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anonymous

Social Networking as a Tool for Student and Teacher Learning - 52 views

  • Online social networking includes much more than Facebook and Twitter. It is any online use of technology to connect people, enable them to collaborate with each other, and form virtual communities, says the Young Adult Library Services Association
  • Among students surveyed in a National School Boards Association study, 96 percent of those with online access reported using social networking, and half said they use it to discuss schoolwork. Despite this prevalence in everyday life, schools have been hesitant to adopt social networking as an education tool. A 2010 study into principals’ attitudes found that “schools are one of the last holdouts,” with many banning the most popular social networking sites for students and sometimes for staff.
  • Survey research confirms, however, that interest in harnessing social networking for educational purposes is high. As reported in School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies and Realities in 2010, a national survey of 1,200 principals, teachers and librarians found that most agreed that social networking sites can help educators share information and resources, create professional learning communities and improve schoolwide communications with students and staff. Those who had used social networks were more positive about potential benefits than those who had not. In an online discussion with 12 of the principals surveyed, most said, “social networking and online collaboration tools would make a substantive change in students’ educational experience.” They said these tools could improve student motivation and engagement, help students develop a more social/collaborative view of learning and create a connection to real-life learning.
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  • Most national, state and local policies have not yet addressed social networking specifically; by default, it often falls under existing acceptable use policies (AUPs). While AUPs usually provide clear language on obscenities, profanity and objectionable activities, they also leave out gray areas that could open students to harmful activities while excluding them from certain benefits of social networking. Likewise, boilerplate policies that ban specific applications, such as Twitter, may miss other potential threats while also limiting the ability of students to collaborate across schools, districts, states or countries. The challenge for districts is to write policies that address potentially harmful interactions without eliminating the technology’s beneficial uses.
mgranger

Media and Technology Resources for Educators | Common Sense Media - 15 views

  • gital driver's license
  • with complete confidence. Our online trainings show you how. More about parent professional development Research Credentials Check out our DNA. Our programs are built on respected digital ethics research. More about parent research credentials Turn wired students into great digital citizens Get all the tools you need with our FREE Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum and Parent Media Education Program. The relevant, ready-to-use instruction helps you guide students to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world where they live, study and play. Every day, your students are tested with each post, search, chat, text message, file download, and profile update. Will they connect with like minds or spill ... read more Get started Browse our classroom lessons and parent education resources by grade level or topical area. select gradeK123456789101112 select topicCell phones & digital communicationCyberbullying & online relationshipsDigital creation, plagiarism & piracyFamily media managementGaming & online worldsInternet safetyMedia's influence on kidsOnline privacy and securityOnline research & learningSocial networking & communityViolence in media Get Started Educator Updates Common Sense announces di gital driver's license Common Sense Media announced plans to create a digital driver’s license, an interactive online game that will teach kids the basics of how to be safe and responsible in a digital world. Read more about our plans for interactive curriculum modules
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    Digital citizenship curriculum targets 4th, 5th graders
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    Lesson plans, articles, and tools to teach Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety
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    Internet safety FREE curriculum and implementation guides. The site has admin, teacher, and student resources. Digital Passport is one of the Internet Safety programs available.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Thieme Hennis

About « OERRH - 19 views

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    "The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) provides a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question 'What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?' and identify the particular influence of openness. We do this by working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. By the end of this research we will have evidence for what works and when, but also established methods and instruments for broader engagement in researching the impact of openness on learning. OER are not just another educational innovation. They influence policy and change practices. In previous research (OpenLearn, Bridge to Success and OLnet) we have seen changes in institutions, teacher practice and in the effectiveness of learning. We integrate research alongside action to discover and support changes in broader initiatives. Our framework provides the means to gather data and the tools to tackle barriers. The project combines: A targeted collaboration program with existing OER projects An internationalfellowship program Networking to make connections A hub for research data and OER excellence in practice The collaborations cover different sectors and issues, these include: the opening up of classroom based teaching to open content; the large-scale decision points implied by open textbooks for community colleges; the extension of technology beyond textbook through eBook and simulation; the challenge of teacher training in India; and the ways that OER can support less formal approaches to learning. By basing good practice on practical experience and research we can help tackle practical problems whilst building the evidence bank needed by all."
Laura Doto

