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Are you a Thought Leader? | The Social Media Hat - 3 views

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    I love these thoughts about being a thought leader. I think also, this could be said of leaders in schools as well. "It's important that if you want to be a Thought Leader in your industry, you take the time to develop your thoughts and publish information that will educate, entertain and engage your readers. Think about the issues you've worked through yourself in the past with your business and talk about those. Share your challenges and how you struggled to get through them, but what you did eventually to achieve success. Or, sometimes even more enlightening, share your failures, and how you're working never to experience that particular failure again. An old Afghan proverb I heard on the radio last week said, "If you think you're leading, and no one's following, you're just going for a walk.""
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Embrace Adaptive Testing - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 7 views

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    I have to admit that it was very hard to put into a few short words my thoughts on adaptive learning. I didn't really intend for it to center on the testing piece but I guess that is what the editors thought hadn't already been covered, although I do agree with everything I said on it. Of course, many will say we need much more than testing but I think the big point is that pencil and paper don't cut it. We are wasting time with how we test now and can be much more targeted in terms of what students know and how we can teach. Your thoughts? The biggest thing that bothers me about all these apps is that we have no learning analytics - no feedback loop at all to parents or teachers. I literally have to watch my son play his ipad learning games to really understand where he is and what I need to do to fill things in. 
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Book: Learning with Leonardo by Ian Warwick & Ray Speakman via @JohnCattEd - 0 views

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    "From the outset, I want to be clear - Leonardo da Vinci, not Leonardo DiCaprio. But don't despair, there is a still a lot Mr da Vinci has to offer in our modern world, with many of seven key concepts that drove his inventive thinking still helping to influence our creative thinking. Ray Speakman and Ian Warwick, in their book, look closely at the seven key concepts that influenced da Vinci's life, and how they can make our own learning more original and thoughtful. The seven key concepts are no big secret, but the authors frame them into a modern narrative that makes understanding ourselves, nature and reality possible. Throughout, much is made of Leonardo's notebooks - the sanctuary where he noted his observations, thoughts and discoveries - where he was constantly pushing his understanding to the edges of what was possible during the period he lived. A lot can be learned from such an approach, as jotting down our thoughts, discoveries and inspirations can help us organise our minds - and could be beneficial for many young learners."
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Evernote shared notebook: Evernote Help - 21 views

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    This is my favorite Evernote "help" shared notebook tha I've found from spgscott. I've subscribed to peruse and learn about these things. I almost wonder if we're seeing the evolution of the textbook. What would happen if we could subscribe to the current research and thoughts of a leading scientist? Are we ready for that sort of messy insight into the minds and thoughts of a person who is turning over ideas in their mind. I"m not sure that we are.
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Changing- Shifting a School Culture- Train of Thought | Langwitches Blog - 9 views

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    Lately my thoughts and efforts are shifting from figuring out how to get educators familiar and comfortable enough to use technology, as just another teaching tool to how to change or facilitate a shift of a school's culture into a learning community.
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About us | Cosas que encuentro para clase - 2 views

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    Spin-off from the Facebook group with the same name which some teachers created last year. Most of us are teachers at Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas, and we like to share ideas, links and debate in Facebook, but we thought that all these posts would be better organized if we had a group so they wouldn't be lost among other entries in our personal Facebook wall. When the group started to grow (there are 92 of us already), we realized that we were missing some kind of categorization, so we thought a blog would do the trick. And here we are. We choose the ideas that are more popular among the posts in our group in Facebook and write a post here.
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Change Magazine - September-October 2010 - 13 views

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    It is important to read things even if you know from the title that you'll disagree. This article is sure to spark controversy and be embraced by those who want to keep a traditional classroom in rows where kids listen to lecture. While I'm not in an ivory tower, my experience in the power of the face to face classroom has convinced me that when I teach and integrate all different senses that students learn better. I've also seen (and quoted in Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds in the Choice chapter that discusses differentiation) that dual encoding (listening to words while reading them) improves the ability to learn to read. (I'll have to look in the book for the sources of research.) I do think, however, there are some good points here, although I firmly believe their conclusion that students are going to learn no matter how they relate to content -- is inaccurate. The lines are being drawn between those who want to change and use technology and those who want the status quo. Nonetheless, if you lose your ability to read things you do not agree with, and engage in thoughtful conversation, then you miss the point of being well educated. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this study.
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Some thoughts on blogging and copyright, trademark, cyberstalking and more - I Speak of... - 7 views

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    It is unfortunate that controversy is surrounding autism and yet it is something misunderstood by many. Here is an article on Liz Ditz's blog going back to an issue that arose in December when she quoted a person's Facebook who then denied the posting and accused Liz of hacking the account and writing the comments herself. I am not on the inside of this but am watching as the outcome has implications for my own thoughts of digital citizenship. I am just saddened any time a person is taken of a mission to help others because of flame wars and it doesn't look like this one is going to stop soon. All I know is I have been reading Liz's blog for quite some time and although I don't know her personally, I find the charges leveled against her doubtful from what I do know.
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Speculation on the future of Google Reader - 0 views

