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Wade Ren

diigo? | Alex's reflecting pool - 0 views

  • I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes. So far these are my thoughts: I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.
Jeff Johnson

Transliteracy / Participatory Media Literacy - 0 views

  • Transliteracy is a new term derived from the verb 'to transliterate', meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language. Today we extend the act of transliteration and apply it to the increasingly wide range of communication platforms and tools at our disposal. From early signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV & film to networked digital media, the concept of transliteracy provides a cohesion of communication modes relevant to reading, writing, interpretation and interaction.
Ruth Howard

LFE.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 4 views

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    Any of the resources inside CommittedSardines are mind extending educational resources. This pdf tracks future trends that exponentially impact us and directly applies them to the field of education.
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    Good find, Ruth. Very interesting read.
David Wetzel

Project Based Learning in Mathematics: Learning Activities in Math Designed to Extend C... - 13 views

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    Six math projects that integrate real-world math problems are presented as a teaching strategy for helping students develop a greater understanding of math.
Michael Walker

10 Things Teachers Should Know to Get Started with Twitter - Arizona K-12 Center Blog - 21 views

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    Great tips getting Educators started using Twitter.
Joseph Alvarado

Tools of the Mind | Extended Campus | Metro State - 8 views

  • Tools of the Mind is a research-based early childhood program that builds strong foundations for school success in preschool and kindergarten children by promoting their intentional and self-regulated learning. In a series of rigorous experimental trials, Tools of the Mind has been shown to have a significant impact on self-regulation of preschool children. The study also found these gains in self-regulation to be related to scores in child achievement in early literacy and mathematics.
Michael Walker

Developing Hybrid Learning Environments - Synthesizing Education - 13 views

  • There are two keys to building the kind of trust required to make the new system successful. The first is to train teachers to effectively facilitate student learning without being the center of attention on a daily basis. This means teachers must develop a new skill set that hybridizes their content knowledge as well as their ability to transfer that knowledge to other fields. The number one trait that districts will be using to judge new teachers in the years to come: flexibility.
  • The second emphasis should be on generating this type of hybrid learning on a district level before extending beyond the walls of local control.
  • districts should begin working with isolated courses and training their staff gradually to facilitate these types of learning environments.
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    Ideas on PD for Hybrid instruction
Suzie Nestico

Using Diigo in the Classroom - Student Learning with Diigo - 42 views

  • Save important websites and access them on any computer. Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups. Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information. Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time. Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes." View any annotations made by others on any website visited. Share websites with groups or the entire Diigo social network. Comment on the bookmarks of others or solicit comments to your shared bookmarks.
  • Professional Development Beyond extended student learning, Diigo can be used as a form of professional development. Diigo has several educator groups that are active in sharing and collaborating on bookmarks relevant to education. This group has almost 10,000 members. You can find over 200 other Diigo K-12 education groups here.
David Wetzel

Project Based Learning in Mathematics: Learning Activities in Math Designed to Extend C... - 21 views

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    Six math projects that integrate real-world math problems are presented as a teaching strategy for helping students develop a greater understanding of math.
Suzie Nestico

Teaching with Evernote: A 6th and 8th Grade Science Teacher Shares His Top Ti... - 27 views

  • For extending the classroom beyond school walls I put up a daily itinerary on the whiteboard for my students to see what we’ll be working on that day. For anyone who isn’t in class, I snap a photo of it and put it in Evernote. You can see all of the past daily itineraries in my Shared Notebook. I use JotNot to take those shots, which integrates really well with Evern
  • vernote’s Shared Notebooks became a simple way for me to give students a way to access class notes, worksheets, PowerPoints and labs. Even though they couldn’t make it to class, they didn’t fall behind.
Michael Walker

Progressive Education - 0 views

  • As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed, “Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning, multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
  • Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people
  • Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
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  • Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model.
  • A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own coun
  • “What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
  • Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
  • students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
  • Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
  • they design it with them
  • what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.
  • A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
  • A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning — they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
  • Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
  • Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of initiative.
  • For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12]  But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
Ruth Howard

YoYo Games | Game Maker - 1 views

  • Do you want to develop computer games without spending countless hours learning how to become a programmer? Then you've come to the right place. Game Maker allows you to make exciting computer games, without the need to write a single line of code. Making games with Game Maker is a lot of fun.
  • Using easy to learn drag-and-drop actions, you can create professional looking games within very little time. You can make games with backgrounds, animated graphics, music and sound effects, and even 3D games! And when you've become more experienced, there is a built-in programming language, which gives you the full flexibility of creating games with Game Maker. What is best, is the fact that Game Maker can be used free of charge. You can do anything you want with the games you produce, you can even sell them! Also, if you register your copy of Game Maker, you can unlock extra functions, which extend the capabilities of the program. Game Maker comes preloaded with a collection of freeware images and sounds to get you started.
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    students create their own games and review others- no coding programing needed
Fabian Aguilar