Final Report: Friendship | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • Social relations—not simply physical space—structure the social worlds of youth.
    • Laura Doto
       
      A critical conclusion to be realized that can inform our assumptions as educators.
  • When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers
  • these dynamics reinforce existing friendship patterns as well as constitute new kinds of social arrangements.
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  • Homophily describes the likelihood that people connect to others who share their interests and identity.
  • One survey of Israeli teens suggests that those who develop friendships online tend toward less homogenous connections than teens who do not build such connections
  • Teens frequently use social media as additional channels of communication to get to know classmates and turn acquaintances into friendships.
  • Some teens—especially marginalized and ostracized ones—often relish the opportunity to find connections beyond their schools. Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, such as those described in the Creative Production and Gaming chapters, often build relationships with others online through shared practice.
  • there are plenty of teens who relish the opportunity to make new connections through social media, this practice is heavily stigmatized
  • the public myths about online “predators” do not reflect the actual realities of sexual solicitation and risky online behavior (Wolak et al. 2008). Not only do unfounded fears limit teenagers unnecessarily, they also obscure preventable problematic behavior
  • As she described her typical session on Photobucket, it became clear that a shared understanding of friendship and romance was being constructed by her and other Photobucket users:
  • The fact that they draw from all of these sources suggests that youth’s friendship maintenance is in tune with a discourse of love and friendship that is being widely displayed and (re)circulated.
  • “It’s like have you noticed that you may have someone in your Top 8 but you’re not in theirs and you kinda think to yourself that you’re not as important to that person as they are to you . . . and oh, to be in the coveted number-one spot!”
  • Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive-aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.
  • Top Friends are persistent, publicly displayed, and easily alterable. This makes it difficult for teens to avoid the issue or make excuses such as “I forgot.” When pressured to include someone, teens often oblige or attempt to ward off this interaction by listing those who list them
  • Other teens avoid this struggle by listing only bands or family members. While teens may get jealous if other peers are listed, family members are exempt from the comparative urge.
  • to avoid social drama with her friends:
  • The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works.
  • teens have developed a variety of social norms to govern what is and is not appropriate
  • The problem with explicit ranking, however, is that it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations. The give-and-take over these forms of social ranking is an example of how social norms are being negotiated in tandem with the adoption of new technologies, and how peers give ongoing feedback to one another as part of these struggles to develop new cultural standards.
  • While teen dramas are only one component of friendship, they are often made extremely visible by social media. The persistent and networked qualities of social media alter the ways that these dramas play out in teen life. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the role that social media play in the negotiation of teen status.
  • primarily a continuation of broader dramas.
  • social media amplify dramas because they extend social worlds beyond the school.
  • Gossip and rumors have played a role in teen struggles for status and attention since well before social media entered the scene
  • social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. Because of this, there is greater potential for gossip to spread much further and at a faster pace, making social media a culprit in teen drama. While teen gossip predates the Internet, some teens blame the technologies for their roles in making gossip easier and more viral
  • That’s what happened with me and my friends. We got into a lot of drama with it and I was like, anyone can write anything. It can be fact, fiction. Most people, what they read they believe. Even if it’s not true (C.J. Pascoe, Living Digital).
  • finds the News Feed useful “because it helps you to see who’s keeping track of who and who’s talking to who.” She enjoys knowing when two people break up so that she knows why someone is upset or when she should reach out to offer support. Knowing this information also prevents awkward conversations that might reference the new ex. While she loves the ability to keep up with the lives of her peers, she also realizes that this means that “everybody knows your business.”
  • Some teens find the News Feed annoying or irrelevant. Gadil, an Indian 16-year-old from Los Angeles, thinks that it is impersonal while others think it is downright creepy. For Tara, a Vietnamese 16-year-old from Michigan, the News Feed takes what was public and makes it more public: “Facebook’s already public. I think it makes it way too like stalker-ish.” Her 18-year-old sister, Lila, concurs and points out that it gets “rumors going faster.” Kat, a white 14-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, uses Facebook’s privacy settings to hide stories from the News Feed for the sake of appearances.
