Advantages
There is a reason that many people are attracted to wikis for learning.
Wikis can be private or public.
You can get wiki software at no cost or at a very low cost.
They only require basic programming skills for installation, setup and maintenance.
Contributors create content independently of each other, so that multiple people can be working on the site at the same time.
Wikis can be applied to just about any content area.
Users find them easy to search and navigate.
I'm planning on integrating the use of a wiki into my unit plan for assignment 2. I remember teaching myself and creating one a few years back and loved it! I think it's a great tool.
the primary technological means used to enhance teaching was to provide visuals for attention, engagement and interaction
They applied technology for a number of reasons: student engagement, time management, motivation and meeting individual students’ needs.
Variables such as influence of mentor teachers, technology access, skills, pedagogical competence and personal attitudes had an impact on their application
A blog post where some math educators point out problems in videos from Khan Academy. A great illustration of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). The idea that there is a special type of knowledge that accrues from knowing how best to teach a particular content/subject areas.
Hi Noah,
This page has give me a succinct list of ideas of digital tools I can incorporate in my assignment work, as well as life outside of, and beyond university. I like seeing the familiar Bloom's Taxonomy applied to the digital age.
It's a great addition to my DIIGO library. Thanks for sharing.
Christine
This is an interesting one - how can a teacher be hailed as such, when there is no real interaction (questioning from the student's point of view)? The Khan Academy does have its advantages as a very useful prop to specific lessons and concepts, yet the questions posed by any learner should be equally important if effective learning is to take place.
I agree Doreen, furthermore, the Khan Academy cannot be used as a stand alone to teaching, yet as a tool to extend understanding or to reteach concepts
It is a useful tool I agree. Students need to have an understand of a variety of ways/strategies/methods to draw upon in order to gain a full understand of the concepts.
I don't get why they are making reference to Bill Gates I don't believe he has an understanding of teaching. Although these online library can help with understanding but is it really the way we want education to go online teaching??
I belive that the reference to Gates arises from the fact that he's spending a lot of his money attempting to improve schools and universities. That money means that his views on what is good teaching carry significant weight. More so than his qualifications and experience might otherwise warrant.
What is more, his videos reveal an ignorance of how we know students learn mathematics.
The videos were started to help students who were already learning through the school system and needed more help without having to pay for it. A lot of people are complaining about the videos as alternatives to explicit teaching in the classroom, but aren't they great for what they were originally designed for.
All teachers make mistakes, after all, and Khan should not, the reasoning goes, be called out for making the same mistakes we all make.
There certainly are broken models in education, but there is absolutely no evidence that competent knowledge of student learning and thinking is one that teachers can afford to jettison.
researchers are finding evidence that particular kinds of PCK are associated with greater gains in student learning in elementary mathematics.
revolutionize
The equal sign (=) i
Many mathematics educators stress another kind of knowledge necessary to design and deliver quality instruction: pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). PCK refers to knowledge of content as it relates to teaching.
Content knowledge is important, but it doesn't matter how much knowledge a teacher has if s/he cannot teach that content in a way that the students will actually understand it and be able to apply it in future
I agree that content knowledge is important but it is just as important to know your students and how best they learn
The standard American curricular treatment, in which students are instructed to append zeroes to the shorter decimal to equalize the number of digits helps students to perform this task correctly, but fosters its own misconceptions.
he exercises offer no intellectual rigor and do not address our central concern.
PCK knows from both educational research and professional experience
I think frankly, the best way to do it is you put stuff out there and you see how people react to it; and we have exercises on our site too, so we see whether they’re able to see how they react to it anecdotally.
A teacher must be prepared before entering the classroom
If Khan’s videos occasionally popped up in a Google search, we would be content to have him carry on. There is lots of worse information available on the web. But Khan is hailed as “unbelievable” (
Bill Gates) and his work as “sparking a revolution in education
It is up to the teacher to assess whether or not the videos are suitable for his/her students. If the teacher chooses to use the video, then s/her can refer to the teacher information and see which questions the students answered correctly / incorrectly and identify any misconceptions. These misconceptions can then be addressed by the teacher in the classroom
Whether small steps or large, we urge Sal Khan and his funders to put their time, effort and dollars to the best possible ends, particularly when it comes to making decisions grounded in accurate, carefully considered pedagogical content knowledge
discuss the meaning of the equal sign frequently and explicitly, and (2) model correct use of the equal sign.
