EduTechK12November

"if responding personally to text isn't leading students to deeper understanding, then where should teachers turn to help students improve their comprehension? We should turn to the text itself. Enter close reading."

"teacher-ready tips for stimulating curiosity in others. First, she suggests starting with the question, rather than the answer-which teachers will recognize as the foundation of inquiry-based or discovery learning (see: math teacher Dan Meyer's take on how to make math "irresistible" to students). She then suggests offering some initial knowledge on the subject. "We're not curious about something we know absolutely nothing about," she writes. Again, teachers may know this as "activating prior knowledge" or "setting the stage" before a lesson. Finally, she says it helps to require communication, or "open an information gap and then require learners to communicate with each other in order to fill it." The think-pair-share technique and vocabulary activities that require students to teach each other their words both exemplify this. What would you add to the list? How does stimulating curiosity gel with other motivation tactics-or should teachers think of curiosity and motivation as one and the same?"

"Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility. "

"a shared close reading of a complex text in which students propose emerging understandings, supported by textual evidence, with occasional reminders and re-direction by teacher-facilitators."

Dr Seymour Papert (1999)

"Writing appropriate emails is part of being a good digital citizen! Students (even digital natives) are not born with knowing the rules and responsibilities. Just as they need to learn to answer and talk on the phone, they need to learn about e-mail writing in an academic setting (to their teachers, Skype partners, project collaborators, administration or their classmates regarding school business)."

In the ideal classroom, all students would learn how to work cooperatively with others, compete for fun and enjoyment, and work autonomously on their own. Cooperation is working together to accomplish shared goals. Within cooperative situations, individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all other group members. it may be concluded that it is the drive for goal accomplishment that motivates cooperative and competitive behavior. Positive interdependence tends to result in promotive interaction, negative interdependence tends to result in oppositional or contrient interaction, and no interdependence results in an absence of interaction.

IQ was a popular measurement but it did not capture the type of thinking that generated novel solutions to urgent predicaments. First, creativity is not equivalent to intelligence. Second, divergent thinking is central to the concept of creativity. Third, we can develop tests to measure divergent thinking skills. What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence? How do we measure creativity? And what, exactly, is creativity? undergrads were better at solving insight-based problems when they tested during their least optimal time participants who played a difficult working memory game known as the n-BACK task scored higher on tests of a fundamental cognitive ability known as fluid intelligence: the capacity to solve new problems, to make insights and see connections independent of previous knowledge. Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between thinking about two concepts or consider multiple perspectives simultaneously

There are a range of activities/workshops here: http://balancedtech.wikispaces.com/Professional+Development I'd recommend iPad Exploration, Apps Taskonomy & WIKId Wide Walls to start with.

""I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said. Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment - even if the pages are somebody else's with the same name."

"The feedback from teachers has been incredible to our top 10 twitter accounts for teachers. We would like to continue to provide great resources for teachers and educators, so we are continuing to add to our list."

"Publishing student thinking can be among the most powerful ways to improve learning. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest reason is that the "threat" of publishing moves the lodestone from the classroom to the "real world." This, of course, changes everything."