  • While gossip is fairly universal among teens, the rumors that are spread can be quite hurtful. Some of this escalates to the level of bullying. We are unable to assess whether or not bullying is on the rise because of social media. Other scholars have found that most teens do not experience Internet-driven harassment (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Those who do may not fit the traditional profile of those who experience school-based bullying (Ybarra, Diener-West, and Leaf 2007), but harassment, both mediated and unmediated, is linked to a myriad of psychosocial issues that includes substance use and school problems (Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Ybarra et al. 2007).
  • Measuring “cyberbullying” or Internet harassment is difficult, in part because both scholars and teens struggle to define it. The teens we interviewed spoke regularly of “drama” or “gossip” or “rumors,” but few used the language of “bullying” or “harassment” unless we introduced these terms. When Sasha, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, was asked specifically about whether or not rumors were bullying, she said: I don’t know, people at school, they don’t realize when they are bullying a lot of the time nowadays because it’s not so much physical anymore. It’s more like you think you’re joking around with someone in school but it’s really hurting them. Like you think it’s a funny inside joke between you two, but it’s really hurtful to them, and you can’t realize it anymore. Sasha, like many of the teens we interviewed, saw rumors as hurtful, but she was not sure if they were bullying. Some teens saw bullying as being about physical harm; others saw it as premeditated, intentionally malicious, and sustained in nature. While all acknowledged that it could take place online, the teens we interviewed thought that most bullying took place offline, even if they talked about how drama was happening online.
  • it did not matter whether it was online or offline; the result was still the same. In handling this, she did not get offline, but she did switch schools and friend groups.
  • Technology provides more channels through which youth can potentially bully one another. That said, most teens we interviewed who discussed being bullied did not focus on the use of technology and did not believe that technology is a significant factor in bullying.
  • They did, though, see rumors, drama, and gossip as pervasive. The distinction may be more connected with language and conception than with practice. Bianca, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, sees drama as being fueled by her peers’ desire to get attention and have something to talk about. She thinks the reason that people create drama is boredom. While drama can be hurtful, many teens see it simply as a part of everyday social life.
  • Although some drama may start out of boredom or entertainment, it is situated in a context where negotiating social relations and school hierarchies is part of everyday life. Teens are dealing daily with sociability and related tensions.
  • Tara thinks that it emerges because some teens do not know how to best negotiate their feelings and the feelings of others.
  • Teens can use the ability to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship.
  • So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships. This spirit of reciprocity is common across a wide range of peer-based learning environments we have observed.
  • From this perspective, commenting is not as much about being nice as it is about relying on reciprocity for self-gain
  • That makes them feel like they’re popular, that they’re getting comments all the time by different people, even people that they don’t know. So it makes them feel popular in a way (Rural and Urban Youth).
  • Gossip, drama, bullying, and posing are unavoidable side effects of teens’ everyday negotiations over friendship and peer status. What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. The scale of this varies, but those who experience mediated harassment are certainly scarred by the process. Further, the ethic of reciprocity embedded in networked publics supports the development of friendships and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks. While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.
  • While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections. Teens leverage social media for a variety of practices that are familiar elements of teen life: gossiping, flirting, joking around, and hanging out. Although the underlying practices are quite familiar, the networked, public nature of online communication does inflect these practices in new ways.
  • Adults’ efforts to regulate youth access to MySpace are the latest example of how adults are working to hold on to authority over teen socialization in the face of a gradual erosion of parental influence during the teen years.
  • learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.
  • articulating those friendships online means that they become subject to public scrutiny in new ways;
  • This makes lessons about social life (both the failures and successes) more consequential and persistent
  • make these dynamics visible in a more persistent and accessible public arena.
  • co-constructing new sets of social norms together with their peers and the efforts of technology developers. The dynamics of social reciprocity and negotiations over popularity and status are all being supported by participation in publics of the networked variety as formative influences in teen life. While we see no indication that social media are changing the fundamental nature of these friendship practices, we do see differences in the intensity of engagement among peers, and conversely, in the relative alienation of parents and teachers from these social worlds.
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    MacArthur Foundation Study - Friendship chapter
Ross Davis

