Group items tagged

And don't swallow the myth of the digital native. Just because your teens Facebook, IM, and Youtube, don't assume they know the rhetoric of blogging, collective knowledge gathering techniques of taggers and social bookmarkers, collaborative norms of wiki work, how to tune and feed a Twitter network, the art of multimedia argumentation - and, by far most importantly, online crap detection.

I teach courses today on social media issues at Stanford and Berkeley.

The most important critical uncertainty today is how many of us learn to use digital media and networks effectively, reasonably, credibly, collaboratively, civilly, humanely.

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mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”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

What is the history behind the tool? The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) was developed to help guide the complex task of evaluating technology integration in the classroom. Basic technology skills and integration of technology into the curriculum go hand-in-hand to form teacher technology literacy. Encouraging the seamless use of technology in all curriculum areas and promoting technology literacy are both key NCLB:Title II-D/EETT program purposes. The Inventory for Teacher Technology Skills (ITTS) companion tool is designed to help districts evaluate teachers’ current levels of proficiency with technology and is also used as a professional development planning and needs assessment resource. The TIM is envisioned as an EETT program resource which can help support the full integration of technology in Florida schools. What is in each cell? Each cell in the matrix will have a video (or several videos) which illustrate the integration of technology in classrooms where only a few computers are available and/or classrooms where every student has access to a laptop computer.

Transformation  The teacher creates a rich learning environment in which students regularly engage in activities that would have been impossible to achieve without technology.

Active

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.

In a pre-life-long Learning environment, the task of education was to teach all of us the knowledge and skills that we would need to know and to know how to do to become employed. After our schooling, we got a job, and kept that job for 35 years. We did some learning “on the job”, but not for the sake of a changing environment. It was for the sake of our job. It was considered part of the job.

Much of what is called virtual education is really just bad teaching done on the cheap. Most of what I have seen offered as online courses for students doesn’t rise to the level of a mail-order correspondence course. There may be no lectures, but there is no deep learning to be found either. Teachers don’t know their students and the pedagogical emphasis is on product over process.

Don’t tell me that online education delivers individualization. The concept of delivery is itself the enemy of learning. Individualization is not customizing the pace of the multiple choice tests, but knowing the

strive to create learner-centered, project-based, collaborative, non-coercive environments in which students learn through a community of practice

Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions.

All these acts are collaborative and democratic, and all occur amid a worldwide community of voices.

with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.

what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy

it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time

Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.