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Barbara Lindsey

CITE Journal Article: If We Didn't Have the Schools We Have Today, Would We Create the... - 0 views

www.citejournal.org/...article1.htm

education technology change 21stcentury actfl09 mafla09 blended learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 09 - Cached
  • chools resist change, because they are designed to resist change. They are cultural organizations, and cultural organizations are not supposed to change. Cultures are designed to preserve existing solutions to problems—considerable social and economic capital goes into developing culturally valued solutions to problems and change is risky.   Stability reduces risk—“change is bad”—and our schools have been designed to focus on the knowledge transmission mode of learning.
  • This is just what many teachers and faculty members are saying, “We don’t have time for this. We are good teachers, and we can continue to serve our students well with the instructional strategies we have always used. Besides, with the time demands on us, we don’t have time to learn this new technology. As good teachers, we are doing well with our students and we don’t need to go through this transition.”
  • The learning revolution is about constructivist learning, and these new communication and information technologies allow us to facilitate constructive learning in ways that we could never do before. They are becoming cognitive amplifiers that will accelerate learning and the development of new knowledge in the same ways that machines accelerated production during the industrial revolution.
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  • The third reason schools will be driven to change is that we have now reached a point where work is learning . Work in the workplace is learning.   Work in the larger community surrounding the schools is about learning every day.   It's not just about putting bolts on things anymore.
  • The fourth force is that learning communities have no boundaries .   In a networked learning community, schools and classrooms will simply become nodes in a larger learning environment.
  • The fifth factor affecting schools is that the home is becoming a learning place .
  • The final force driving change in schools is kid power.  
  • New learning teams are emerging, which consist of college faculty, the teacher candidates, and the in-service teachers. The high school students themselves are sometimes members of these teams, developing new applications of technology. They are becoming learning communities, “communities of practice,” as some would call it.   And in these learning communities, the distinctions between “teacher” and “student” no longer serve us well. That is why I believe education is rapidly moving toward new learning environments that will have no teachers or students—just learners with different levels and areas of expertise collaboratively constructing new knowledge.
  • There is no way for the faculty or teachers to collaboratively learn and construct new knowledge in this system—no way for them to know whether the knowledge that might have been acquired by the student teacher is actually the knowledge the student teacher then conveys as a teacher to the K-12 students. Few, if any, of the educators know anything about what the K-12 students might be doing with any of the knowledge they may have acquired after they leave the K-12 classroom.   This is a linear, fragmented teaching approach—the epitome of the factory-era assembly line approach to teaching and learning—which defeats any opportunity for collaborative learning or feedback across the various levels of teaching and teacher preparation.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 09
     
    expert learners (we call them teachers, educators, scientists, and researchers today) are going to be recognized for their ability to learn and help others learn, as they continue to construct new knowledge and develop their own expertise.
Barbara Lindsey

Weblogg-ed » Wanted: School Chief Learning Officer - 0 views

weblogg-ed.com/...-school-chief-learning-officer

learning2.0 LearningLeading willrichardson pd pln mafla09 actfl09 ctcolt09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 May 09 - Cached
  • And it really is about a culture that supports, celebrates and shares learning. Jay points to a survey about CLOs from TogetherLearn that I think acts as a good barometer of that work. Does your school: Welcome innovation and contributions from its teachers? Encourage (and provide time for) reflection on successes and flops? Tolerate mistakes and reward thinking out of the box? Share information openly? Foster learning for everyone? Experiment with new ways of doing things? Work across departments and unit boundaries with ease?
  • I wondered how many schools could point to someone, anyone, who is in charge of learning. By that I mean someone who manages the culture of the school by focusing not on outcomes as much as how learning is writ large in the system. Someone who also understands the ways in which social Web technologies accentuate the need for the learning skills we’ve desired all along: creativity, critical thinking, independent thought, collaboration, etc. I know I keep going back to this, but I wonder how many of us can look at our colleagues and answer the question “How does that person learn?” And think of the leaders in our schools in that light as well.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 May 09
     
    Creating and supporting a culture of learning for everyone in schools.
Barbara Lindsey

