Learning Sciences

College professors and instructors can learn a lot from the chapters of a digital textbook that they assign students to read. Reynol Junco, an associate professor in Iowa State University's School of Education, says digital books provide real-time analytics to help faculty assess how students are doing in the class.

In this research, digital textbook is used for predicting students outcomes. With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend reading. On the other hand, with regular textbooks, instructor do not know how students are doing or whether they read the assigned material or not until they give a graded assignment. Digital text book gives opportunity to teacher to monitor their students' actions and can take precation to make students read the material.With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend on reading. By this way, instructor can gain some information like the material complexity for students reading level and s/he can adapt course material or take other precautions to help students succeed.

The human brain learns two ways - either through avoidance learning, which trains the brain to avoid committing a mistake, or through reward-based learning, a reinforcing process that occurs when someone gets the right answer. Scientists have found that making a mistake can feel rewarding, though, if the brain is given the opportunity to learn from its mistakes and assess its options.

"Scientists have long understood that the brain has two ways of learning. One is avoidance learning, which is a punishing, negative experience that trains the brain to avoid repeating mistakes. The other is reward-based learning, a positive, reinforcing experience in which the brain feels rewarded for reaching the right answer." The "avoidance learning" is which I have learned from my father thanks to his raising children technique. He always wanted that we, as his children, should be faultless. And that understanding (of course he is not a pedagog :)) affected me negatively in my subsequent years. In fact, the second one, reward-based learning, is essential if someone wants to apply discussion and peer learning in his/her classroom as students who avoid making mistakes will avoid having communication with others, generating assertive questions, defend his/her arguments, asking help even if s/he struck at a ridiculous point, etc. Making mistakes is a part of learning. We need to emphasize this in our classrooms.

The article is about Generation Y which is the students in our classes now. In his article, Peter Reilly mentions about a new generation called "Generation Y " and its features. Firstly he talks on four different generation types which are "the baby boomer generation", "generation X", "generation Y" and "generation Z" respectively. He takes generation Y especially because I think they are the young people of our world and there isn't enough knowledge about them. He mentions about some features of generation Y members who prefer multitask rather than focusing one thing in a time. Also they are more concerned about what their employer can do for them rather than what they can do for a company.In the school, Gen Y wants technology integrated multitask ways rather than traditional old-way.

The talk is about a research conducted by Indian Pawan Shinha. The research has been conducted on a group of 200 children. They were blind as a result of cataract. He pioneered the project which consists of treatment and post observation. He defined learning seeing step by step. He uttered that after treatment, the patient cannot differentiate the shapes; even the shadow is an object for them. The video has real data which is very interesting in my opinion.

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." ― Benjamin Franklin In the area of adult learning, Ben Franklin turns out to be quite prescient.

That's true. Education is a social-emotional act. As I said in my personal learning theory, teaching humans is not like inserting lines of codes to series of robots to make them behave in a specific way. We all have emotions and our emotions to a specific event may not be same all the time as our point of views to an event are affected by our personal experiences, culture, philosophy, etc. In that sense, for a teacher, it is important to monitor students' feelings to a specific topic and to arrange learning environments in which students have positive feelings about a topic.

"Introduce failure into your learning design." something we appreciate less in our educational system.

We have heard some ideas or theories about better learning from our teachers during the school years. I had organized some science fairs during my past teaching years. However none of them was in the project settings. In this project students learn how to carry out a research about how we learn by reading and listening. In your opinion, which one results in more information retained, reading or listening?

There are many different factors investigated affecting students' mathematics learning before in the literature. However I had never read a research project about the instructional gestures supporting learning. It reveals that the gestures have a substantial role in comprehension. The results even shows that some studies triggers the learning even roughly twice.

This is quite interesting. I am curious to hear more about the results of this research.

In this video, a teacher shows that using technology (smartboard) and concrete materials/manipulatives help students learn geometrical concepts. Especially in early ages, children can learn abstract concepts better with the proper use of hands-on activities and concrete manipulatives. If we add visualizations to words in our lessons, we can enhance students' learning. Furthermore, using such instruments in class may prevent misconceptions that make difficult to learn new concepts.

I like this video because of two reasons. Firstly, it is good example of effective lesson and good example for using materials.Different types of materials are used in this video and lesson materials are support each other by this way lesson becomes enjoyable and interesting for students who has different learning styles. Secondly, in this video, manipulatives, paper pencil actvities and technogical tools are used together and a good example of how technology should be used in the lessons. Studies shows that in our classrooms, smart board used like projectors and teachers even do not know the function of document camera. Therefore, I think that this video should be used for teacher training in Fatih project.

I have seen this post when I was searching for how can interaction with peers contribute to learning maths. It is written by ROBERT SUN who is the CEO of Suntex International and inventor of First In Math, an online program designed for deep practice in mathematics. The things that are mentioned felt very similar with our country's situation actually, as learners how do we use concepts of maths (or any other courses) except from school? May be the first reason for our students cannot learn and hate maths is behind this question.

"Teachers can encourage their students to express themselves verbally using mathematical terms; even in the early grades, children can be asked to explain what they want or mean using numbers, or relationships between numbers. Anything that encourages them to talk about math and mathematical concepts is beneficial." Social math!. It looks like article emphasizes the importance of language in information exchange. It reminds me Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory in which he also believed that language is important for learning. He also purported that language is culture-dependent so each cultures' learning may be different from each other. In addition, providing opportunity to students to express themselves verbally can give us clues about current mental maps of students as to a specific topic (what is correct, what needs improvement, etc.). In addition, students can transfer their transformed ideas (ideas transformed from scholarly language to level-appropriate language) to their friends which can facilitate their learning.

Yasin, I am curious to hear about some of the contemporary approaches towards teaching Math, a subject generally taught with more traditional methods. Regarding mathphobia, we also need to think about the culture that stimulates that.

This study is the latest one, to my knowledge, conducted in English language teaching field in Turkey in terms of TPACK. I do not think that this study is a powerful one because it fails to provide a vivid picture in terms of preservice EFL teachers' TPACK competencies. Nevertheless, it is a fresh one, it has been conducted in our country and it explores my target population's competencies: preservice EFL teachers. :) By the way, you can have an access to the full text through METUnique search. You're welcome. :)

"The results of the research suggest that males' technological knowledge was higher than females; however, females were better than males in pedagogical knowledge. Moreover, no significant difference was found between TPACK mean and academic achievement in terms of the correlation between TPACK scale and academic achievement of the participants". WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS MY FRIEND :)

At first glance, yes, you are the champions :), but this is only one study and it is conducted with a certain group of people. We don't know what kind of results we'll have with a different group. This means I expect you to show more evidences in favor of your "champion" title :).

I use this software so much while preparing animations and videos. Its interface is so easy to use and the videos created seems so professional. You can share the link with your friends and edit collaboratively the video.

Benefits of mediation. We experienced this a bit in class last week, good to see that it has some effects :)

In this wiki page, you can find a variety of different CSCL technologies. Since the page is a "wiki" one, you can also edit and add some technologies to the list.

There are lots of technologies in that website to use in CSCL environments.

The researchers think the presence of some narcissists helps generate healthy in-group competition =)