Group items tagged

the school board president

“What you can do on laptops isn’t measured on current standardized tests,” said

teachers not knowing how to teach with laptops

Maine’s laptop program has had other positive effects. From the beginning of the program, class attendance rose and detentions dropped.

Three-quarters of Maine’s middle school students say they like school more since getting their own laptops,

ut a study led by University of Southern Maine professor David Silvernail found that the average 8th-grader using a laptop did score significantly higher on the writing part of a statewide exam

Bette Manchester, the first director of Maine’s laptop program, said the state also wants to use its laptop program to solve an age-old educational problem: How to offer every child the same opportunity at a quality education.

Blogging not only allowed us access to the event; it made us part of the event. And with that, the form had indeed finally come into its own.

Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers. Blogs are, in their purest form, the core of what has come to be called personal publishing.

As Rosalie Brochu, a student at St-Joseph, observes: "The impact of the blogs on my day to day life is that I write a lot more and a lot longer than the previous years. I also pay more attention when I write in my blog (especially my spelling) since I know anybody can read my posts.

They’re using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I’m not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?

Blogging is about, first, reading.

In summary, up to this point, education has been based on a model of scarcity because it was very hard to get good academic material. It was hard to get the right kinds of books. It was hard to get access to the teachers. So naturally, school formed a solution, an economical way of delivering information, using the classroom model, using the teacher model. What you basically got is a really constrained environment. Today, it’s about abundance: what do the models for learning look like now?

But it’s not about the technology. It’s about the way that your culture is organized.

College is becoming, for many undergraduates, a social experience.

But absent a one-on-one tutorial, it’s very difficult to do that. You get into small groups, and you have active discussions, but once you scale the group up, it becomes very difficult because you can’t push sixty people individually to the limits of their knowledge.

you can create an online environment where those sixty people can push against the limits of their knowledge. And that becomes something different and very important. That’s what simulations are good for.

© 2004

Because one of the most effective uses of simulation is as a mechanism to surface assumptions. You put the simulation up there, and people play it out, and in the course of playing it out, they question the underlying rules of the game.

One of the hallmarks of a good game is that it creates a game community. In order to play this game, players have to get information from other sources. They have to explore. They have to communicate. They have to post.

They are handing off and reinforcing each other’s learning. You don’t get that in a classroom. Not often.

You really have to think in terms of how to bring learning to networks of people, to groups of people.