To quote a fellow student, Lucas Naughton states, 'ICT must be used to enhance and amplify the learning rather then becoming the point of the learning'. I get that there are holes in the Khan videos however if we are using them to enhance learning then why cant the teacher design an entire lesson around one video. They can discuss the missing misconceptions. They can provide other methods/concepts and they can create practice activities all around a Khan video. Remember-enhance and amplify the learning using these ICT's. Cheers Angela Woodward
Wikipedia mentions Khan's education: "Khan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science in 1998. Khan also holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School" I can't see a Bachelor of Education in there. I would have thought that this would be essential, and the first stepping-stone, to acquire an understanding of PCK and how students learn.
Danielson and Goldenburg state that "content knowledge alone is inadequate for quality instruction" and that many videos are prone to creating further confusion for students. They also go on to say that Khan's explanations are frequently off target in addressing likely student questions that experienced teachers would anticipate and elicit. Maybe a four-year stint at USQ might be in order?
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Even Khan will acknowledge that he’s not an educational professional; he’s just a nerd who improvised a cool way to teach people things. And for better or worse, this means that he doesn’t have a consistent, comprehensive plan for overhauling school curricula.
Basically one-on-one teaching...that's what ICTs provide.
A lightbulb went off: Khan realized that remediation—going over and over something that you really ought to already know—is less embarrassing when you can do it privately, with no one watching. Nadia learned faster when she had control over the pace of the lecture. “The worst time to learn something,” he says, “is when someone is standing over your shoulder going, ‘Do you get it?'”
here are a few other online tools helping to reshape education.
“Math is the killer,” Gates told me recently. His foundation had researched unemployment and found math to be a significant stumbling block. “If you ask people, ‘Hey, there are these open nursing jobs, why don’t you go and get one?’ math is often the reason they give for not applying,” Gates says. “‘Why didn’t you pass the police exam?’ Math.”
So in claiming that learning styles do not exist, we are not saying that all learners are the same. Rather, we assert that a certain number of dimensions (ability, background knowledge, interest) vary from person to person and are known to affect learning. The emphasis on learning styles, we think, often comes at the cost of attention to these other important dimensions.
However, when these tendencies are put to the test under controlled conditions, they make no difference—learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not. A favorite mode of presentation (e.g., visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) often reveals itself to be instead a preference for tasks for which one has high ability and at which one feels successful.
However, in order to persuade us to devote the time and energy to adopt a certain kind of differentiated teaching, the burden of proof is on those who argue for the existence of that description of students' cognitive strategies
a good rule of thumb is that we should only bring ideas from the laboratory into our teaching if (1) we are sure that the laboratory phenomena exist under at least some conditions and (2) we understand how to usefully apply these laboratory phenomena to instruction
Some research that I need to follow up with and ponder how it might be integrated into EDC3100
We shouldn't congratulate ourselves for showing a video to engage the visual learners or offering podcasts to the auditory learners
we should realize that the value of the video or audio will be determined by how it suits the content that we are asking students to learn and the background knowledge, interests, and abilities that they bring to
NSW will apparently be the first of the states to introduce a literacy/numeracy test for pre-service teachers in 2016. Likely to see this spread over time.
I remember a course examiner a few years ago saying that this test would likely apply to USQ pre-service teachers by the time we graduate. It seems like a good idea to me because I have seen teachers make simple, embarrassing grammatical and mathematical mistakes in class. I know that we all make mistakes, however there are some things that teachers should know by the time they leave university. A test at the end might, to some extent, uphold the standards that are expected from teachers.
The paper is mainly to explore the automated music composition experiences for the students in the high grades of elementary school who are unfamiliar with the professional music theory. The proposed Automated Composition for Music Education (ACME) software was developed to help the students to compose the rhythm and melody themselves, while chord configuration and arrangement are automatically generated.
Finally the students in the experimental group using the ACME teaching materials showed a better learning effectiveness at both reaction level and learning level, than those of the students in the comparison group
This site allows teachers to set up individual student blogs and link them up as a class. All this is done while the teacher has full control over the blogs.