Group items tagged

"What is an essential question? An essential question is - well, essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter - the essence of the issue."

"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."

Online learning system used by High Tech High. Seems similar to Carnegie Learning. "Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces is a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn't know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple-choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking."

"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."

Mini posters for reminding us how to develop questions with blooms in mind

"Very few people or organizations however constantly discuss and debate "WHY" they do something. It's only by reflecting on the question of "why" that enables us to develop and articulate a meaningful vision for what we should be doing ... and that certainly applies to education." Sam Gliksman, iPads in Education ning

As you work with digital material (both in your own preparation and with your students), you will run up against the questions of copyright and fair use more and more. Students are becoming incredibly adept at grabbing and repurposing online material. This can result in powerful and inventive work (after all, there's very little created that is truly original, with no influence from prior works) but can also be a way to avoid original thought.  There's a fine line between copyright infringement and fair use. Not to mention outright plagiarism, of course. And educational use is not necessarily fair use; that's a common misconception.  This is a recording of an ISTE web conference on copyright and fair use. It even includes an original fair use rock song!

Math teacher Katie Gimbar answers questions about her flipped classroom. Good introductory information and some good answers, but a lot of this is from personal experience. Take with a grain of salt. 

A classroom music experience in which 24 kids (many on iPads) and several professional musicians collaborated on a piece of digital music. The piece they created may not shatter any sales records (though it is actually on sale in the iTunes store), but it's certainly not bad for student work. It's unclear how long they worked on this piece, or how many takes were involved, but the resulting music and video are good. And the students are left with a downloadable song that they created. So here are my questions: - are these students learning music? - is their learning transferable to real instruments? - to tweak Sting's words: is technology a legitimate teacher in this case?

An overview of Twitter for professional development as well as some links. "Teachers who are fans say they appreciate the easy-to-use tool as a quick way to network with colleagues. They like being able to ask and answer questions, learn from experts, share resources, and react to events on the fly."

"schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning."

Recently, Christine Wiser T&L's Managing Editor, asked the Tech Advisors the following question: What do you think are the top three most important issues facing K-12 edtech this year? 1. Mobile device adoption. Especially bring your own device program implementation. 2. Getting people to really understand what is meant by 21st century teaching and learning. 3. Anytime, anywhere learning.