iPads in Education - Exploring the use of iPads and mobile devices in education. - 187 views

  • How does the releaseof iOS 5 impact you? Multitouch gestures, Notification Center, an upgraded Safari browser, Newstand and more. iOS 5 comes with over 200 new features. Which ones will you use most - both personally and professionally? Share your opinions... News & Views Videos Using an iPad as a Document Camera Added by Sam Gliksman0 Comments 0 Likes First Look: Apple's iOS 5 Added by Sam Gliksman0 Comments 0 Likes Impromptu Field Trip Added by Skip Via0 Comments 0 Likes Add Videos View All xg.addOnRequire(function () { x$('.module_video').mouseover(function () { x$(this).find('.video-facebook-share').show(); }) .mouseout(function () { x$(this).find('.video-facebook-share').hide(); }); }); #iPadEd on Twitter Use the hashtag #iPadEd to tweet with network members // iPads in Education Tweets SamGliksman RT @kcalderw: Last call for participants for an iPad in Edu survey for Masters class. Looking for teachers who use them. #ipadchat #ipaded4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite buddyxo Coding on the iPad: http://t.co/J55XxcXl. Looki
  • Finally, the goal of this community is to promote innovation in education through the use of technology. The site is not sponsored by Apple nor does it endorse the use of any specific technology or product.
  • Finally, the goal of this community is to promote innovation in education through the use of technology. The site is not sponsored by Apple nor does it endorse the use of any specific technology or product.
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  • Tablet computing and mobile devices promise to have a dramatic impact on education. This Ning network was created to explore ways iPads and other portable devices could be used to re-structure and re-imagine the processes of education.
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    EXCELLENT SITE!
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    Lists of apps for k-6, teachers and parents
Trevor Cunningham

International EdTech K-12 - Community - Google+ - 50 views

  • This is a K-12 education community with a target audience of teachers, tech integration specialists, coaches, educational technology leaders, and lovers of learning from around the world. It is in recognition of the growing global inter-connectedness of educators in independent and municipal K-12 schools, and offers an opportunity for all to grow their craft through this professional network.
    • Trevor Cunningham
       
      Google+ community hoping to build a global cohort of people passionate about EdTech.
  • This is a K-12 education community with a target audience of teachers, tech integration specialists, coaches, educational technology leaders, and lovers of learning from around the world. It is in recognition of the growing global inter-connectedness of educators in independent and municipal K-12 schools, and offers an opportunity for all to grow their craft through this professional network.
Clint Heitz

