From A Very Short List: Based on a chilling contingency speech written for Richard Nixon titled "In the Event of Moon Disaster," this nostalgia-laced 15-minute radio broadcast, courtesy of American Public Media, tells its story entirely through the radio communication between Mission Control and the astronauts. Seconds after tuning in, you'll witness Apollo 11's crash landing on the moon. Buzz and Neil are okay, but the lunar module is destroyed, and the men are running out of oxygen. The story is haunting in its plausibility, and despite the fact that the astronauts sound less like test pilots from the Air Force than hipsters from Brooklyn, the quality writing and sound effects bring this macabre counterfactual deliciously close to reality.
digital story (dig·i·tal sto·ry)
A short, first-person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.
digital storyteller (dig·i·tal sto·ry·tell·er)
Anyone who has a desire to document life experience, ideas, or feelings through the use of story and digital media.
"What Makes a Great Teacher?
Image credit: Veronika Lukasova
Also in our Special Report:
National: "How America Can Rise Again"
Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke.
Video: "One Nation, On Edge"
James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths.
Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..."
... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown
Chart: "The Happiness Index"
Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller
On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.
One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked.
The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so.
Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work
(Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org)
At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one).
After a year in Mr. Taylo
There was happy news for people like me Monday, when the National Endowment for the Arts announced the latest results of its annual survey of American reading habits. The percentage of Americans who reported reading a novel, a short story, a poem or a play has gone up, from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in the last year - the first increase in that percentage since the NEA began investigating national reading habits in the 1980s. The NEA's 2002 report was titled "Reading at Risk;" this year's report is called "Reading on the Rise."
"Constraints drive innovation and force focus," according to 37Signals in their popular "Getting Real" book. If that's true, then Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest, announced a couple of weeks ago, should have had writers brimming with creativity. The task? Write a short story in 140 characters. Not less than 140 characters, exactly 140 characters. That's no easy task, but the contest still fielded over 300 entries. Today, Copyblogger revealed the winners.
Hundreds of articles, expert interviews, research, and resources highlighting success stories in K-12 education. Short videos provide case studies in technology integration, project-based learning, emotional intelligence, teacher preparation, assessment and more." /> metatext/html; charset=utf-8
ThumbScribes is a platform for creating collaborative content.Co+Create haiku, poems, short stories, flash fiction, novellas, exquisite corpse and songs, real time or asynchronously with your computer, tablet, cell phone or even IM.
An intriguing site which has split the whole world into 3 metre by 3 metre squares and assigned 3 words to label that coordinate, giving addresses to millions around the world who don't have an official address, or making a meeting point more accuracy than a postcode. For educators, there are lots of geographic and literacy possibilities - geocaching with spelling, or writing short stories or descriptions about a real location including the words. The site can be viewed in many different European languages meaning there are MFL possibilities too."
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?
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.
What if we applied the psychology of what makes technology attractive to students...to our face-2-face practices in the classroom?
Using this idea, instead of using more technology in the classroom, why not design the traditional human / face-to-face classroom experience to be more like what makes technology so engrossing to modern students?
Do these principles sound familiar...
Deliver information in bite sized chunks,
Create mental models,
Use short stories to help process information,
Learning happens and is remembered through repetition,
People are motivated by Progress and Mastery,
Sustained attention lasts 10 minutes,
and the use of Progressive Disclosure.
Progressive Disclosure an interaction design technique often used in human computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user's attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand.
Here are 100 little articles that could have big implications in the classroom.
A Brisbane-based, international remixable literature project named Remix My Lit released this summer their first publication, "Through the Clock's Workings": it's defined as the world's first remixed and remixable anthology of literature. (continue....)