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Vicki Davis

Dangerously Irrelevant: NECC - Edubloggercon, Web 2.0 Smackdown, Chicks That Click - 0 views

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    This is an excellent summary of the tools shared in Web 2.0 smackdown.
Dave Truss

Don't teach your kids this stuff. Please? - Dangerously Irrelevant - 38 views

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    A cheeky, but effective look at why 'this stuff' is what we should be teaching our students.
Adrienne Michetti

Comparing ICT use in education across countries | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Educa... - 7 views

  • we still do not have reliable, globally comparable data in this area
  • basic answers to many basic questions about the use of technology in schools around the world remain largely unanswered
  • Recent World Bank technical assistance related to ICT use in education has highlighted the fact that internationally comparable data related to ICT use in education do not exist -- and that this absence is a problem
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  • "It is a mistake to separate out technology infrastructure from pedagogical practices."
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Yes, this is true, but very difficult to measure
  • will begun to be collected in late 2010 as part of the general statistical gathering that UIS coordinates with all countries in the world.
  • At first glance, it might appear to some that, generally speaking, the more hours of recommended hours per use of computers might correlate well with how 'advanced' a country is in its use of ICTs in schools.  In fact, the opposite is often the case. 
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      another reason why pedagogy can not be separated from the IT use. It's not enough to simply put a computer in front of a child.
  • In countries considered 'advanced' in ICT use, especially in 1-to-1 computing environments (like Uruguay, for example), laptops are (essentially) always available, but use is not officially prescribed/recommended for a specific period of time.
  • that less developed countries where ICT use in relatively new may well report that ICT use is recommended more than in more 'advanced' countries where ICTs are more mainstreamed in education.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      American educators, are you reading this???
  • it highlights the fact that that simple conclusions drawn from such data can be quite dangerous. 
  • That said, the building of a universal  index related to ICT use in education is especially problemmatic, given the the number of assumptions and value judgements that would need to be made about the importance or weight of individual indicators -- and that cross-national data collection in this area is still in its infancy
  • the fast changing nature of technology requires regular adaptation and change.
  • As we do so, the fact that the UIS will be collecting basic data on where things stand today in all countries in the world will greatly contribute to our collective ability to track developments and changes in this increasingly vital and strategic area of investment for governments and societies around the world. 
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      I'm thinking the data collectors should talk to Hans Rosling.. I bet he has some ideas about how to go about this properly!
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    Fascinating article about upcoming data to be collected on international ICT use in education. So many challenges.
Andrew Barras

Is 'The School of One' the future of schooling? - Dangerously Irrelevant - 13 views

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    Completely awesome new model for schooling. customization!
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    Completely awesome new model for schooling. Customization!
Ed Webb

The LMS and the adolescence of web learning « Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog - 8 views

  • there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.
  • Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)
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    Sound pedagogical reasons to resist the omnipresence of Blackborg
David Hilton

Constructivism - 0 views

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    Links, research and readings on constructivism
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    Constructivist theories grew out of the work of a couple of Russians around the time of the Russian Revolution. It is radical subjectivism dressed up as science, and has no scientific credibility whatsoever. It is used by radical educators to push their barrow that nothing the teacher knows is worth the student learning and that all knowledge is innate. It's bullsh*t. Theories like this rot are part of the reason that the bottom has dropped out of Western education and we have a generation who can't write. This should be resisted by any educator with an interest in educational excellence.
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    David, back up your argument. If you think this is junk science, then be a real scientist and substantiate your claim. I'm a very objective thinker and will listen and gladly debate this with you, but having studied this and used it, I'm skeptical of your dissent. It is the only thing that has gotten me through our failed education system, not the reason the system has failed (unless your argument is that our system is failing due to lack of use of constructivist approaches).
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    Constructivism is a prime example of the dangers of deductive reasoning. Instead of starting with evidence from observed reality which the scientific method dictates (inductive reasoning) constructivism starts with theories and then makes the evidence fit the theory or else dismisses it and rationalises it away. It's the same type of thinking that has gotten all ideologues into trouble throughout history, whether it's the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis, the hippies or the recent Wall Street bankers who drove our economy off a cliff. Any true system of thought must start with the real world as its beginning, or else it's just a bunch of people making stuff up and then defending it despite all evidence to the contrary until the weight of truth destroys them and usually the institutions they've taken over.
Fabian Aguilar

What Do School Tests Measure? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago.
  • Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
  • Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
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  • More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate.
  • Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know.
  • An almost exclusive focus on raising test scores usually leads to teaching to the test, denies rich academic content and fails to promote the pleasure in learning, and to motivate students to take responsibility for their own learning, behavior, discipline and perseverance to succeed in school and in life.
  • Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.
  • Students, families and groups that have been marginalized in the past are hurt most when the true purposes of education are not addressed.
  • lein. Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
  • The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
  • This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows.
  • Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking.
  • First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills.
  • Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
  • Reliable and valid standardized tests can be one way to measure what some students have learned. Although they may be indicators of future academic success, they don’t “prepare” students for future success.
  • Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
  • Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
  • The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
  • While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world.
  • Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it.
  • The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
tee1962 Reagan

Technology in Education Leadership Day - 0 views

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    Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant fame invited edubloggers (educational bloggers) worldwide to post (write in our blogs) about digital technologies. Here are bookmared posts I collected from the day.
Dave Truss

