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Ron King

60 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom by Category | Fluency21 - Committed Sardine Blog - 0 views

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    "The staff at TeachThought have compiled an amazingly comprehensive list featuring 60 different ways to incorporate the social media power of Twitter in the classroom. To make it even easier, the links are organized into separate categories. Explore, learn, and have fun Tweeting!"
Troy Patterson

Ten ideas for interactive teaching | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com - 1 views

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    While lecturing tends to be the easiest form of instruction, studies show that students absorb the least amount of information that way. Interactive teaching methods are an effective way to connect with a generation of students used to consistent stimulation-and education professor Kevin Yee has some advice for how teachers can make their lessons more interactive.
Troy Patterson

The best way to understand math is learning how to fail productively - Quartz - 1 views

  • Students who are presented with unfamiliar concepts, asked to work through them, and then taught the solution significantly outperform those who are taught through formal instruction and problem-solving. The approach is both utterly intuitive—we learn from mistakes—and completely counter-intuitive: letting kids flail around with unfamiliar math concepts seems both inefficient and potentially damaging to their confidence.
  • So far, teachers have mixed reactions. They recognize that the approach is good but they worry about efficiency and standardized tests: will kids fall on high-stakes national and international tests?
  • Kapur uses the research to make his case. Students get more output (deeper learning) for the same input (hours of instruction), which presents another problem: teachers have to get out of the way. “They [teachers] say it’s stressful to teach this way,” he says. “It’s easier to tell them [students] what you know.”
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  • In fact, Kapur theorizes in one of his studies that direct instruction might close students’ minds. Once a teacher presents a solution, students may no longer see the possibility of other solutions, or more creative approaches.
Troy Patterson

10 Realities About Bullying at School and Online | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • “most educators aren’t aware of the function bullying serves in school,”
  • The majority of kids don’t bully other kids and haven’t been victimized
  • Kids pick on others as a way to secure their standing among their peers or to move up a notch.
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  • aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained.”
  • Children from single-parent homes, and those with less educated parents, are no more apt to bully than kids with married and learned parents. African-Americans and other minorities show the same rates of bullying as their white counterparts.
  • The popular notion of bullies as sullen social outcasts who come from broken homes is a myth.
  • What adults call bullying kids call drama.
  • Cyber-bullying is just an extension of what’s happening in the classrooms, halls, and cafeteria
  • online cruelty merely makes visible what kids are doing in person behind the backs of adults.
  • ust another way for kids to express hostility towards targets they’ve already gone after—or are in retaliation against those who have attacked them in school.
  • Kids don’t intervene because doing so would jeopardize their own standing, they lack the tools to assist, and because they don’t think it will help anyway.
  • Adolescents are fixated on their social standing, and anything that jeopardizes their fragile position will be avoided.
  • students receive scant training on how to help in such a way that it won’t backfire.
  • “Asking students to be empowered and responsible bystanders is tantamount to telling them to be good readers or safe drivers without giving them instructions, guidance, and opportunities to practice,”
Troy Patterson

Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

  • Let's review the educational cure-alls of past decades: back to basics, the open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few.
  • Starting with the gifted-education community in the late 1960s, differentiation didn't get its mojo going until regular educators jumped onto the bandwagon in the 1980s.
  • Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.
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  • In theory, differentiation sounds great, as it takes several important factors of student learning into account: • It seeks to determine what students already know and what they still need to learn. • It allows students to demonstrate what they know through multiple methods. • It encourages students and teachers to add depth and complexity to the learning/teaching process.
  • Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.
  • 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating,'
  • "In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction."
  • It seems that, when it comes to differentiation, teachers are either not doing it at all, or beating themselves up for not doing it as well as they're supposed to be doing it. Either way, the verdict is clear: Differentiation is a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions.
  • The biggest reason differentiation doesn't work, and never will, is the way students are deployed in most of our nation's classrooms.
  • It seems to me that the only educators who assert that differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.
  • Differentiation is a cheap way out for school districts to pay lip service to those who demand that each child be educated to his or her fullest potential.
  • Do we expect an oncologist to be able to treat glaucoma?
  • Do we expect a criminal prosecutor to be able to decipher patent law?
  • Do we expect a concert pianist to be able to play the clarinet equally well?
  • No, no, no.
  • However, when the education of our nation's young people is at stake, we toss together into one classroom every possible learning strength and disability and expect a single teacher to be able to work academic miracles with every kid … as long as said teacher is willing to differentiate, of course.
  • A second reason that differentiation has been a failure is that we're not exactly sure what it is we are differentiating: Is it the curriculum or the instructional methods used to deliver it? Or both?
  • The terms "differentiated instruction" and "differentiated curriculum" are used interchangeably, yet they are not synonyms.
  • Differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own. Until that time, differentiation will continue to be what it has become: a losing proposition for both students and teachers, and yet one more panacea that did not pan out.
Ron King

Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving | Edutopia - 0 views

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    By teaching students to "drive their own brain" through metacognition, we provide a concrete way to guide them think about how they can best learn.
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    By teaching students to "drive their own brain" through metacognition, we provide a concrete way to guide them think about how they can best learn.
Ron King

In Common Core, Teachers See Interdisciplinary Opportunities - 0 views

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    Educators around the country are exploring innovative ways to teach the new common-core literacy standards, and some are calling attention to an approach they say is working well: interdisciplinary thematic units.
Ron King

Want to Improve Teaching? Listen to Students - 0 views

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    Annie Emerson doesn't have to wonder about what it takes to help her kindergarten students learn how to write or do math. They've told her. Several times during the year, the Pinewoods Elementary School teacher asks her students two basic questions: what are ways that I teach you that you like or that are really working for you? What could be changed to help you learn even more? And it turns out even 5-year-olds have plenty to say.
Ron King

ANTI-BULLYING PSA PROJECT [LESSON] - The Tempered Radical - 1 views

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    Over the past few years, I've become convinced that today's kids are best motivated as learners when they are tackling a real-world issue in a meaningful way. That's why my #sugarkills blog and my classroom microlending project have been so successful.
Ron King

CCSS Toolbox - 1 views

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    T he Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), the product of a major, multiyear state-led initiative coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), present an extraordinary opportunity for districts across the country to move to higher levels of achievement for all students. These rigorous standards will require that districts reexamine what it means for all students to understand and to do mathematics in ways that prepare them for success in a rapidly changing world.
Ron King

No-Zero Policy: Students Don't See Zeroes The Same Way Adults Do - 0 views

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    Many teachers see zeroes as punitive, but teaching 11th Grade English has taught me that the least motivational force on the planet is a zero. Though many teachers would chaff under the prospect of a zero, many students simply shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and say, "Whatev." This can be very frustrating for teachers and parents, and worst of all doesn't support the learning process. Which might suggest a new kind of no-zero policy.
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
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  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

Activity: Feedback Action Planning Template | - 0 views

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    "I've been doing a ton of tinkering this year with the way that I give students feedback in my classroom.  My goal is to steal Dylan Wiliam's idea that our goal should be to turn feedback into detective work.  That just feels right to me."
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