Lessons Learned: Webcasting and Live Blogging a School Board Meeting » Moving... - 0 views

www.speedofcreativity.org/...logging-a-school-board-meeting

webcasting liveblogging fryer

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • In many ways, digital technologies can be used as humanizing and socializing influences in a community. One of the virtual attendees (Ernie Cox) tonight commented, “as a father of 2 small children I could be even more involved in civic life if more meetings where covered like this…..” Ernie is exactly right. Webcasting and recording events like this can open up many more doors for civic engagement and involvement. School
  • veryone who wanted to get into the room tonight could not fit. How many more Edmond residents and school district constituents could “attend” the meeting if it was both webcast live and archived? Many, many more.
  • If we want to help motivate and direct our students to become meaningfully engaged in the civic activities of their community, state, and nation (and I think this is an important goal) we should advance this purpose by encouraging them to become citizen journalists.
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  • The benefit of using a tool like CoverItLive (which was free, incidentally) was the opportunity to engage in a backchannel discussion with others during the meeting. This would not have been possible if we were simply viewing the board meeting on the TV. I could even envison the school board making time for virtual attendee/participant comments and questions.
  • This can and should be a context where the transparency afforded by social media tools produces numerous ancillary benefits for those involved, besides the simple act of documenting and sharing an event.
  • Our school board should go paperless. It was AMAZING to see how thick the binders of paper were which each school board member had in front of them during the meeting. In our digital world, it would be both prudent and useful to have all those documents digitized so they were full-text searchable.
  • the district blocks all videos and photos from the learning community so they are inaccessible by students as well as educators on the district network.
  • No one can predict with complete accuracy what the information and communications landscape is going to look like in 2015. How is this dynamic environment addressed in the site plans of our schools? I’m curious if these site plans will be made available electronically for parents to download and read. I think they should be.
Barbara Lindsey

Different class: How a new online approach aims to revolutionise language learning - Sc... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...language-learning-1802620.html

teachers parents advocacy publications critical languages

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Five years since secondary school pupils were allowed to drop languages after the age of 14, the number of young people taking a modern foreign language at GCSE has slumped. The Government currently has no plans to make languages a compulsory subject again, preferring instead to make them available to all primary schoolchildren. But there are new initiatives afoot to encourage secondary school pupils to learn foreign languages.
  • athryn Board is the chief executive at Cilt, the National Centre for Languages, which is working to motivate young people through initiatives such as the annual Language and Film Talent Awards (Laftas). She says the removal of foreign languages as a compulsory element of education for children older than 14 puts British youngsters at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to carving out international careers. But her message is more about using language-learning to boost employability, literacy and reading skills than attempting to push school-leavers into specialised languages-based careers.
  • While our sometimes smug attitude to foreign languages rests on the belief that the rest of the world speaks English, this is no longer the case, according to Cilt.In 2000, 51 per cent of internet use was in English, but this figure has now dropped in favour of Chinese and Arabic. While English remains a key language of business for the present, it is quite possible that Mandarin will overtake it."Less than 7 per cent of the world speaks English as a first language and 75 per cent of the world's population don't speak any English at all," says Board, "so to assume that our mother tongue is sufficient to get by in most circumstances simply isn't true any more." If, at a time of increased globalisation, being able to offer at least a smattering of someone else's language puts you ahead of the game in all sorts of different walks of life, then in terms of popularity, languages are at an all-time low.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Oct 09
     
    Five years since secondary school pupils were allowed to drop languages after the age of 14, the number of young people taking a modern foreign language at GCSE has slumped. The Government currently has no plans to make languages a compulsory subject again, preferring instead to make them available to all primary schoolchildren. But there are new initiatives afoot to encourage secondary school pupils to learn foreign languages.
Barbara Lindsey

One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

www2.scholastic.com/...article.jsp

1:1 equity students laptops

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08 - Cached
  • quietly tell select students about the policy
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
       
      and which students then get to use this resource? What of issues of equity?
  • “We’re going to invite 20 seniors [this school year] selected by teachers,” he says. We don’t want the computers to be a distraction.”
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
       
      So is this the AP version of digital access?
  • In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
       
      Sounds like a resonable solution
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  • The Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois, has taken a step in this direction by allowing students to bring their computers to school and connect to the Internet, but not log on to the district’s network, says Darrell Walery, director of technology.Stay Away from My Networkwalery sums up the struggle in this issue succinctly. He says tech directors who have been teachers favor the experiment, while those who have business backgrounds blanche at the thought. “My role as technology director is to mediate this exact issue,” he adds.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
       
