Group items tagged

Grant Wiggins' website on all aspects of UbD, great and small. 

Another advance in the flipped classroom construct. What I found most interesting was the use of the students as peer assessors when they were given papers to write instead of quizzes. not sure how effective it would be, but it might be very effective to have 1000 or so thoughtful critiques of a paper you've written. You would see a trend of the responses, and it might weed out subjectivity. That kind of "crowdsourcing" is something unique that technology could provide. There is a module in moodle which was not ready for primetime in version 1.9, but in Moodle 2.0 it might be. It was called Workshop, and allowed teachers and students to do peer editing and grading in an organized way. If it works better in 2.0, we should consider using it for peer editing exercises... ben

Good thoughts on setting goals for technology use in a school, rather than allowing the technology to define the school's goals. "In the end, our advice is: be sure your school defines clear goals for what it seeks to achieve by having computing devices in the hands of its students."

"Bloom's Taxonomy and a Praying Mantis" -- a reflection on the original taxonomy through the lens of a third grade class.

"Questioning enables teachers to check learners' understanding.... These questions are often arranged according to their level of complexity; this is called taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is one approach that can be used to help plan and formulate higher order questions."

"suggestions for keeping students engaged in a project and accountable for their time with computers"

Tips and tools for educators on how to build a PLN, with lots of examples of great content and resources. 

"Students and Professors Sound Off on the State of the College Lecture" Lots of personal examples, not a lot of theory. But useful to hear both sides of the experience.

A nice range of uses for this social bookmarking tool. 

"This then leads into a discussion of ... the reconstructive and associative nature of long-term memory. ... when we remember information, it is a combination of what we have experienced and what we know about the world." Memory as constructed experience. Beautiful.

Don't know if they're actually "the best," but there are a lot here -- and they cover multiple interests and disciplines.

Free video chat with up to 6 people. Sounds pretty cool.

"Our research shows that the argument that there is a generational break between today's generation of young people who are immersed in new technologies and older generations who are less familiar with technology is flawed," says Dr Jones. "The diverse ways that young people use technology today shows the argument is too simplistic and that a new single generation, often called the 'net generation', with high skill levels in technology does not exist." Press release: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/press-releases/20523/not-all-todays-students-are-tech-savvy.aspx

"we found that they still had many of the well-known conceptual difficulties with basic mechanics, and there was little correlation between the number of problems solved and conceptual understanding. This result suggests that traditional problem solving has a limited effect on conceptual understanding."

"One of the most common questions we get is, "But where do we find the time to use all this new technology?" To answer that question, we developed this infographic - A Day in the Life of a Connected Educator to show that using social media in your classroom and in your life can be integrated, easy, and fun."

"My 11 year old son just took a course at Stanford. That has a nice ring to it but it is actually meaningless because these days anyone can take a course at Stanford. You don't even have to pay. All you need is access to a computer and a reasonable Internet connection. So what we can say is my 11 year old son just watched a bunch of videos on the Internet. That doesn't make for an interesting post except that this 'bunch of videos' is currently being heralded as the future of higher education." Joshua Gans, Forbes, 5/7/12

"This is a really big deal. For the first time in history it is easy for non-specialists to explore and closely examine art from museums across the globe on a single website.... Here are two examples of how the Google Art Project opens the conversation. In 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted three canvases depicting his bedroom in Arles; these now reside in three different museums. Only the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam illustrates another version on its website and remarkably, none of the three museums link to the paintings at the other institutions."

Tips and ideas for using audio in your classroom.

Lots of ideas, from interviews to collaboration to assessment.