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The Harvard Graduate School of Education is pleased to announce its spring 2013 Askwith Forums, a series of public lectures dedicated to discussing challenges facing education, sharing new knowledge, and generating spirited conversation.

A movie that has so much fun. It provides some lessons to be learnt by educators as well. Recommended.

I watched this. Fun!

"FATIH PROJECT Turkey has initiated FATIH Project with the aim enabling equal opportunities in education and improving technology in our schools for the efficient usage of ICT tools in the learning-teaching processes by appealing to more sense organs in all 620.000 schools that are in the preschool education, the primary education and the secondary education through providing tablets and LCD Smart Boards.

You can find the story of this system at that page and also photos from the old schools in America. Also it gives information about student profile, evaluation system, philosophers' names, etc.

It says that children can learn with internet without any intervention from outside -like a teacher. When the topic is not defined, children can learn what they want. But for some specific topics, they at least need the very first idea -a question, sometimes even a pre-designed system of information and instruction. Are we too much interfering to students' learning process?

Such educational frameworks support the trend of shift from teacher-centeredness to student-centeredness. In the past, when we need to ask something, we asked to our elders- in school, to teachers. Now, we have an additional elder, the internet. It can answer almost anything. In that sense, the impact of the technology can not be ignored. The idea of providing internet access to places that is scarce in terms of teachers is reasonable - which also supports the idea of distance education. Besides, bringing technology is easier and cheaper than bringing a teacher with resources. However, we still need teachers as -cliche but vital term- "facilitators" and regulators in self-learning process. It is necessary for constructivism as well as child-driven education or for any other self-learning methods. Someone is needed for wrapping-up the knowledge gained, for assessing the results, for remedying circumstances that obstruct the learning process, for deciding goals or organizing goals to be attained, and for secure and heuristic browsing on the internet. In that sense, I support the idea of "self organized learning environments" as Mitra offers, but also I contend that there should be teachers around these environments for facilitating. In short, we should not quit important elements of education while trying to make it better.

I believe although computers and instructional softwares are amazing to enhance the effectiveness of instruction, they are not enough. They are always limited. It is impossible to load them all possible questions of students and their responses. Moreover, none of the computers or softwares would be able to fulfill students' emotional and motivational needs. There is also the uniqueness of the students; not all of the students would enjoy a computer-based education. Lastly, as a science educator when I think for my area; it is never the same to make an experiment on computer and in a laboratory. Students learn better when they are actively engaged in an experiment and seethe results with their eyes.

A text that I found while searching for something else. It was fun to read it.

A useful website including examples of learning and teaching materials about humanism.

Gamze, thanks for sharing. Especially I liked the "humanist perspectives" part since a teacher might not have difficulty in implementing a pre-planned curriculum, however, s/he might have hardship while creating a humanistic classroom. Because, in education, what is a humanistic element is and what is not is not so clear as traditional views. Remember what Ana said, "It seems some of you think that humanism means freeing yourselves or the educational environment. Humanism means enabling students to set a goal and work together to achieve that goal." Ana tries to say that we should not let learning occurs just by chance. That is not humanism. Humanistic teacher just should allow students what they want to do and teach them considering their way of learning and interests. That's why I found humanist perspectives part really useful. To illustrate, to touch on environmental issues in the classroom, you can read the related part for grasping the idea of how a humanistic teacher should behave while teaching this issue.

The link to the pool that has been prepared for technology based educational materials for FATİH project. In this pool, teachers and students can send several educational materials that they created or they were using in classroom environment. They aim to extend the content with contributions of people who are actively in education in Turkey. However, it is obvious that the project needs professional e-content materials. Videos, pdf's are ok but multimedia based tools are needed.

Erdem, I wonder if there is any section on the website that include resources/guidelines for teachers. E.g. how to integrate those simulations in the classrooms.

Canan, I hope it will help, thank you, Hocam, there are just materials in the pool. I downloaded 10th grade math teacher guidelines released by Ministry of Education and started to read some sections. I saw that they offer recommendations like "using a dynamic math software, students do...". However, I don't know if they will handle the learning and usage of such software in in-service trainings. I wish I could bring more information about the system but they have not answered my CV and my sample work yet,

Dear friends, I strongly recommend you to watch this film. It is about a school (like hababam sınıfı). You will see different approaches against students. Examples of radical behaviorism and in part constructivism can be found. It will be enjoying to watch and contrast these two approaches. Besides educational aspects, this film is so touching. Please, prepare your handkerchiefs :) Original language: French Subtitle: English Link to watch: http://filenuke.com/ulgl9j1ux08p (click to "free" option)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anh7Enari2U (Eng sub)

Dinçer, I will watch it this week!

Teacher swaps desk chairs for exercise balls

Songs have been prepared by STRCT(TÜBİTAK) to make students love schools. These are very intersting songs which are prepared according to the neccessities of the current times.

A funny video about the memorization issue in education. The narrator claims to make a student be graduated in 5 minutes. An exaggerated view to education. However, it is not completely wrong.

Hope to see a similar result for Fatih project.

Here I think the most important phrase is "when used properly". "Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm's president of global market development, believes that the improvement comes because students using smartphones have easier access to information at any time of day or night. They are also able to keep in contact with their classmates and even their teachers, which helps them stay on top of everything that goes on in school." When students have enough motivation to allocate more time to use these devices for such activities stated above, the finding that their learning is increased can be supported. Here again we reach the conclusion: How to use technology is important, since it is just a tool, and can well be used as a toy instead of educational material.

Is this a case of learning or transfering the existing information without assimilating or accommodating into the classroom environment via technology? I think the meaning of learning is also changing. In near future, there will be no learning like we do I guess.