. The pressure, the workload, the demands on our time and the cognitive load have all been immense, and so it seems fitting to ask "Are we there yet?".
It seems that thanks to COVID19, educators, parents and students are in a rush. It seems the rush started moments after the decision was made to promote social distancing by offering remote learning. From quality learning in classrooms focused on deep learning we shifted into top gear. Packets of work were prepared, online tools rapidly expanded, new options for content delivery were examined and quickly deployed. We wanted to make sure that our students would be kept busy. Parents wanted their children to be busy. - Maybe slow looking is the solution?
At some point, we will need to pause. Lift our heads up and survey the scenery in this new world. Then, let us hope that we ask the right questions. Making time and space for a moment of pause and reflection will be crucial if it becomes clear that this is more than a brief fling with online learning.
Great resources for streaming free content -- free online documentaries. The current most recent addition an excellent reinterpretation of Freud's "Hysterical Girl." #metoo
Our collective ability to learn and by doing so, adapt to changing circumstances through the acquisition of new skills and dispositions is what Edward de Bono refers to as EBNE; Essential But Not Enough. - What then might education need as it develops a response to times of rapid change?
hat the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves
roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a “mostly positive” impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self-sufficient researchers.
But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.”
About 60 percent said it hindered students’ ability to write and communicate face to face, and almost half said it hurt critical thinking and their ability to do homework.
Other teachers said technology was as much a solution as a problem.
The Universal Usability site houses an unabridged, online version of Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers, by Sarah Horton, published in 2005 by New Riders Press. You'll find the complete text and illustrations from the printed book here under Access by Design Online. The online version also offers links to texts and tutorials that support and expand on the concepts covered in the book. Visit About the site to learn about the purpose and process of posting the book online.
The new research could lead to systems that can carry on a decent conversation.
the world’s leading A.I. labs have built elaborate neural networks that can learn the vagaries of language by analyzing articles and books written by humans.
Bert (from Google) learned to fill in these missing words by analysing thousands of pages of wikipedia and online books. Bert soaked up so much with so little effort. Never send a Human to do a robots job.
It is soon the start of a new school year for students in Australia. In other parts of the world, the year continues after a short break for Christmas while New Year festivities are just around the corner for those observing the lunar new year. The start of the year is considered an excellent time to reflect on key ideas that matter to our learning and potential for success. But does this equate with goal-setting?
On the other hand, leadership is voluntary. Those who follow you must be enrolled in your journey and persuaded to follow (and contribute to) your vision.
Digital charisma doesn’t feel like management, and it requires alternative channels. Human channels. Channels that involve actually showing up, not hiding behind a system.
We can learn quite a bit from how the modern cultural leaders of Instagram and Facebook use their platform, despite so many of their habits we’d prefer to avoid.
Through FB and IG modern cultural leaders affect change because they have "chosen" to do so. Not because anyone game them the authority. They chose to tell a different story.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of parents whose children are transitioning into a new phase of their learning. I used this as an opportunity to share some key messages for successful learning and thought I would briefly unpack these here.