      Why we need more IT who have been teachers or really understand the difference between a business and educational environment.
  • Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.
  • Compatibility seems to be less of an issue each day as more online applications become available.
  • schools can turn to the growing number of free online tools available to all.
  • Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.
  • The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.
  • “How do you get teachers prepared to teach in a classroom where everyone is a teacher?
  • “Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”
  • “There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says,  from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.
  • Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”
  • Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.
  • While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.
  • “The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”
  • Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.
  • “It’s much more likely in a few years all students will have their own smartphones,” he says.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
     
    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
Barbara Lindsey

Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice - 0 views

www.infed.org/...communities_of_practice.htm

CoP community education wenger collaboration practice learning communities mafla09 actfl09 blended learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 May 09 - Cached
  • Supposing learning is social and comes largely from of our experience of participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very different disciplines - Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in a 'community of practice'. 
  • When looking closely at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized as such' (Lave 1993: 5).
  • Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa 2007)
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  • Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)
  • The characteristics of communities of practice According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities: The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.). The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.). The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).
  • The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community.
  • The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects though cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust
  • Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation.
  • It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation 'refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities' (Wenger 1999: 4).
  • Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others.
  • Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.
  • What is more, and in contrast with learning as internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a relational view of the person and learning (see the discussion of selfhood).
  • 'the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation'. This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing attention to the need to understand knowledge and learning in context. However, situated learning depends on two claims: It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997: 77).
  • There is a risk, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of romanticizing communities of practice.
  • 'In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power relations, access, public knowledge and public accountability' (Tennant 1997: 79).
  • Perhaps the most helpful of these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and parents were able to work together to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.
  • Learning is in the relationships between people. As McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it: Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.
  • One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize 'instruction that builds on children's interests in a collaborative way'. Such schools need also to be places where 'learning activities are planned by children as well as adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster children's learning but also learn from their own involvement with children' (2001: 3). Their example in this area have particular force as they are derived from actual school practice.
  • learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice
  • Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important in part because of their potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that individual members of a community obtain in the form of enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they learn. (Lesser and Storck 2001)
  • Educators need to reflect on their understanding of what constitutes knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important things to grasp here is the extent to which education involves informed and committed action.
Barbara Lindsey

Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Learning with Blogs and Wikis - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...ning_with_Blogs_and_Wikis.aspx

professionaldevelopment leadership education Ferriter

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Teachers rarely get to self-select learning opportunities, pursue professional passions, or engage in meaningful, ongoing conversations about instruction.
  • Although most of my colleagues recognize that business-driven reform efforts are likely to have little effect on student learning, they are largely unwilling to challenge the status quo. "Nothing's going to change," they insist. "This is how professional development has always been done.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Mar 09
       
      Do you agree with this statement?
  • First, there's a new emphasis on the importance of collaborative learning among members of close-knit teams in schools. School leaders are beginning to believe in the human capacity of their faculties and are structuring opportunities for teachers to reflect on instruction together. These joint efforts are targeted and specific, increasing educators' motivation and engagement.
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  • Second, digital tools now help fulfill Elmore's desire for fresh "portals through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools." Specifically, thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice. In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are actively reflecting on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. And all this collective knowledge is readily available for free.
  • Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.
  • What's more, the readers of my own blog challenge my thinking in provocative comments day after day.
  • Start by using a feed reader as a learning tool for a few weeks. Find several blogs that target educators in your grade level or content area and organize them with an aggregator of your choice. The search for blogs probably best begins at the SupportBlogging wiki (http://supportblogging.com), which includes a list of hundreds of blogs broken down into specific categories, such as education blogs, principal blogs, teacher blogs, classroom blogs, and librarian blogs.
  • Tell others how much you enjoy having your thinking stretched by the blogs you read.
  • Share your feed reader with your learning team and begin to explore together. Ask peers about the most interesting articles they're reading. Make it a point to talk with a colleague about a shared blog post at least twice each week.
  • Although reading blogs is the best way to start incorporating 21st-century tools into your plan for professional learning, writing your own blog about instruction can be equally powerful.
  • The difference between a wiki and a blog is that wikis are designed for collaboration among groups of users. Anyone with the shared wiki password can edit the content on a wiki at any time. Wikis also provide discussion boards for every page, enabling users to engage in ongoing conversations about their developing project. Some teams of teachers—such as the teachers creating Digitally Speaking (http://digitallyspeaking.pbwiki.com)—use wikis to reflect on the characteristics of effective instruction. Others use them to create warehouses of materials among teachers working in the same content area (http://cesa5mathscience.wikispaces.com) or as a source for teachers and teams creating entire classroom textbooks (http://anatowiki.wetpaint.com/?t=anon).
  • Consider finding a few peers to write about teaching and learning together. Divide your topic of interest into subtitles or sections. Teachers could be responsible for creating content for their area of expertise; they could generate key ideas, add links to external resources, upload appropriate documents, or embed interesting videos. Then allow users who are fluent with language to polish your final text. Find members who are sticklers for spelling and grammar and turn them loose. On a wiki, the writing process is far less intimidating than on a blog because you're not responsible for an entire selection all by yourself. Instead, you'll reflect with colleagues—which in and of itself is a powerful form of professional growth.
  • Digital tools have also changed who I am as an instructor because I've introduced these tools to my students. Together, we use feed readers to explore collections of student blogs (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/20982438) and organize resources on topics connected to our curriculum, such as biofuels and global warming (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/22534539). We write a classroom blog reflecting on current events (http://guysread.typepad.com/theblurb) and use wikis to collaborate around content (http://carbonfighters.pbwiki.com). I teach my students to challenge the thinking of digital peers with their comments—and to enjoy the challenges that others make to their own electronic thinking. At the same time, my students are learning to create, communicate, and collaborate—and to manage and evaluate information found online.
  • Blogs and wikis are changing who we are as learners, preparing us for a future driven by peer production and networked learning.
Barbara Lindsey