  • Last night, Google announced the shutdown of many experimental products that weren’t really generating any revenue: Notebook, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, and Jaiku. One product that survived the ravaging but shares many of the same characteristics as the discontinued services also happens to be one of our favorites: Google Reader
  • Now, I think the answer to that question is unequivocally “no,” (and a Google exec has since confirmed as much) as Google has too many smart people that are connected enough to the industry to know that Reader is an essential product for many of the company’s biggest enthusiasts.
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    Google reader - is it next?
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    As Google shuts down unprofitable services, this thought that they'll shut down Google Reader - my trusty and favorite RSS reader just sends chills down my spine - I use it to generate my reader lists on my blogs. I have to question that Google is not looking at the affect of what we call "penetration rate" into the services people use - if they push us to ZohoNotebook (which is what they've done) and force us to another reader, what else will we start using. Just thought Google was going in the right direction with things and now... well, they just seem to be pooping lots of parties.
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Sex education - Eloise's thoughts and fancies - 0 views

  • it's about a rather surprising and to me quite worrying difference in how we teach adults about coping with it.
  • Anyway, this person during their nursing training had quite extensive training about how to cope with patients getting 'frisky' during treatment. He, being gay, found the compulsory training quite a giggle personally, although he did realise that it has the potential to be a real issue for some of the other people he was training with. The teacher training covers the potential issues in about 10 minutes, and basically says "don't do it" but doesn't offer any strategies for coping with it.
  • hat 10 minutes saying "Don't do it" is certainly excellent advice, is it really sufficient?
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  • But for teachers in their 20's it strikes me as more of an issue, and something we might like to address. Any thoughts?
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    Thoughts about how we might be failing our student teachers.
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ED in '08 Blogger Summit - 0 views

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    Conference for educational bloggers -- too bad it is in the waning weeks of the school year.
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    Join thought leaders in education policy and national politics to discuss how the Internet is changing the discourse of education reform, and how those changes are affecting the 2008 presidential election. ED in '08 welcomes ed-bloggers and political bloggers to take part in the discussion. I'm glad the "thought leaders" in American can come, however, the timing of this conference precludes most teachers I know from even considering coming we're all in the "home stretch" and rarely are we able to leave the classroom, especially this time of year. I would hope that one day the edublogosphere would truly level us so that teachers would be included in these discussions. For, until that happens, I doubt we'll find any truly relevant change for the classroom.. just more buzzwords and "programs" that don't suit today's student. Hint: If you want reform, ask some good teachers or at least include them in the discussion. There are some big picture thinkers out there that ARE teachers in the public classroom.
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Langwitches Blog » Learning: Then & Now - 11 views

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    ...by creating visuals, I support my own learning and understanding. * Ideas that I am trying to articulate become clearer in my mind * I am able to formulate and recall the connections between thoughts better * The sequence of my train of thought becomes apparent or can be revised better
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What Are Your Thoughts on Educational Blogging? | Sue Waters Blog - 7 views

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    1. Demonstrate how conversations in blog comments provides greater knowledge gain for all involved, because each individual sees a different perspective of the task - giving everyone greater "food for thought!" 2. Model personal learning networks in action!
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5 things learnt in 5 years of teaching by @Mr_Gillett - 1 views

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    "Maybe it is something to do with starting something new, but when I started thinking about my new role as Head of Science, I thought I should write a blog. This led me to re-discover the blog I had wanted to start before starting teaching. Unsurprisingly, I failed to keep going with the blog during the first chaotic years of teaching, but now I think it will be really useful and so I am going to stick with it this time! Since the previous post was 5 years ago, I thought I would start with a very general blog about five of the big lessons I have learnt since starting teaching."
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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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Thought Questions - Asking the right questions is the answer. - 14 views

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    This site contains hundreds of fascinating images with thought-provoking questions. These are a great resource for class discussions and philosophy. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/PSHE%2C+RE%2C+Citizenship%2C+Geography+%26+Environmental
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Personalized Assessment «Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech - 7 views

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    Interesting thoughts here from Dean with great examples. 
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apophenia: "Born Digital" by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser - 0 views

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    John Pederson pointed me to Danah Boyd's post about the new book "Born Digital" by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Danah describes the book as: "Intended for broad audiences, "Born Digital" creates a conversation between adult concerns, policy approaches, technological capabilities, and youth practice. This is not an ethnography, but JP and Urs build on and connect to ongoing ethnographic research concerning digital youth culture. This is not a parent's guide, but JP and Urs's framework will benefit any parent who wishes to actually understand what's taking place and what the implications are. This is not a policy white paper, but policy makers would be foolish to ignore the book because JP and Urs provide a valuable map for understanding how the policy debates connect to practice and technology. The contribution "Born Digital" makes is in the connections that it makes between youth practices, adult fears, technology, and policy. If you care at all about these issues, this book is a MUST-READ." Danah also goes on to give a great disclaimer to the "academics in the room", those who are very wary and weary of the term "Digital Native". I just ordered this from Amazon - can't wait to share my thoughts on it!
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