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Martin Burrett

Children with autism thrive in mainstream pre-schools - 0 views

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    "In a world first, breakthrough research from La Trobe University has shown that toddlers with autism are just as capable of learning important life skills through early-intervention delivered in mainstream pre-schools as in specialised settings. Over a period of three years, 44 children aged between 15 and 32 months were randomly assigned to classrooms that included only children with autism or to classrooms with typically developing peers."
Dave Truss

ELT notes: IWBs and the Fallacy of Integration - 7 views

  • motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.
  • We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.
  • There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?
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  • We already know it's about shifting power. Tight teacher control is a hindrance to foster empowered students who own their learning paths. We need to be aware of the old way finding its way to surface in what we question.
  • Tech is tech no matter what it does. It's innovative in its nature.
  • We can tell by the huge resistance to it. If there is no resistance in the process, we are probably facing improvements and weighing their gains in efficiency points. Good enough, only it is not an innovation. Innovation is not about "more or better", it's about "different".
  • What is the school picture today? What does my working context look like?I see an illusion that technology is to be bought, taught, used in class and then we can expect everyone to be happy. This false assumption seems to be guiding managerial decisions. This is the same old story behind the idea of technology "integration".
  • I doubt formal courses can make people adopt informal ways of learning. Courses could change teacher behaviour and leave their mindset untouched.
  • students are not digital natives. They know very little about educational uses of the technology they have been using for entertainment purposes only. They are quite ready to resist thoughtful, time consuming uses of the same technology. Particularly if they have had no part in choosing or deciding together with the teacher how we would use it.
  • First things first. Stay out of the tug-of-war. It is not a moment to think if the school is wrong in imposing it and teachers are right in resisting it. It's probably the moment to get together and go ahead purposefully. This is short-term thinking, though. Somehow teachers need to communicate to managers that the buy-don't-ask is an unhealthy approach from now on.
  • Ideally, we should envision a future where authorities engage teachers in conversations before buying.
  • Innovative teaching practices require innovative management practices. Let's think of adoption models that rely on having one-to-one conversations with teachers, experimenting together, asking them how far they feel they need mentoring, identifying what makes teachers happy at work.
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    We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.
Vicki Davis

Are Finland's vaunted schools slipping? - 2 views

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    PISA Scores help and hurt... of course, the world won't be happy until every country and every child and every system is at the 100th percentile - something that won't happen. From Valerie Strauss about what Finland should do as the result of their "slipping" scores. In the Washington Post. "Finland should also continue to let national education and youth policies - and not PISA - drive what is happening in schools. Reading, science, and mathematics are important in Finnish education system but so are social studies, arts, music, physical education, and various practical skills. Play and joy of learning characterize Finland's pre-schools and elementary classrooms. "
Vicki Davis

ECRP. Vol 4 No 1. Moving up the Grades: Relationship between Preschool Model and Later ... - 2 views

  • This trend is especially prevalent in programs that serve low-income children. Compensatory early childhood programs such as Head Start and state-sponsored pre-kindergarten for low-income families and preschoolers with special needs are designed to help children acquire skills needed for later school success.
  • Beginning in the 1980s, leading early childhood experts expressed concern about the wisdom of overly didactic, formal instructional practices for young children (e.g., Elkind, 1986; Zigler, 1987). They feared that short-term academic gains would be offset by long-term stifling of children's motivation and self-initiated learning. Later research suggests that these early concerns were warranted
  • They cautioned that early academic gains in reading skills associated with didactic instruction of preschoolers "come with some costs" that could have long-term negative effects on achievement.
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  • imilarly, when the highly didactic Direct Instructional System for the Teaching of Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR) was discontinued after third grade, children's previously high achievement in reading and mathematics declined
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    Interesting study of children, preschool and later school success. "Children's later school success appears to have been enhanced by more active, child-initiated early learning experiences. Their progress may have been slowed by overly academic preschool experiences that introduced formalized learning experiences too early for most children's developmental status."
Jeff Johnson

College Board Will Offer a New Test Next Fall - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college. The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.
Stephanie Sandifer

Op-Ed Contributor - Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Great article on the intelligence and learning capabilities of infants and toddlers -- has implications for how we approach pre-school learning with children.
Ted Sakshaug

