Group items tagged

let students create their own labs to test hypotheses

Integrate lots of interviewing into a history curriculum and have students compare stories they hear. Add a five-minute reading component to journal-writing time, emphasizing to students that real authors share their writing and need to have a sense of their audience.

Performances, presentations, displays, publications, and entries into contests are essential for student buy-in. ULS's hula class spends the semester gearing up for a final performance, and Hamilton's seventh graders forget how hard they're working on their writing when they focus on creating podcasts. "When I tell students they are going to create a podcast of their own stories, they get excited," she says. "This buy-in from the students gives them a purpose to learn new skills and a reason to come to school."

See, when you're at the front of a wired classroom, you get to watch students peck at laptops, skitter their eyes over screens and, every now and then, toss a glance in your direction. Some of them are taking notes, some are chatting with friends or cruising sports sites. Few are giving their instructor undivided attention. It's crazy making.

one of the things we ported over to new media from traditional media was the notion of the passive audience.

that chittering back channel itself isn't the problem. The problem is, as instructors, we haven't given it anything useful to do. "Students are telling us they want to be engaged. So, we need to find a way to give them specific focus for that back channel. If they're doing stuff that's on-task we're going to get engaged learning and ownership," she says.

WebWatch Releases Landmark Study on Childrens' Web SitesPublishers of many major children’s Web sites should do a better job disclosing sales and advertising information to parents, especially as more kids at younger ages go online to play and meet friends, says a study released today by Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Mediatech Foundation. For the study, parents in 10 families used video cameras to keep journals, providing insights into the way children use sites such as Club Penguin, Webkinz, Nick Jr., Barbie.com and others. Footage from those journals, which can be viewed here, illustrates how young children respond to advertising and marketing tactics online. The study, "Like Taking Candy from a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments," used ethnographic methods and focused on young children, ages 2½ to 8. Download a PDF of the study.

The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

But when I get such granular updates every day for a month,

For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: S

watching TV is no longer the de-facto spare time activity that I'm going to simple force people to watch it when they claim not to understand how I have no time to watch television.