I am accepted and acceptable here just as I am.
I am safe here—physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
People here care about me.
People here listen to me.
People know how I'm doing, and it matters to them that I do well.
People acknowledge my interests and perspectives and act upon them.
Some great lines here regarding the needs of the learners in your classroom.
I understand what we do here.
I see significance in what we do.
What we do reflects me and my world.
The work we do makes a difference in the world.
The work absorbs me.
when students discover meaning and relevance implicit in books, ideas, and tasks. Without meaning, schoolwork is purposeless for students.
People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”
This is a key point in making those who feel that there are huge flaws in online learning. While there is definite potential for the "correspondence course" model they mention above to still be present, there are myriad ways in which online learning can be extremely communal. What I love about it is that it automatically eliminates pacing concerns in that students can move through material at a rate that is more to their style.
guiding exercises in text translation: pulling up a MySpace page or a lingo-drenched school paper and asking students to translate the writing into standard English. Or they ask students to translate passages from classic literature into texting speak to demonstrate their comprehension of the writing and to create a form of multilingual focus, similar to how learning a foreign language tends to enhance a student's understanding of his or her native tongue.
Take this video, put it into the context of your latest classroom reading, be it novel, short story, poem, what have you, and ask yourself if your students could get into this. It's like video sparknotes, only much much better. Summary isn't always writing...