Lure of the Labyrinth - 11 views

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    Lure of the Labyrinth is a digital game for middle-school pre-algebra students. It includes a wealth of intriguing math-based puzzles wrapped into an exciting narrative game in which students work to find their lost pet - and save the world from monsters! Linked to both national and state mathematics standards, the game gives students a chance to actually think like mathematicians.
Kathy Benson

BBC - Schools - Pre-school - 0 views

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    rhyme time
Ed Webb

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 19 views

  • Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.
  • Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship. What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. In a recent study by the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, teenagers did a simulated high-risk driving task while they were lying in an fMRI brain-imaging machine. The reward system of their brains lighted up much more when they thought another teenager was watching what they did—and they took more risks.
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
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  • contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.
  • first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness "Romeo and Juliet." But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience. You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them. You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again. Expertise comes with experience.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies. For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27
  • experience shapes the brain. People often think that if some ability is located in a particular part of the brain, that must mean that it's "hard-wired" and inflexible. But, in fact, the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses. Our social and cultural life shapes our biology.
Suzie Nestico

Teaching and Assessing Creativity - WeAreTeachers - 1 views

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    Useful rubrics for assessing creativity & innovation Catalina rubric on critical and creative thinking (as well as several other fantastic rubrics): http://www.cfsd16.org/public/_century/centMain.aspx   Metiri's creativity rubric http://akron4.metiri.wikispaces.net/Creativity+Rubrics   A great blog post on the subject by The Science Goddess, one of my favorite Twitter people to follow: http://blog.whatitslikeontheinside.com/2009/10/curiouser-and-curiouser.html   Good perspective from a career cluster perspective: http://www.careerclusters.org/resources/institutes/cci2006/pre-institute/Creativity-InnovationFinal....  
John Evans

About Us | SchoolWAX TV - 0 views

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    SchoolWAX TV was designed with students, teachers, and parents in mind. All uploaded videos are pre-screened and approved by our moderators before ever showing up on the site. It may take 1 to 2 days for an uploaded video to appear for that very fact, but we know that being able to guarantee 100% safe educational content makes it worth the slight delay.
Julie Altmark

iLearn Technology » Blog Archive » The Pre-Raph Pack - 3 views

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    Featured Post Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving What it is: Scholastic has amazing resources all year long but the interactive on The First Thanksgiving is topnotch!  Students learn about how the Pilgrims reached America, and what daily life was before the First Thanksgiving.  Students can take a tour of the Mayflower, take the virtual journey to America, compare and contrast modern life with when the Pilgrims lived (housing, clothes, food, chores, school, games), and the Thanksgiving feast.  There is a great slideshow and play a webquest feature where kids can learn more about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag and the famous harvest feast.  The site includes audio for every page and activity.  This is great for younger students. How to integrate Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving into the classroom: The First Thanksgiving is a collection of great activities for students to learn about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims.  Students can use this site independently as young as first grade because of the audio features on The First Thanksgiving.  The site can be used as a center activity that a few students can explore together, independently in the computer lab setting, or as a whole class with a projector or interactive whiteboard.  The webquest at the end of the activity checks for student understanding with a quiz.  Increase students participation further with some The First Thanksgiving bonus features and extras.  Print out a Thanksgiving Readers theater, door signs, a fact hunt, a vocabulary quiz, and some letters from historical figures.  There are also research and historical fiction journals that students can continue learning with.  These range from a Plymoth Colony research starter to Our America: Colonial period. Tips: Check out Scholastic's Teaching resources for The First Thanksgiving as well as the literature connections that are available. Leave a comment and share how you are using The First Thanksgiving  in your classroom. Read More
Vicki Davis

Income, Parental Education Linked To Pre-School Learning Gaps - 3 views

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    This Huffington Post article summarizing findings from a recent Brookings Institute study showing that parental income and education are more highly linked to a child's preschool success than anything else. It also presents the naysayers making for a balanced overview of this report that has lots of people talking.
David Warlick

2¢ Worth » Search Results » anchored - 0 views

shared by David Warlick on 28 Jul 09 - Cached
  • 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.
    • David Warlick
       
      It points to the skills required for the future!
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