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anonymous

Response: Several Ways Teachers Can Create A Supportive Environment For Each Other - Cl... - 10 views

    • anonymous
       
      Relationships are key.
  • One way to address this is to establish a team norm that collaborative efforts AREN'T about studying successful people. Instead, they are about studying successful PRACTICES
  • Because teachers are (1). surrounded by efforts to tie performance to individuals instead of collaborative groups and (2). used to working in isolation, it is only natural to see competitive teacher-centered language slip into our conversations.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The first level is, what can an individual teacher do to impact the culture of her individual professional learning team?
  • The second level is, what can teachers do to impact the culture of their schools?
Fred Delventhal

Welcome to Schoolr. The only resource you'll need. - 19 views

  •  
    Google, Dictionary.com,Thesaurus.com, Wikipedia, Acronym Finder, NCSU, unitconversion, Bablefish, and Wolfram-Alpha. Click on the MORE link for more options.
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    Schoolr would like to thank the Reference.com family, Google, Wikipedia, Acrnonym Finder, Urban Dictionary, Altavista Babel Fish, SparkNotes, NCSU, and unitconversion for their great resources.
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    Love to see metaphor tab search maybe citations too? Ah! there's citations in the drop down tab!
Dave Truss

ePortfolios & Learning Management Systems: Setting our default to social - Ewan McIntos... - 16 views

  • The elephant in the room, of course, is that most Learning Management Systems on the market these days and being developed by Education Ministries the world over have their defaults set to 'anti-social'
  • for students, teachers and parents to use; for showing the workings that led to a final product (it's time we stopped covering up our learning in English, showing our working in Maths - let's get the process of learning out there for all to see, contribute to and build upon);
  • ePortfolios for teachers should resemble those useful moments of sharing in the staffroom. For students, ePortfolios should be the messy learning log or journal de bord that, frankly, not enough of them keep on paper anyway;
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  • But the longer teachers put up with these attitudes, rather than challenging them and asking intelligent questions about the balance of risk in not having students share with the world wide web, the longer we do not have conversations with parents, and invite them to spectate and participate in what learning can look like now, then the longer we will continue to do a disservice to the digital footprints, competitiveness and understanding of otherness in our young people.
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    # for students, teachers and parents to use; # for showing the workings that led to a final product (it's time we stopped covering up our learning in English, showing our working in Maths - let's get the process of learning out there for all to see, contribute to and build upon);
Ed Webb

New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development - MacArthur Foundation - 0 views

  • parents and their children came together around gaming or shared digital media projects, where both kids and adults brought expertise to the table.
    • Ed Webb
       
      And wouldn't it be great if teachers and students could interact in the same way? Some of us do, of course, or at least try to.
  • an effort to inject grounded research into the conversation about the future of learning in a digital world.
Terry Elliott

World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others | Edutopia - 0 views

  • We must also expand our ability to think critically about the deluge of information now being produced by millions of amateur authors without traditional editors and researchers as gatekeepers. In fact, we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits. And we have to work together to organize it all, as long-held taxonomies of knowledge give way to a highly personalized information environment.
    • Jeff Richardson
       
      Good reason for teaching dig citizenship
    • Terry Elliott
       
      What Will suggests here is rising complexity, but for this to succeed we don't need to fight our genetic heritage. Put yourself on the Serengeti plains, a hunter-gatherer searching for food. You are thinking critically about a deluge of data coming through your senses (modern folk discount this idea, but any time in jobs that require observation in the 'wild' (farming comes to mind) will disabuse you rather quickly that the natural world is providing a clear channel.) You are not only relying upon your own 'amateur' abilities but those of your family and extended family to filter the noise of the world to get to the signal. This tribe is the original collaborative model and if we do not try to push too hard against this still controlling 'mean gene' then we will as a matter of course become a nation of collaborative learning tribes.
  • Collaboration in these times requires our students to be able to seek out and connect with learning partners, in the process perhaps navigating cultures, time zones, and technologies. It requires that they have a vetting process for those they come into contact with: Who is this person? What are her passions? What are her credentials? What can I learn from her?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Aye, aye, captain. This is the classic problem of identity and authenticity. Can I trust this person on all the levels that are important for this particular collaboration? A hidden assumption here is that students have a passion themselves to learn something from these learning partners. What will be doing in this collaboration nation to value the ebb and flow of these learners' interests? How will we handle the idiosyncratic needs of the child who one moment wants to be J.K.Rowling and the next Madonna. Or both? What are the unintended consequences of creating an truly collaborative nation? Do we know? Would this be a 'worse' world for the corporations who seek our dollars and our workers? Probably. It might subvert the corporation while at the same moment create a new body of corporate cooperation. Isn't it pretty to think so.
  • Likewise, we must make sure that others can locate and vet us.
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  • technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).
    • Terry Elliott
       
