Group items tagged

"Idaho is set to become first state in the nation to require high school students to take at least two credits online to graduate." Has anyone seen this yet? Comments/thoughts? I think the main motivator for this initiative is to lower costs...I fear that if finance is the driving force, it won't be implemented as effectively as possible....

"Good teaching was not defined by test results. Instead, its attributes were identified on a nine-item scale, which included student appraisals of how well the teacher organized material, used class time, explained directions, and reviewed the subject matter."

Technology in the classroom --> only works with parental participation. This is an angle that has not been covered much in our class. But, my experience tells me it is more important than whether technology helps pedagogy.

Many of you have read my "rants" about buying iPads before the teacher's even know what to do with them. This article speaks to the need for Professional Development before full scale implementation.

When a teacher must accept their restriction of their rights, as a special class of individuals, because it protects a district from the abuses of a free, everyone else must understand they are accepting the lost of freedoms for us all.

The Cyberlearning Research Summit will take place in Washington DC, with speakers from industry and academia, who will share visions for the future of learning with emerging technologies. Topics include role of emerging technology in learning, individualized learning, augmented reality, and many others topics covered in T561. HGSE Faculty Dr. Todd Rose will also be a speaker.

Todd Rose presented here last year and it seems highly relevant to our course. In class right now. More on this later.

This is an RSA I shared with the blog class I teach. I think the event of "shared knowledge" and its effect on groups dynamics is very interesting. The prompt I used is below: Here are the three questions asked by James Surowiecki in the post below. Please consider them and answer one or all three in a comment. What does the blogosphere tell us about what we believe motivates people to do what they do? Do blogs have the possibility of accessing a collective intelligence that has previously remained untapped? What are the potential problems of blogs as we know them?

Professor Clayton Christensen says, now more than ever, online education is ready for disruption.

This is a very interesting follow-up to the topic we saw a few weeks ago in class!

Day in the life of a flipped classroom

It's cool to see how teachers have been inspired. This model obviously has some strengths.

This website briefly talks about Kajeet's solution to the safety and filter issues of internet use in schools that we have talked about in class.

Interesting article that shows the next step that Khan Academy wants to take

"He [Sal] added: "If nothing else, I'd like a kid who's gone through the Khan Academy to be able to say, 'I've learned accounting, law, and I can write as well as someone who's graduated from Andover. That's empowering." Could that also be "disrupting the class"? traditional educational institutions bettter take heed of new technologies.

This idea can be seen as an alternative way for teaching methods however we have more sophisticated educatinal tools other than video . Unless this project includes other tools such as 3D and learning by doing , it will be flawed for some sides of teaching ways.

This was shared in my UDL class by my teaching fellow, but I thought it was something this group would appreciate, too.

Excellent resource! Thanks for sharing.

In Disrupting Class we explained that prosperity is a bittersweet reward. Poverty often serves as an extrinsic motivator for some students, as it causes them to endure monolithic, batch teaching of subjects like math and science. When prosperity has removed this source of motivation, the solution must be to make learning intrinsically motivating. Student-centric learning will play a key role in addressing this challenge. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon another model from our research on innovation to dive more deeply into students' motivation to learn. If children are motivated to learn and if we enable each one to learn effectively, we will have an education system with a great performance record. As the late educator Jack Frymier often said, "If the kids want to learn, we couldn't stop 'em. If they don't, we can't make 'em."

"As the session continued, Lindquist gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice. "Cruising!" she exclaimed, after the student answered three questions in a row correctly. "Did you see how I had to stop and think?" she inquired, modeling how to solve a problem. "I can see you're getting tired," she commented sympathetically near the end of the session. How could a computer program ever approximate this? "

Thanks to Dr. Dede for inviting Neil Heffernan to speak to our class a while back. Great to see Dr. Heffernan's work being covered in the press.

A profile of a teacher in Florida who is using smart pens from LiveScribe to create pencasts of exercises for her HS math classes.

Following up on Chris's comment about how social media is allowing students to create a society. Have a look. The work of this graduate class in anthropology is fascinating.

Talks about systematic change to education via technology and social media. Gives some good examples of two initiatives in schools. I think it's pretty relevant to what we talked about in class yesterday.

I'll be working on this project through the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT Media Lab this semester

This is very cool...I haven't seen much on cross-generational learning, but I think that there are very valid benefits to it (as well as multi-generational living). Anyways, it seems not so different from the research that Uche is doing in the class. Look forward to hearing how your semester goes!

BiNu makes feature phones a little smarter.

I'm so excited to see biNu on here, Jenny! I wrote a case study about their technology for a class last year and was blown away how their model of cloud computing could essentially turn "dumb" feature phones into smart phones - and for a fraction of the cost. They've changed their marketing approach and business model substantially since I wrote the case study last fall, but I still see a lot of potential for this type of tech to reach hitherto-unconnected people in the developing world who were still using phones and 2G networks. So interesting, thanks for posting!