The act of teaching is becoming more about designing the educational context and engaging students as they learn to approach material in more insightful and demanding ways. We are not transmitters of knowledge very often today,
The current university system is increasingly out of touch with student needs, and the entrenched players in an industry will always be too married to the old way of thinking to disrupt themselves - it takes outsiders to make it happen.
The LMS was not a creative decision, it was not pushing the capabilities of the Internet, it was settling for the least innovative classroom practice and repositioning that digitally. As a result classes taught within its structure generally land with a dull thud. No matter how creative and inspired the teacher or pedagogue behind the wheel, the LMS is no match for the wideness of the Internet. It was born a relic -- at its launch utterly irrelevant to its environment and its user.
The LMS largely erased mindfully aware teaching, and made excuses for unconscionable practice.
VocabularySpellingCity has a new summer word study program that allows children to sharpen academic skills as they play. These simple assignments are a daily workout for the brain, building literacy skills such as vocabulary, spelling, and writing.
VocabularySpellingCity provides the following sets of correlations to standards:
U.S. Standards by State
Common Core Standards for each States' Implementation
Australian Standards by State
Canadian Standards by Province
English National Curriculum Standards
deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday
teachers need to start somewhere (Monday
Both pathways are important to teacher growth and meaningful, sustained changes in teaching and learning.
consumption of media to curation, creation, and connection
flexible, mobile device for creating multimedia performances of understanding
foster critical reading of text, images, audio, and film
read in communal settings, leveraging social technologies to allow users to share notes, highlighted passages, questions, and ideas.
Focused and connected modes of reading are both vital, but they require different habits, disciplines, and settings, and they serve different ends.
focused reading mode, we hope young people will engage deeply with a text.
imagine how differentiated reading experiences in classes could be more social, how literature circles or book groups could collaborate in reading at home and then discuss their insights together in class.
it will be practices rather than apps that help students develop the capacity to read deeply.
learn both habits of mind for disciplined reading and how to control their technology environment to minimize distraction.
recognize how to strike the right balance between exploring a networked of hyperlinked texts while not wandering away from the core purpose of one’s reading
naming “attention” as a skill: having students reflect metacognitively on their attention strategies and weaknesses and think about how best to exercise their own attention muscles.
iOS 6 has a Guided
shutting down all apps before reading can be a kind of ritual of concentration, like clearing way books and papers from a desk before sitting down to read
develop new habits to make the most of our new tools. If our tools can distract us, then we need to learn more about focusing attention and managing distraction.
document their learning and create tangible performances, when they create objects-to-think-with, they deepen their understanding of material, and perhaps more importantly, create tools to spark metacognitive thinking about thinking
In this post, Byrne suggested, "Rather than trying to remember when to revoke access to the folder, you could use the Auto-Expire script to set an expiration date for your shared folders" (2013.01.25, para 1). He displayed a Tekzilla Daily video from which he "learned about the script", and also point out a Digital Inspiration blog post that provides instructions as well.