      All of these skills are technical know how. We differentiate between hard and soft skills when we should be showing how they are all of a piece. I am so far from being an adequate coach on all of these matters it appalls me. I feel like the teacher who is one day ahead of his students and fears any question that skips ahead to chapters I have not read yet.
  • The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Partners and predators? OK, let's not in any way go down this road. This is the road our mainstream media has trod to our great disadvantage as citizens. These are not co-equal. Human brains are not naturally probablistic computer. We read about a single instance of internet predation and we equate it with all the instances of non-predation. We all have zero tolerance policies against guns in the school, yet our chances of being injured by those guns are fewer than a lightning strike. We cannot ever have this collaborative universe if we insist on a zero probability of predation. That is why, for good and ill, schools will never cross that frontier. It is in our genes. "Better safe than sorry" vs. "Risks may be our safeties in disguise."
  • Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.
  • The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.
  • The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.
  • Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.
  • The technologies we block in their classrooms flourish in their bedrooms
  • Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.
  • I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.
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    Article by Wil Richardson on Collaboration
Vicki Davis

ASCD - 0 views

  • first 60 seconds of your presentation is
    • Vicki Davis
       
      How many of us emphasize the first 60 seconds of a presentation students give?
  • Summers and other leaders from various companies were not necessarily complaining about young people's poor grammar, punctuation, or spelling—the things we spend so much time teaching and testing in our schools
  • the complaints I heard most frequently were about fuzzy thinking and young people not knowing how to write with a real voice.
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  • Employees in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information daily.
  • There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the information effectively it almost freezes them in their steps.”
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Buidling a PLN using an RSS Reader is ESSENTIAL to managing information. THis is part of what I teach and do and so important!
  • rapidly the information is changing.
  • half-life of knowledge in the humanities is 10 years, and in math and science, it's only two or three years
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Personal learning networks and RSS readers ARE a HUGE issue here. We need to be customing portals and helping students manage information.
  • “People who've learned to ask great questions and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in our environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have the most impact on innovation.”
    • Vicki Davis
       
      How do we reward students who question teachers -- not their authority but WHAT They are teaching? Do we reward students who question? Who inquire? Who theorize? Or do we spit them out and punish them? I don't know... I'm questioning.
  • want unique products and services:
  • developing young people's capacities for imagination, creativity, and empathy will be increasingly important for maintaining the United States' competitive advantage in the future.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      IN a typical year, how often are your students asked to invent something from scratch?
  • The three look at one another blankly, and the student who has been doing all the speaking looks at me and shrugs.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      When teachers tell students WHY withouth making them investigate, then we are denying them a learning opportunity. STOP BEING THE SAGE ON THE STAGE!.
  • The test contains 80 multiple-choice questions related to the functions and branches of the federal government.
  • Let me tell you how to answer this one
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Drill and test is what we've made. Mindless robots is what we'll reap. What are we doing?
  • reading from her notes,
  • Each group will try to develop at least two different ways to solve this problem. After all the groups have finished, I'll randomly choose someone from each group who will write one of your proofs on the board, and I'll ask that person to explain the process your group used.”
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Every time I do a team project, the "random selection" is part of it. Randomly select -- classtools.net has a random name generator -- great tool - and it adds randomness to it.
  • a lesson in which students are learning a number of the seven survival skills while also mastering academic content?
  • students are given a complex, multi-step problem that is different from any they've seen in the past
  • how the group solved the problem, each student in every group is held accountable.
  • ncreasingly, there is only one curriculum: test prep. Of the hundreds of classes that I've observed in recent years, fewer than 1 in 20 were engaged in instruction designed to teach students to think instead of merely drilling for the test.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Not in my class, but in many classes - yes. I wonder how I'd teach differently if someone made me have a master "test" for my students at the end of the year. I'd be teaching to the test b/c I"m a type "A" driven to succeed kind of person. Beware what you measure lest that determine how you grow.
  • . It is working with colleagues to ensure that all students master the skills they need to succeed as lifelong learners, workers, and citizens.
  • I have yet to talk to a recent graduate, college teacher, community leader, or business leader who said that not knowing enough academic content was a problem.
  • critical thinking, communication skills, and collaboration.
  • seven survival skills every day, at every grade level, and in every class.
  • College and Work Readiness Assessment (www.cae.org)—that measure students' analytic-reasoning, critical-thinking, problem-solving, and writing skills.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Would like to look more at this test, however, also doing massive global collaborative projects requiring higher order thinking is something that is helpful, I think.
  • 2. Collaboration and Leadership
  • 3. Agility and Adaptability
  • Today's students need to master seven survival skills to thrive in the new world of work.
  • 4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
  • 6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
  • 7. Curiosity and Imagination
  • I conducted research beginning with conversations with several hundred business, nonprofit, philanthropic, and education leaders. With a clearer picture of the skills young people need, I then set out to learn whether U.S. schools are teaching and testing the skills that matter most.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Background on the research done by Tony Wagner.
  • “First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions,” Parker responded. “We can teach them the technical stuff, but we can't teach them how to ask good questions—how to think.”
    • Vicki Davis
       