Dangerously Irrelevant: It's not 'the tests.' It's us. - 0 views

  • It's not ‘the tests.’ It's our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better. It's not ‘the tests.’ It's us.
    • Dave Truss
       
      Note the highlighted comment as well- scary!
  • In my state, students don't take standardized tests until third grade, but test preparation was a major focus in K-2. Students did little but complete worksheet after worksheet in kindergarten. The block corner was gone, there was no snack time, the dress-up box was taken away, and recess was reduced to just a few minutes. My son and his classmates sat at their little tables and silently filled out worksheets for the majority of the day. Talking, laughing or getting out of your seat was frowned upon. In first grade, the timed math tests began. Shortly after students learned how to add and subtract, they were given daily math facts timed tests in order to "prepare" them for the ITBS math computation tests in third grade. Those lucky enough to pass the tests had their names posted on the winners wall in the classroom. Those who couldn't pass, were sent to the hallway to do flashcards with parent volunteers. In second grade, the timed oral reading tests began. Each week, all students were required to read aloud as fast as they could while they were timed with a stop watch. Those that could spit the words out quickly enough to meet the benchmark number were rewarded with free reading time. Those that were deemed too slow, were given practice pages to read aloud, over and over again. In third grade, they started timed writing tests. His classroom held a weekly contest to see who could write a paragraph the fastest using that week's vocabulary words. The vocabulary words were test prep for ITBS. The fastest child's paragraph was posted on the wall for all to admire. Kids learned very early on that faster meant smarter and that slower meant stupid. NCLB plays a part in the way school has been reduced to test preparation, but teachers chose to use all of these truly awful methods in the classroom. Teachers could have chosen different, more engaging, and more developmentally appropriate teaching methods, but they didn't.
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    We must take ownership of our own culpability... It's not 'the tests.' It's our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better. It's not 'the tests.' It's us.
Vicki Davis

12-02 ISTE conference keynote update - The crowd speaks! - Dangerously Irrelevant - 4 views

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    Current update and overview on ISTE keynoting process as it stands today.
John Marr

Don't show, don't tell? - MIT News Office - 11 views

  • Don’t show, don’t tell? Cognitive scientists find that when teaching young children, there is a trade-off between direct instruction and independent exploration. Emily Finn, MIT News Office
  • It turns out that there is a “double-edged sword” to pedagogy: Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery.
  • The danger is leading children to believe that they’ve learned all there is to know, thereby discouraging independent discovery.
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  • To study this phenomenon, the researchers built an original toy
  • they recruited 85 preschool-age children to interact with the toy under one of four conditions: pedagogical, interrupted, naïve and baseline.
  • In the pedagogical condition, the experimenter said, “Look at my toy! This is how my toy works,” and demonstrated the squeak function twice (but made no mention of the other functions).
  • Many children in the pedagogical condition failed to discover even one function in addition to the squeak, while children in the other three conditions found, on average, one or two functions they had not been taught. What’s more, children in the pedagogical condition spent less time playing with the toy — less than two minutes, on average — than children in the other conditions, whose times ranged from slightly more than two minutes in the naïve condition to longer than three minutes in the baseline condition.
  • “The whole double-edged sword concept is really interesting,” says Susan Gelman, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “In almost any domain and across different cultures, we engage in spontaneous teaching. It doesn’t have to be in the classroom, we just naturally do this with young children — we show them how things are done, point out what’s important. This study shows how sensitive children are to the kind of cues that signal teaching.” Further experiments may want to examine differences in children’s behavior across cultures, she adds.
  • the study underscores the real-world trade-offs between education and exploration, and the importance of acknowledging what is unknown even while imparting what is known. Teachers should, where possible, offer the caveat that there may be more to learn.
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    Recent study found that if you explain "all aspects" of a toy, children are less likely to discover new uses. If you allow them to "play and experiment" they will discover new a creative uses. This should be taken into account in teaching.
Deron Durflinger

Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 4 views

  • “killer applications
  • Competition
  • The Scientific Revolution
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  • Modern Medicine
  • The Consumer Society
  • The Work Ethic
  • The Rule of Law and Representative Government.
  • these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
  • the great divergence
  • They also grew more powerful
  • 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.
  • tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.
  • But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
  • Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans
  • Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.
  • On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection
  • The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers
  • The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
  • Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too
  • the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
  • Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
  • Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
  • What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic
  • And finally we need to reboot our whole system.
  • If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
  • Western Civilization's Killer Apps
  • COMPETITION
  • THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
  • THE RULE OF LAW
  • MODERN MEDICINE
  • THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
  • THE WORK ETHIC
Vicki Davis

Listening to James Baldwin | My Year of Teaching Dangerously - 3 views

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    Writing Teacher Shannon Carey is teaching writing this year with an edge. Using the idea of "writing as resistance" she's helping kids find their voice on hard, tough topics and daring them to write great things. Read this blog post for ideas and to see some cool things you can do to challenge great writing.
Martin Burrett

The danger of colour stereotypes by @BoltCallum - 0 views

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    "Colours promote such emotion and are attributed to everything we see every day. Children are taught from a very young age that the sky and the ocean are blue, the grass and leaves are green, that the sun, sand and sunflowers are yellow and the night is black. But I ask you, how often have you looked at the ocean and seen green, not blue or looked up into the branches and seen a selection of oranges, yellows, browns and reds not a blanket of green. I am not suggesting that we shouldn't teach children these colour clichés, at a young age they are their first experiences of colour and form the bases of many of their first art pieces."
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