Can you see the difference? | bee's buzz - 0 views

bshallowes.edublogs.org/...can-you-see-the-difference

teachers blog technology tools twitter skype

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 09 - Cached
  • We had another great experience this week. A few of the children who stay at school  for After Care joined me at 4:00pm to Skype a class in Jacksonville USA. The Jacksonville kids are doing a tour Around the World with 80 Schools. It was a real WOW experience for the boys as they saw and spoke to children so far away in real time. They caught a glimpse of life beyond our school or city. Most of our learners have not travelled outside of Port Elizabeth and few have access to computers or the Internet outside of school, so their general knowledge is a bit lacking. This morning when I checked my Twitter account there was a link to a video clip that Silvia had edited and uploaded for us which means the rest of the grade 3’s can view it next week. So thank you to innovative and creative teacher, Silvia Tolisano for the experience. Which brings me to another difference technology makes in education. Twitter. I would never have met Silvia without Twitter. Three little boys’ lives have been enriched by a 15 minute Skype call and hopefully it will ignite a desire to learn more. Technology in education is dynamic!
Barbara Lindsey

Students as 'Free Agent Learners' : April 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views

www.thejournal.com/...24308_1

pewresearch digital divide survey

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 May 09 - No Cached
  • Among the findings: There's a trend toward students using technology to take hold of their own educational destinies and act as "free agent learners."
  • The survey this year polled more than 281,000 students, 29,000 teachers, 21,000 parents, and 3,100 administrators and involved 4,379 schools from 868 districts in all 50 states.
  • students see significant obstacles to using technology in schools. They reported that school networks block sites that they need to access, that teachers specifically limit their use of technology, and that there are "too many rules," preventing students from using their own devices, accessing their communications tools, and even limiting their use of the technologies that the school provides.
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  • students and teachers were asked which technologies they would include in the "ultimate school." More than twice as many students as teachers chose online classes; more than twice as many students as teachers chose gaming; nearly three times as many students chose Internet access; and three times as many students chose mobile devices.
Barbara Lindsey