      This is a great aspect of project based learning. Although when we allow students to have individual research topics, some teachers are frustrated because they cannot "can" their approach (especially tough if the class sizes are TOO LARGE,) students in this environment CAN and MUST ask individualized questions. This is TOUGH to do as the students who haven't developed critical thinking skills, whether because their parents have done their tough work for them (like writing their papers) or teachers have always given answers because they couldn't stand to see the student struggle -- sometimes tough love means the teacher DOESN'T give the child the answer -- as long as they are encouraged just enough to keep them going.
  • “I want people who can engage in good discussion—who can look me in the eye and have a give and take. All of our work is done in teams. You have to know how to work well with other
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Last Saturday, my son met Bill Curry, a football coach and player that he respects. Just before meeting him, my husband reviewed with my son how to meet people. HE told my son, "Look the man in his eyes and let him know your hand is there!" After shaking his hand, as Mr. Curry was signing my son's book, he said, "That is quite a handshake, son, someone has taught you well." Yes -- shaking hands and looking a person in the eye are important and must be taught. This is an essential thing to come from parents AND teachers -- I teach this with my juniors and seniors when we write resumes.
  • how to engage customers
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Engagi ng customers requires that a person stops thinking about their own selfish needs and looks at things through the eyes of the customer!!! The classic issue in marketing is that people think they are marketing to themselves. This happens over and over. Role playing, virtual worlds, and many other experiences can give people a chance to look at things through the eyes of others. I see this happen on the Ning of our projects all the time.
  • the world of work has changed profoundly.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Work has changed, school hasn't. In fact, I would argue that schools are more industrial age than ever with testing and manufacturing of common knowledge (which is often outdated by the time the test is given) at an all time high. Let them create!
  • Over and over, executives told me that the heart of critical thinking and problem solving is the ability to ask the right questions. As one senior executive from Dell said, “Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems.”
    • Vicki Davis
       
      We give students our critical questions -- how often do we let them ask the questions.
  • I say to my employees, if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. You'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed for not trying.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      If our students get eight out of 10 right, they are a low "B" student. Do we have projects where students can experiement and fail without "ruining their lives." Can they venture out and try new, risky things?
  • risk aversion
    • Vicki Davis
       
      He says risk aversion is a problem in companies -- YES it is. Although upper management SAYS they want people willing to take risks -- from my experience in the corporate world, what they SAY and what they REWARD are two different things, just ask a wall street broker who took a risky investment and lost money.
Dave Truss

twitter4teachers / FrontPage - 0 views

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    I'm a bit of a twitter snob- I tend mostly to follow back educators. I get the idea of diversification of information, but now that I'm following over 400 people I find that I prefer the education conversations and use Twitter for that purpose. My RSS is diversified, my Twitter is about education and learning.
  •  
    This wiki was created to easily help educators find other educators on Twitter that have the same interests as them (that teach in the same content area). Check out the list of educators on the pages linked below and add your Twitter name to the appropriate list too.
Kristin Hokanson

The Strength of Weak Ties » Tragedy of the Commons - 0 views

  • At its best, Twitter is a place to share a resource, a link to a new blog post, or an insight, and even a place to have a little fun. It’s a place that could be about learning. At its very worst, Twitter is a self-indulgent exercise in self-promotion and pettiness.
  • Those people that have lived off twitter at the expense of their aggregator, have in my opinion, traded in full meals for snack food.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      A great analogy for how Twitter falls into the menu of networked learning tools.
  • “God kills a kitten each time you count your Twitter followers. Please, think of the kittens.”
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  • We can decide what we want to read or what we do not want to read. We are big kids, right?
    • anonymous
       