Edu Leadership:Tech-Rich Learning:The Basics of Blended Instruction - 38 views

  • Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.
  • Tip 1: Think big, but start small.
  • Tip 2: Patience is a virtue when trying something new.
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  • Tip 3: Technology shouldn't be just a frill.
  • Tip 4: Weaving media together makes them stronger.
  • Tip 5: Students need to know where they can get online.
  • Student-centered classrooms are the goal of my teacher-designed blended learning model. Giving students control over the learning process requires that they know how to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems in groups, pairs, and individually. This work can be messy, loud, and disorganized, but in the end, the learning is much more meaningful.
  • Then I found Collaborize Classroom, a free, dynamic discussion platform. I used it to replace many of my pen-and-paper homework assignments with vibrant online debates, discussions, writing assignments, and collaborative group work.
  • Remember that mistakes lead to learning. The best resources I've designed and the most effective strategies I've developed were all born from and refined through mistakes.
  • I anticipated that students might hit some bumps as they navigated their first TED-Ed lesson, so I set up a TodaysMeet back channel so students could ask questions, make comments, and access a support network while going through the online lesson. A back-channel tool makes it possible for people to have a real-time conversation online while a live presentation or real-time discussion is taking place.
  • I asked students to reference specific details to support their assertions, as did one student who commented on the town's poverty by noting that the local doctor often took potatoes as payment for his work. She also showed how the characters nevertheless reflected the country's "cautious optimism" about its future: That same doctor was still able to support himself, she pointed out, and he enjoyed his work. Students posted their responses, complimenting strong points made, asking questions, and offering alternative perspectives.
  • I asked students to analyze examples of strong discussion posts and revise weaker posts. I also realized that I needed to embed directions into our discussion topics to remind students to respond to the questions and engage with their peers. I started requiring them to thoughtfully reply to at least two classmates' posts, in addition to posting their own response to the topic.
  • It's crucial for students to see that the work they do in the online space drives the work they do in the classroom so they recognize the value of the online conversations.
  • For example, during the To Kill a Mockingbird unit, we researched and discussed the death penalty in preparation for writing an argument essay. The students debated online such issues as cost, morality, and racial inequality and then delved into these topics more deeply face-to-face in class.
  • In the classroom, the teacher might give small groups various topics to research. Then he or she could ask students to go online to research and discuss their topic on a shared Google Doc and create a presentation using Glogster, Prezi, or Google Presentation Maker.
  • When we read Romeo and Juliet, I use this strategy to encourage students to research such topics as the monarchy, entertainment, and gender roles in Elizabethan England so they have a better understanding of the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote. Back in the classroom, each group then presents its findings through an oral presentation.
  • Compared with traditional in-class group work, which typically yields a disappointing finished product, online work provides the time necessary for students to complete quality work together.
  • Some teachers think that incorporating online work means they have to be available 24 hours a day. This is not the case. When students are connected online, they have a network of peers they can reach out to for support, and they begin to see one another as valuable resources in their class community.
  • I've embedded a Google map in my website that has pins dropped in all the locations on our campus and in our community where there are computers with public access to the Internet.
  • I even wrote the local computer recycling center to request a computer for my class.
tapiatanova

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 98 views

  • Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
    • trisha_poole
       
      Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
  • External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
    • tapiatanova
       
      yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
  • Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
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  • back-channel conversations
  • While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
    • trisha_poole
       
      An effective use of Twitter that can be translated to classrooms.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      All classrooms?
    • John Dorn
       
      classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
  • Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
  • A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
  • Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
  • Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
  • Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
  • The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
  • Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
  •  
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
  •  
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
  •  
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
Christophe Gigon

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - 17 views

  • Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I aggree that as teachers we need to realize that technology has changed instruction and the way that our students learn and the way that we learn and instruct.
    • Orlando Gonzalez
       
      Technology has always changed the way we live. How did we respond to changes in the past? One thought is that some institutions, some businesses disappeared, while others, who took advantage of the new tech, appeared to replace the old. It will happen again and we as educators need to lead the way.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      With technology our students brains are wired differently and they can multi-task and learn in multiple virtual environments all at once. This should make us think about how we present lessons, structure learning and keep kids engaged.
    • Mike Burnett
       
      Rubbish. The idea that digital native are adept at multitasking is wrong. They may be doing many things but the quality and depth is reduced. There is a significant body of research to support this. Development of grit and determination are key attributes of successful people. Set and demand high standards. No one plays sport or an instrument because it is easy rather because they can clearly see a link between hard work and pleasure.
  • Information development was slow.
  • Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience.
  • Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime.
  • Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains.
  • Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.
  • Principles of connectivism:
  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I think it is important for us to realize the importance of connections.
  • The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
  • Classrooms which emulate the “fuzziness”
    • Maureen Curran
       
