Group items tagged

"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.

"By working together on problem sets in math and sharing their perspectives in roundtable discussions in English, students at The College Preparatory School are making collaboration the driving force in their learning." Some great examples of collaboration -- both in practice and theory.

Great resources for teaching and learning.  "We strive to empower instructors by helping them develop a deep understanding of how students learn, so that they can effectively apply and adapt teaching strategies to meet their own goals and their students' needs.  The purpose of the following materials is to present current research and theory on student learning in a way that can inform and guide effective teaching practices."

Slideshare in which Robert Talbert explains his vision of a flipped classroom: its justification and its application in classes.

Valuable reading, as understanding how these cycles reinforce learning leads to better planning for blended learning. The Pedagogy and Technology Workshop employs a cycle much like the first few diagrams. 

"We teach numbers, then algebra, then calculus, then physics. Wrong!" exclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. "Start with engineering, and from that abstract out physics, and from that abstract out ideas of calculus, and eventually separate off pure mathematics. So much better to have the first-grade kid or kindergarten kid doing engineering and leave it to the older ones to do pure mathematics than to do it the other way around."

Many Diigo resources for UbD.

RCS Professional Development Day 2012 presentation by Sean Dagony-Clark and Don Ostrow on the creation of the Pedagogy and Technology Workshop.

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

Tons of links and resources on blended learning, from Diigo.

Very smart writing on the distinctions between a hierarchy of thinking vs. scaffolded learning. "the notion that students have to be immersed in 'lower-level' factual and procedural knowledge BEFORE they can do 'higher-level' thinking work doesn't comport with what we know from cognitive research."

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

UConn professor demonstrates the difference between presentations with text and multimedia. A nice example of why multimedia is a better tool and creates less cognitive distraction when learning from a slideshow.

A nice range of uses for this social bookmarking tool. 

"A blended learning approach combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach." Leads to more links about blended learning as well.

A passionate and eloquent plea from a university lecturer, attesting to the continued relevance of the lecture as a learning tool. I value her point that a lecture promotes active listening, but I disagree with the notion that a technology that has worked for thousands of years should see continued use simply because it has worked in the past.[1] Given the multitudes of other means of delivery of information today (remember, the lecture was developed when the only other means to spread information was handwriting), the lecture as transmission of information is a tool, not THE tool. She also equates books to lectures, and says that if we abandon one we move toward abandoning the other. A bit of tenuous logic, if you ask me. Still, perhaps worth a read.  [1] See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptorium#Trithemius.27_Praise_of_Scribes

"Digital learning resources, tips, research, and teaching and learning resources. Feel free to join this group to share related resources."

"Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did. What was originally a distance learning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America's education system..."

"Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association."

"Researchers who have investigated expert and novice performance have uncovered important distinctions between deliberate practice and other activities, such as work, play and rote repetition. Rote repetition - simply repeating a task - will not automatically improve performance. Effective practice is deliberate."