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"1. Blogging enables reflection. This is true for both students and educators. Too often do we go through our days, class to class, with minimal opportunities for reflection on our experiences or the information that we have acquired along the way. Blogging offers the opportunity to take a step back and connect with our learning and place it in the context of the bigger picture. Make reflection an assignment or part of another assignment - it is an important component to learning. For students: This is not the easiest thing to accomplish - blogging takes time and that is a finite resource during a busy class period. There is great opportunity in academic support periods or advisory classes for students (particularly in 1:1 schools) to blog. Many advisory classes take place throughout the day, which is a great break point for students to create based on their learning from that day. For teachers: This type of reflection can and should be compiled into your lesson planning for future lessons. Take what you learned from teaching and learning that day and incorporate it into the next day's lessons. Find time to do this during a conference period during your day or right after school. Yes, it is tough to get in the habit of doing a new thing - but once you start using reflection through blogging, I think that your lesson planning will be easier and much more meaningful. 2. Develop an Authentic Audience An authentic audience is a great way to increase rigor and in all of my experiences has led to increased performance by students. Authentic audiences in blogging could mean any number of things - family members, students from other classes, students from other buildings, other teachers, individuals interested in the content from around the world, etc. A student knowing that their work may be seen by people other than what they consider their 'typical audience' (read: teacher) typically spends more time and exerts more effort to creating a quality p

"It seems only fitting to explore the role of questions in education by asking questions about the process of doing so. I propose that we start with the customary way of framing this topic and then proceed to questions that are deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling. 1. WHICH QUESTIONS? To begin, let's consider what we might ask our students. The least interesting questions are those with straightforward factual answers. That's why a number of writers have encouraged the use of questions described variously as "true" (Wolf, 1987), "essential" (Simon, 2002), "generative" (Perkins, 1992; Perrone, 1998), "guiding" (Traver, 1998), or "fertile" (Harpaz & Lefstein, 2000). What the best of these share is that they're open-ended. Sometimes, in fact, no definitive right answer can be found at all. And even when there is one - or at least when there is reason to prefer some responses to others - the answer isn't obvious and can't be summarized in a sentence. Why is it so hard to find a cure for cancer? Do numbers ever end? Why do people lie? Why did we invade Vietnam? Grappling with meaty questions like these (which were among those generated by a class in Plainview, NY) is a real project . . . literally. A question-based approach to teaching tends to shade into learning that is problem- (Delisle, 1997) and project-based (Kilpatrick, 1918; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Wolk, 1998). Intellectual proficiency is strengthened as students figure out how to do justice to a rich question. As they investigate and come to understand important ideas more fully, new questions arise along with better ways of asking them, and the learning spirals upwards. Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What's required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures, or simpl

"... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity. ..."

Aplicación web para unir caras de forma fácil

"The Minute Paper comes in many variations, but the simplest one involves wrapping up the formal class period a few minutes early and posing two questions to your students: What was the most important thing you learned today? What question still remains in your mind? Taken together, those two questions accomplish multiple objectives. The first one not only requires students to remember something from class and articulate it in their own words (more about that in a moment), but it also requires them to do some quick thinking. They have to reflect on the material and make a judgment about the main point of that day's class. The second question encourages them to probe their own minds and consider what they haven't truly understood. Most of us are infected by what learning theorists sometimes call "illusions of fluency," which means that we believe we have obtained mastery over something when we truly have not. To answer the second question, students have to decide where confusion or weaknesses remain in their own comprehension of the day's material. Closing connections. If we want students to obtain mastery and expertise in our subjects, they need to be capable of making their own connections between what they are learning and the world around them - current events, campus debates, personal experiences. The last five minutes of class represent an ideal opportunity for students to use the course material from that day and brainstorm some new connections.The metacognitive five. We have increasing evidence from the learning sciences that students engage in poor study strategies. Likewise, research shows that most people are plagued by the illusions of fluency. The solution on both fronts is better metacognition - that is, a clearer understanding of our own learning. What if all of us worked together deliberately to achieve that?Close the loop. Finally, go back to any of the strategies I introduced in my recent column on the first five minutes of clas

Head Departments of Educational Centres need to be flexible and creative to cope with new circumstances, looking at obstacles as if they were opportunities. In this context, this meeting aims to provide participats with the opportunity to think and reflect about the ways we can take advantage of educational change to keep on advancing in Education.

"Este 'arma nuclear' es el LGM-30 Minuteman, un misil balístico intercontinental con tres cabezas nucleares, de 32 toneladas de peso, 18 metros de largo y 1, 67 metros de diámetro, capaz de alcanzar un objetivo a 9650 kilómetros y la capacidad de destrucción de vida humana de manera inmediata contabilizable en decenas de millones de personas. arma-nuclear Este arma nuclear tiene además una serie de cualidades que los científicos, los políticos y la ciudadanía en general suele pasar por alto y que nos hace inconscientes del problema que tenemos los humanos ante el peligro nuclear. La primera consideración se refiere a la inocuidad de la imagen que nos representa esta máquina de destrucción; su aspecto, la forma en que se nos presenta no da lugar a comprender su poder de aniquilación, es a simple vista inofensiva, una parte más de nuestro dispositivo tecnológico, un paso más en el camino del progreso. Una segunda apreciación sobre el alejamiento de la realidad militar; la sociedad civil y la sociedad castrense no se perciben mutuamente, habitan realidades paralelas que no se tocan. La distancia facilita la ignorancia y provoca indiferencia ante un problema colectivo que no puede dejarse en manos de la jerarquía guerrera. Una tercera singularidad tiene que ver con los fundamentos de nuestra existencia moral y política. Es desproporcionado lo que defendemos (principalmente nuestro modo de vida occidental), con los medios con lo que lo defendemos. Esto es la causa de una enfermedad mental colectiva que destruye todos los valores y todo el derecho, vaciando de contenido la democracia, pues ponen las decisiones más importantes en manos de unos cuantos y producen un embrutecimiento generalizado de quienes las poseen, que siempre han de estar decididos y dispuestos a todo. Estas armas logran que los países que cuentan con armamento nuclear pierdan la fe en su propia humanidad y moralidad. Una cuarta constatación se refiere a la existencia de