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Dave Truss

What Makes a Great Teacher? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 27 views

  • Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
  • one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.
  • Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.
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  • “We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”
  • On the front wall, Mr. Taylor has posted different hand signals—if you need to go to the bathroom, you raise a closed hand. To ask or answer a question, you raise an open hand. “This way, I have the information before I even call on you,”
  • Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing.
  • I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things.”
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    Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully-for the next day or the year ahead-by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
Theresa Allen

Teacher Wall - 5 views

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    Sometimes this stuff helps after a tough day.
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.
Ed Webb

The English Teacher's Companion: Breaking My Own Rules - 0 views

  • It's all spaghetti against the wall
  • We never know if we are right. There is only doing the right thing at what we hope is the right time in hopes of making the difference we hope to make.Our work? Most days it's like driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at night in the fog: You can only see the stretch of road just in front of you and even that is shrouded in fog. So we drive on, guided by faith--in the kids, in ourselves, in our work.
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    Amen, Jim!
Julie Altmark

Wallwisher.com :: Words that stick - 2 views

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    make a simple wall where participants can post "post it notes" Good for collaboration and discussion. Simple to use
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.
Dave Truss

Recipe for a Disruptive Keynote : Stager-to-Go - 0 views

  • 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
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  • decentralize knowledge
  • Our network policies treat teachers and children as either imbeciles or felons. How many of you are unable to use your classroom computers in educationally sound ways because of a network policy created without your input? We install iPod labs so that children can be marched down the hall once a week for iPod lessons. We chain laptop computers to desks and don’t allow children to take them home. That’s the point of a laptop. You cannot blame such stupidity on four walls of brick and mortar. The blame lies within the bankruptcy of our imaginations.
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    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.
Ruth Howard

Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age | HASTAC - 0 views

  • 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.
  • Self-learning: Today’s learners are self-learners.
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  • Today’s learning is interactive and without walls. Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to admission. While it has never been confined solely to the academy, today’s opportunities for independent learning have never been easier nor more diverse.
  • with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.
  • They create their own paths to understanding.
  • learning to judge reliable information.
  • finding reliable sources.
  • learning how.
  • collective pedagogy
  • fostering and managing levels of trust.
  • collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.
  • growing complexities of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning
  • Networked learning
  • in contrast, is committed to
  • cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit, and social engagement
  • The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.
  • contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.
  • Networking through file-sharing, data sharing, and seamless, instant communication is now possible.
  • Learning never ends. How we know has changed radically.
  • new institutions must begin to think of themselves as mobilizing networks.
  • mobilize flexibility, interactivity, and outcomes. Issues of consideration in these institutions are ones of reliability and predictability alongside flexibility and innovation.
  • Students may work in small groups on a specific topic or together in an open-ended and open-sourced contribution.
  • These ten principles, the authors argue, are the first steps in redesigning learning institutions to fit the new digital world.
Ruth Howard

Gemin-i.org :: Welcome - 0 views

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    Safe Web 2.0 for primary aged children and their teachers.
Ted Sakshaug

PinDax | Create and discover message boards for your interests and passions - 14 views

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    Free customizable message board widgets you can put on your website
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    Free customizable message board widgets you can put on your website
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    PinDax offers a fun real-time alternative to the traditional message board. Sign up for free, and get up and running in minutes.
Vicki Davis

Philips' Luminous Wallpaper Will Create the Mood Lighting of the Future | Popular Science - 3 views

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    Excited about the LED wallpaper and the potential it has for making learning spaces more powerful and engaging. This self-luminating wallpaper takes "mood lighting" to a whole new level.
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
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