      So what does this look like? I feel that when I attempt this, evaluators and administrators don't necessarily understand. They want a neat, quiet, well-managed, orderly classroom.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      If new learning approaches are required, then why are we still being evaluated in a linear way?
  • John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few.
  • The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.
  • Knowledge is growing exponentially
  • amount of knowledge
  • is doubling every 18 months
  • To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”
  • (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
  • know-where
  • learning
  • a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”
  • Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned.
  • The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.
  • knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner
  • What is the impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process on learning
  • An entirely new approach is needed.
  • Chaos is the breakdown of predictability, evidenced in complicated arrangements that initially defy order.
  • Meaning-making and forming connections between specialized communities are important activities.
  • Chaos, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything to everything.
  • If the underlying conditions used to make decisions change, the decision itself is no longer as correct as it was at the time it was made.
  • principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole.
  • Connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations.
  • Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual
  • decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations
  • The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital.
  • Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism do not attempt to address the challenges of organizational knowledge and transference.
  • The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
  • This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.
  • This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.
  • Diverse teams of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely exploring ideas
  • An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy surviva
  • As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
    • BalancEd Tech
       
      Access is not enough. Prior knowledge and understanding is needed. Processing is needed. Evaluation of processing and outputs is needed. Feeding that back into the "system" is needed.
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
Roland Gesthuizen

The Innovative Educator: Think you're a Digital Immigrant? Get Over It! - 103 views

  • educators hesitant to use the modern tools of today, to stop relying on others and take ownership of their learning and suggests this can be done through developing a personal learning network
  • educators must take ownership of their learning rather than waiting for/relying on others to provide it.
  • Teachers do not need to be technology experts to allow students to use it to retrieve information, collaborate, create, and communicate
  •  
    There is less tolerance for educators who do not believe it is their responsibility to move their teaching out of the past. Those stuck in the past... those who are not developing their own personal learning networks... those not taking ownership for their learning... are doing a great disservice to our students and themselves.
Carol Ansel

The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views

  • Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
  • 4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
  •  
    Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
London Jenks

Teenagers, Legal Risks and Social Networking Sites | Lucacept - intercepting the Web - 49 views

  • a significant minority (36.1%) of the teachers who were asked this question indicated that they had used SNS for educational purposes, including communicating with their students about schoolwork.
  • These educational activities should be aimed primarily at equipping children and young people with the skills required to be effective digital citizens, and not focussed on rare or hypothetical fears.
  • the importance of SNS in the lives of students, and the potential significance of social media for future digital citizenship, suggests that room should be found for these issues to be directly addressed.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Research findings like these will support our use of new technologies in classrooms. What is evident from their recommendations is that further teacher professional development is required to ensure that we have teachers with the skill set to produce the ‘effective digital citizens’ we need in society today.
Kulari Lokuge Dona

iearn - 4 views

shared by Kulari Lokuge Dona on 24 Aug 12 - Cached
  •  
    iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) iEARN is a non-profit organization made up of over 30,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 130 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies. Over 2,000,000 students each day are engaged in collaborative project work worldwide.
Phil Taylor

Thumann Resources - 0 views

  • “How can educators around the world use technology to connect, collaborate, teach, support and inspire each other? Collaborative Internet applications allow educators to create online communities that support their professional learning and relieve their isolation. In this session we will focus on the ways two social networking tools, Twitter and Classroom 2.0, can be harnessed to build a rich and powerful learning community.
  •  
    From Twitter PLN - great resource and explaination for why teachers should use Twitter to build up their PLNs
  •  
    I realize there are many amazing posts on the merits of using Twitter to develop a PLN. I also realize that there already exists dozens of collections of tools for making the most of Twitter. Yet, as I prepare for my presentation at NJECC's annual conference tomorrow, I am compelled to write one of my own.
cwozniak Wozniak

Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Learning with Blogs and Wikis - 2 views

  • What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years, countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations," and tried to move "from Good to Great."
  • With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates into what I do with students.
  • This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • That's when I introduce them to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed readers.
  • If you're not sure where to begin, explore the blogs that I've organized in my professional Pageflake at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841. I read these blogs all the time. Some leave me challenged. Some leave me angry. Some leave me jazzed. All leave me energized and ready to learn more. School leaders may be interested in the collection of blogs at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/23697456.
  • A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated—cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value. (Kindle location 268–271)
  • The few moments
  • Technology has made it easy for educators to embrace continual professional development.
  • knowledge is readily available for free
  •  
    Learning with blogs and wikis.
Casey Finnerty

Wired Up: Tuned out | Scholastic.com - 0 views

  • Compared to us, I believe their brains have developed differently," says Sheehy. "If we teach them the way we were taught, we're not serving them well."
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Whether their brains have developed differently or not, we still need to teach our students differently than we were taught. They are living in different times with different demands and expectations. If we teach to the demands and expectations of our childhood would not meet our students needs.
  • children were much more likely to have connections between brain regions close together while older subjects were more likely to feature links between parts of the brain that are physically farther apart.
  • "media multi-tasking."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Recent reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that 93 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 go online. Of those kids, 55 percent use social-networking sites (like Facebook and MySpace), and 64 percent are creating their own original content (such as blogs and wikis)
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Is this all happening outside of the classroom?
  • Unlike watching television, using the Internet allows young people to take an active role; this move from consumption to participation affects the way they construct knowledge, develop their identity, and communicate with others.
  • "Computers give you different ways to solve problems, the opportunity to run and test simulations, and a way to offload processing. . . . We need kids to think about problems in innovative and creative ways. We need to change the emphasis of education to focus on higher-order kinds of thinking."
  • "It's a shift from how to memorize and retrieve data in one's mind to how to search for and evaluate information out in the world
  • Even if we're duplicating a real-life scenario in a virtual environment, the fact that students are engaged with technology and performing through a semblance of anonymity lends itself to a deeper level of discourse.
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Why do we need anonymity to get to a deeper level of discourse?
  • "If we fail to do so, our kids are going to look at what they're learning in schools and see that it is irrelevant to the future they see before them."
  • Davis says today's teachers are seeking information when they need it instead of waiting for more formal professional development workshops.
    • Casey Finnerty
       
      Sounds like a quick learner. Does this 15 minute approach really work?
  •  
    acob is your average American 11-year-old. He has a television and a Nintendo DS in his bedroom; his family also has two computers, a wireless Internet connection, and a PlayStation 3. His parents rely on e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype for daily communication, and they're avid users of Tivo and Netflix. Jacob has asked for a Wii for his upcoming birthday. His selling point? "Mom and Dad, we can use the Wii Fit and race Mario Karts together!"
anonymous

The Innovative Educator: Listen to a Principal Who Knows Banning is the Easy Way Out - 66 views

  • Sheninger understands that while banning students from technology and social media is certainly easier, his job is not to do what is most convenient, but rather what is right for our students.  As a result, Sheninger publicly embraces the use of social media for himself and for his students.  
  • Sheninger, considered to be one of the most innovative principals in the country, will be joined by several of his teachers, students, board trustees and members of his community to discuss how New Milford High School uses technology as a student, parent, and community engagement tool.
  •  
    Great video!
BalancEd Tech

Seven Tips for Maximizing the Impact of PD - Houston, TX, United States, ASCD EDge Blog post - A Professional Networking Community for Educators - 50 views

  • Current research indicates that teacher expertise is the most significant school-based influence on student learning.
    • BalancEd Tech
       
      Expertise in what? Content, pedagogy, technology integration, child psychology, empathizing, formative assessment, ...
  • Model what you expect teachers to do.
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