      This is why I don't get most of the fuss about people not using twitter the way any particular person likes. If you don't like how someone uses twitter, don't follow them. What else is there to say?
  • Seriously, twitter is not OURS. If people want twitter to act and be used a certain way, it’s time to step up and create/find a service that allows this. For the record, I feel the same about blogging. Prescriptions for use bog us down and stifle creativity and innovation. But what do I know, I’m just a part-time teacher
  • I really enjoy my Twitter relationships
    • Kristin Hokanson
       
      The difference is you do have twitter RELATIONSHIPS and that is key. These are easy to develop with manageble followings ...when there are thousands of people "following you" like in the case of jakes, richardson...they don't need to follow back all the folks...because they do a good job of engaging in the conversation. without having to develop "relationships" with thousands. It would be impossible and would leave them as Shareski said, only constantly snacking
  • his post was about what I considered to be the abuse of Twitter by certain individuals, and the second grade playground mentality of who follows who, and who is in this group, who is in that group, etc. Because you know what, its there. It is, and its not pretty.
    • Kristin Hokanson
       
      I actually think this is a GOOD analogy. I have seen the ....can someone who follows @somebody please tell them.... because they don't follow me...posts...
  •  
    At its best, Twitter is a place to share a resource, a link to a new blog post, or an insight, and even a place to have a little fun. It's a place that could be about learning. At its very worst, Twitter is a self-indulgent exercise in self-promotion and pettiness.
Art Gelwicks

Comment on: Fluffy thinking in the edtech community…a waste of energy and time - 0 views

  • I’m not saying there isn’t a place and a time for strategic thinking, what I’m saying is that the edublogosphere is loaded to the freakin’ gills with it. How many ways can you discuss the innate digital skills of middle school students before realizing it’s worth more to talk about what works and doesn’t work with them. In this case the why is truly “academic”. We’ve twittered, blogged, bookmarked, tagged, forwarded, and flogged this horse to an amazing degree. What I don’t see is the same amount of energy in capturing what’s been done with the students, the successes and failures, in anything longer than 140 characters. If we want our teachers to learn to fish, we have to show them how to bait the hook and cast the line…not wonder if the fish are truly hungry.
  • voicethread.com used in first grade classroom so students are participating in asynchronous conversation and everyone gets to share on topic chosen by teacher. Combined with short recordings from audio enhancement classroom system help the teacher quickly post new content from class to the site.
    • Art Gelwicks
       
      This is the type of practical example I'm talking about. 30,000 ft. talk is great...only if you're able to land the plane too.
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    Annotated comments about this blog posting.
cory plough

Convert Youtube and Myspace Video to MP3! Only at VidtoMP3.com - 0 views

  •  
    convert youtube and other vids to mp3
Peggy George

RTI Action Network - Home - 0 views

  •  
    What is RTI? Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multi-tiered approach to help struggling learners. Students' progress is closely monitored at each stage of intervention to determine the need for further research-based instruction and/or intervention in general education, in special education, or both.
  •  
    Home page for RTI Action Network-discussed in live show linked from CR20 LIVE Conversations on 4-9-08. LD Live-Living with Learning Disabilities
Vicki Davis

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web - New York Times - 0 views

  • Open Content Alliance
  • , a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
  • Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.
  • Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.
  • libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.
  • “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”
  • The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material.
  •  
    This New York Times article on the Open Content Alliance is an essential article for librarians and media specialists to read. It is also important for those following the fight for information and control of that information. In this case, the Open Content Alliance wants to make books that they scan available to any search engine while Microsoft and google are aggressively approaching libraries for exclusive access to their content. (which could be rescanned by another later, possibly.) Librarians and media specialists should understand this... when will people approach schools to scan annuals or student produced works? Maybe that is a while off, but for now, be aware that it is probably inevitable.
  •  
    An overview of the Open Content Alliance versus Google and Microsoft battling to take control of the content housed in libraries.
Keith Hamon

The Strength of Weak Ties » Archive for December, 2007 - 0 views

  • In a typical high school, learning communities are fragmented and isolated, if they even exist at all. It’s unlikely that any of us would label a typical high school classroom, with its characteristic five rows of six desks, limited access to information and conversation, a learning community. Very little interaction exists within the classroom, and interaction from sources outside the four walls of the classroom is generally non-existent-the classroom walls, in effect, are impermeable.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a characteristic of hierarchical structures, which tend to be impermeable, or semipermeable, at best, and even then, the gateways are most carefully controlled and access is severely restricted.
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