ASCD Inservice: Would Your Admins Embrace MySpace? - 0 views

ascd.typepad.com/...ur-admins-embrace-myspace.html

cybersafety k-12 manuela

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • "Our eyes are not on the ball," said Moses. "If we're really serious about child safety, it's not about what's going on online; it's what's going on in their immediate physical environment. Five thousand kids get sent to the hospital every year for scissor injuries, but how many schools have scissors in them? We need to teach kids how to use things safely. You can run a band saw in middle school,but you can't go on the Internet."
  • Finally, the big question from this session: "Do you want to be a barrier to kids learning, or do you want to work with the learning they're already doing?"
  • We recently received an email from our superintendent all social networking sites and many other internet sites would be blocked. We are unable to view videos on our computers. My students are unable to play many games on the internet that are educational because of this. We have training in our school on how to teach our students to be safe but we never actually get to show how to use these social networks properly.
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  • I'm an administrator at a large high school in an organization that content filters almost everything of potential value. (it's ironic that our students cannot access iTunes U to get Chemistry lectures from UC Berkeley in the classroom but they can access ebay and a Las Vegas gambling rewards page. I wonder if there would be to much of an outcry among the office weasels if those sites were blocked as well) One of the things that I am observing outside the school is how many of our teachers (as well as students) are using Facebook. I was actually able to set up a training during Spring Break using Facebook as a back-channel communications tool when our teachers were scattered all over the country. Why are we asking students (and staff) to step back into the previous century when they arrive at the schoolhouse door?
Barbara Lindsey

The Tempered Radical: New Opportunities to Connect and Create. . . - 0 views

teacherleaders.typepad.com/...new-opportuniti.html

technology teachers

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Jan 10 - Cached
  • I've truly embraced digital dialogue because it provides me with the opportunity to be challenged and to grow all at once---and on my own time. The traditional barriers of time and space that prevent teachers from learning from one another are eliminated by technology---and the terms "relationships" and "professional development" are being redefined by new opportunities to connect and create together.
  • Last year, I tried to pass that digital enthusiasm on to the sixth graders of my classroom. Together with peers, my students collaborated on a wiki, recording nearly everything that we learned in my science and social studies class. The collective efforts of 90 motivated kids resulted in nearly 80 pages of content that had been revised and refined almost 400 times.  They also joined an effort to create a classroom podcast program that earned over 20,000 page views from visitors in 125 countries ranging from Bolivia to Burkina Faso. With over 110 posts, our "little adventure" drew recognition from technology experts like Will Richardson and was spotlighted on national resource websites like MiddleWeb. 
  • The children of my classroom grew as digital citizens throughout the year. They learned to see the Internet as a tool for collaboration and communication---rather than simply as a vast online research encyclopedia. They practiced posting on our own digital discussion board, polishing the unique skills that it takes to engage others electronically. They judged the reliability of online resources together, became experts at questioning, grew willing to open their work to review and revision, learned Internet safety practices important for protecting themselves and saw the potential of becoming citizens of an electronic world where content is being created at a blinding pace.
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  • What are we going to do with our wiki and blog at the end of the year?" they asked often. "Can we take it with us to seventh grade and keep recording what we're learning? It would be neat to see what we had at the end of middle school!"
  • Our students will buy and sell from countries across the world and work for international companies. They will manage employees from other cultures, work with people from different continents in joint ventures and solve global problems such as AIDS and avian flu together.
  • But what I've grown to realize is that very few people have really embraced the changing nature of a tomorrow that remains poorly defined. We know that the Internet today is far more powerful than ever before---and have heard about companies that are capitalizing on these changes---but we haven't figured out what that means for us. We're jazzed to have access to information and geeked by interactive content providers, but our digital experiences remain somewhat self-centered.
  • the new National Educational Technology Standards for Students being developed by the International Society for Technology in Education. These standards reflect an increased need to teach children how to use the Internet in new and different ways. Perhaps the most challenging---and important standard---for educators to embrace will this one:Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students: A. Interact, collaborate and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media. B. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats. C. Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. D. Contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.Does that sound like the digital work being done in your classroom, school, district or state?!
  • Together with the Center for International Understanding, North Carolina in the World is developing partnerships based on digital collaboration between schools in North Carolina and nations ranging from China to Mexico. Teachers and students in partnering schools are learning to use Web 2.0 tools like web-conferencing and wikis to connect kids across continents. Not only do these efforts help to build a general knowledge of other countries in our children, they are providing concrete opportunities to use technology in new ways.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 31 Jan 10
       
      Share with Glastonbury!
Barbara Lindsey

The Tempered Radical: Compulsive Sharing and the Public School Teacher - 0 views

teacherleaders.typepad.com/...the-public-school-teacher.html

Ferriter pln professionaldevelopment teachers opensource OpenPD

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 22 Mar 09 - Cached
  • To put it simply, the kinds of compulsive sharing that Fisch, Johnson and Priestley argue is essential for powerful learning only develops in conditions where sharing is efficient. 
  • In my experience, digital tools are the key to making sharing---whether it's between colleagues in the same building or on different sides of the world----efficient, yet schools have been slow to embrace their potential.  
Katherine Ruddick

