Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This student, as a sophomore in high school, earned a “C” in a “college” English course, which exempts her from our basic English 111 College Writing class. Even though her ACT score indicates her writing skills are deficient, we are limited in what we can do. Like many students who have already passed a “college” class, she thinks she already has the necessary writing skills to be successful in college. We know she very likely does not. Our willingness to increase student access by accepting transfer credit means that, without taking this student’s credits away, we cannot help her with her writing. Instead, by virtue of an average performance as a high school sophomore, this student will be placed into college classes for which she is unprepared.

If nobody knows exactly what path the money is taking, it’s unlikely that it’s headed in the direction of the public interest.

“As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.

If you accept that Learning is a Conversation , and that some of the most powerful learning can take place in the process of conversing and exchanging ideas with others, then setting up ways to have as many of these conversations as possible seems like an obvious thing to do.

If we limit our notion of learning to the "official" channel - the teacher, the textbook, the syllabus - we miss so much. Yes, learning happens at school, but what about outside school? Yes, learning happens in the classroom, but what about outside the classroom? Yes, learning happens in the act of "being taught", but what about when we are not "being taught"?  Our schools system implies that when we ring the bell to signal the start of a class, we are really saying that the learning starts... wait for it... now!   And at the end of the lesson we ring it again to say the learning now stops. Ok, school's over, you can all stop learning now. Until tomorrow.

 if we acknowledge that creativity in education is important, then how can we teach kids to be creative if we continue to focus on just regurgitating standard answers to standard questions, year after year. Because if it's only about learning pre-defined content then you don't need creativity, and you don't need conversation. Learning in messy and there is no point extending our thinking into new and creative areas if we aren't committed to that notion, because that just muddies up all those nice clean facts we have to remember.

Example: instead of writing by hand, learners use an app like Pages to type up a report.

Example: once again, if students are creating a document on Pages, using the collaborative tools available on iWork for iCloud, learners can work on a document together. Peers could add feedback comments to the document in real time which could be responded to, which would improve the end product further.

Example: again using Pages, however making use of features like spellchecking function or importing images to enhance the end product.

Example: like before, learners may be collaborating on a document in Pages. However, this time the end product will be uploaded to a website or perhaps a class blog. Students are usually excited by the prospect of their work being on display in a classroom, so the use of a real audience is huge for them. Furthermore, this builds their literacy skills as they need to consider the audience that they’ll be writing to and adapt their work accordingly. Finally, this opens up the possibility of feedback from this global audience which they can respond to.

Tell about it.

pointed out anomalies and inconsistencies, and wondered