American Cultures 2.0 - 0 views

  • If we want students to become citizens who understand their role as a citizen then we need to teach them to understand and respect the power of questions.
  • Without the freedom and courage to ask that paradigm shifting question then progress and innovation would cease to exist and we would become slaves to our past and out-dated solutions.
  • The power of just one word can totally change the meaning of something as intrinsic as national identity.
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  • The more students have an opportunity to read, speak and write the more they are going to understand the power of words.
  • The moment students craft words meant not just for the teacher and a few other peers, but for the wider world, is the moment students learn that a misplaced, mispronounced, or misspelled word has consequences far beyond a grade. These authentic learning opportunities are crucial to prepare students for the new realities of a more global and transparent world.
  • Students (and teachers) need to understand that everything they do communicates, whether they know what they are communicating or not.
  • Once students really figure out who they are and what they stand for then they can more comfortably be themselves. However, an important social skill that many students have difficulty grasping is knowing appropriate social norms in various settings.
  • Anyone can be a teacher... if you are alert and willing to learn from others. We need to teach students to be alert and willing to learn from sources other than textbooks. We need to teach students how to create and cultivate learning from a personal learning network, in order to extend the traditional capabilities of school from the limited hours of the school day to the unlimited hours beyond the school day. The informal classroom of life offers lessons far more valuable than the classroom if only we are open to learning from each other each and every day.
Rob Jacobs

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME - 0 views

  • Searching. As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search.
    • Rob Jacobs
       
      In a Professional Networked Learnign Collaborative the value of each memeber as a node or link to a network is mutliplied.
Suzie Nestico

Jim Klein :: Weblog :: To those who would lead... - 9 views

  • What we must never forget, no matter what circumstances are forced upon us, is that without failure, there is no success. We learn when we fail. We grow when we fall. Science is all about learning from failure, and failure is a key component of innovation, without which nothing would ever be tried. The right technology brings with it the opportunity to create environments where students have the opportunity to not just fail, but to fail gracefully, recover quickly, and move forward having learned from the experience in a non-threatening way.
    • Suzie Nestico
       
      Seems, by far, to be one of the most powerful statements in this blog.  As educators, we need to remind our students how very important failure can be.  Not to suggest we purport failure as a good thing, but that we emphasize it as part of a growth model.
  • As is so well stated by Weston & Bain (2010), "Bransford et al (2000), Jonassen (2000, 2004, 2006, 2008), and Jonassen et al. (1999), fix the future of educational technology in cognitive tools that shape and extend human capabilities. Cognitive tools blur the unproductive distinctions that techno-critics make between computers and teaching and learning (Bullen & Janes, 2007; Hukkinen, 2008; Kommers et al., 1992; Lajoie, 2000). When technology enables, empowers, and accelerates a profession's core transactions, the distinctions between computers and professional practice evaporate.
  • For instance, when a surgeon uses an arthriscope to trim a cartilage (Johnson & Pedowitz, 2007), a structural engineer uses computer-assisted design software to simulate stresses on a bridge (Yeomans, 2009), or a sales manager uses customer-relations-management software to predict future inventory needs (Baltzen & Phillips, 2009), they do not think about technology. Each one thinks about her or his professional transaction." 
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    Must read about considerations for the future directions of our schools and developing the 21st Century learner.
Ed Webb

The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and... - 1 views

  • In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
  • The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
  • faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
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  • remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out
  • The dual delivery model—in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material—is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching—or some combination of the two— will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.
  • Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.
  • Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures
  • faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.
  • treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care.
  • In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.
  • A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders. In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.
  • Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.
  • while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online
  • Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.
  • When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously. 
  • when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor’s permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike (as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set? 
  • Students’ exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be “liberal” or “left” by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students’ education.
  • In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere—and as a public sphere unto itself—is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society’s self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development. 
  • The free and broad pursuit—and critique—of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.
  • Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified—and opposition to them discredited—using Margaret Thatcher’s famous line that “there is no alternative.” This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli—the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.
  • The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online—or teach them simultaneously online and in person—is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students
  • Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
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