First Six Weeks of School: Week 1 - Building Community - 1 views

blog.edmodo.com/...hool-week-1-building-community

edmodo Technology first day of school community

shared by Katherine Ruddick on 08 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Katherine Ruddick on 08 Sep 11
     
    Great ideas for icebreakers/first-few-weeks activities from the Edmodo blog.
Barbara Lindsey

Technology in the Middle » Blog Archive » In the Classroom: Global Collaboration - 0 views

pwoessner.com/...classroom-global-collaboration

globallyconnectedproj global collaboration students education2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 May 09 - Cached
  • Technology also determined how the project would end. Considering I was using the internet for overseas contact, I decided to look domestically for the conclusion. As a result of just a few minutes effort using emails I found three US museums (see below) who agreed to take our class interview projects for safe keeping in their archives. I was overwhelmed by the interest in our work and was amazed when the US National WWII Museum in New Orleans asked to have us provide links and information for their website. In conclusion, some simple email and wiki-site contact with a handful of schools brought the WWII period to life for Midwestern students in the US like nothing else could have.
  • Poland offered vivid stories and images of invasion, concentration camps, and families torn apart, and my students were able examine perspectives that were not to be found in our text book.
  • After blanketing the world with polite requests for collaboration things began shaping up. My 6th graders were set to work with schools in Turkey, Lebanon, and Morocco. My 7th graders were set to work with schools in Germany, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, and most importantly Junior High #4 in Poland.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • My students were involved in two projects. One was collecting and discussing input from around the world on WWII, and the other was interviewing someone in their own life who had a connection to the war. The combination of the two projects proved powerful. The process connected them with friends and family who told amazing stories of their youth, they were able to social network with other students on the other side of the world, and we managed to slip in a good deal of history when they were not looking.
Barbara Lindsey

Home Page - 0 views

www.cobbk12.org/~mabry

website mabry school1.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 May 09
     
    Wow! What a change-and not for the better-of the Mabry School web site after Tim Tyson left. What does this say about the difficulty of sustained change?
Barbara Lindsey

NYC school uses collaborative wikis to cut costs and save time - 0 views

searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/...9142,sid186_gci1361953,00.html

teachers administrators wiki budget collaboration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The wikis include everything from test scheduling (internal) to early dismissal information (external).
  • "We've saved lots of money," Cohen said. "But the real drag of using [expensive collaboration products] was you have these elaborate systems; parents had to get accounts; you had to give vendors the students' names; there was lots of work just to get it to work."
  • With the Wikispaces, Cohen can just set the program up and have users do the work for him. Privacy concerns are minimal because the only publicly accessible information is the student's name and time of meeting,
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  • Cohen also likes the project because it was a simple way for teachers to "get their toes wet" with collaborative technology with a shallow learning curve and a high return on investment. For the spring semester, he said, teachers would actually have to sit and field calls for scheduling parent-teacher appointments.
  • Demonstrating the value of collaborative technology, while teaching how to use it, is the hardest challenge in its adoption, said Zeus Kerravala, a Yankee Group analyst. "The success depends more on the utilization of the tools than the tools themselves," Kerravala said. Keeping it simple and easy to access increases the chance of success.
  • Much of the essential documentation for teachers is now on wikis at the school, but Cohen still fields requests for how to do this, or for hard copies of those forms. He regularly denies such requests and points the users to the appropriate wiki page.
  • "Kids only use technology for the things they want to use it for," Cohen said. "They won't necessarily check the website for their homework."
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Aug 09
     
    Excellent article on why and how a NYC school uses wikis
Rita Oleksak

Resources for Schools | Asia Society - 0 views

www.asiasociety.org/...resources-schools

Chinese Teachers Parents Students Professional Organizations

shared by Rita Oleksak on 18 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Rita Oleksak on 18 Apr 12
     
    Global non-profit organization. The leading force in forging closer ties between Asia and the West through arts, education, policy and business outreach.
Rita Oleksak

Peace Corps | Coverdell World Wise Schools - 0 views

www.peacecorps.gov/wws

Global education Students Parents Professional Organizations Publications

shared by Rita Oleksak on 18 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Rita Oleksak on 18 Apr 12
     
    The Coverdell World Wise Schools program fosters an understanding of other cultures and global issues by facilitating communication between Peace Corps Volunteers and U.S. classrooms, and publishing free print and online classroom resources based on the Peace Corps experience.
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