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Michael O'Connor

Drive, By Daniel Pink: What motivates students? Part Two - Implementing 21st Century Sk... - 0 views

  • nk/203).
  • century.  Drive says for 21st Century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose." (
  • Dan's main point in Drive, according to his twitter summary: "Carrots & Sticks are so last
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  • Motivation comes from within, not external threats or bribes
  • -"People to contribute rather then just show up and grind out their days." (100) -What teacher has not wanted this?
  • -"Control leads to compliance: autonomy leads to engagement...only engagement can produce mastery" (110-111) When was the last time you had true engagement and what caused this engagement?
  • -"Do the workers refer to the company (school) as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"?" (129)  Do your students see school on their team?
  • First, Student's need to gain autonomy, not empowerment (we love this word, it gives the impression that students have power in the system).  Autonomy is self direction. Second, Mastery of the topic (big word in education ten years ago).  And third, purpose (education likes to use meaning or relevance).
  • the system right now makes this very, very hard to do
  • I find it very difficult sometimes to convince students that I am not grading a project, or that they can take a quiz whenever they are ready.  Students have learned that they will be told and shown how to survive in education. 
  • We need to encourage students to be independent thinkers that formulate their own methods to their own answers.  The data collection systems of education need to change to meet the new education system of the 21st century; we need to stop attempting to make new methodology fit into old data collection routines.
Michael O'Connor

Where Speech Recognition Is Going - 0 views

  • “I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface.
  • “We’re at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront,
  • Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been working on speech interfaces since the 1980s, says today’s smart phones pack as much processing power as the laboratory machines he worked with in the ’90s. Smart phones also have high-bandwidth data connections to the cloud, where servers can do the heavy lifting involved with both voice recognition and understanding spoken queries. “The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just couldn’t do before,” says Glass. “You can use more sophisticated statistical models.”
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  • Siri,
  • But voice functionality is built into Android, the Windows Phone platform, and most other mobile systems, as well as many apps
  • Nuance is at the heart of the boom in voice technology
  • , Nuance hopes to put its speech interfaces in many more places, most notably the television and the automobile
  • Meanwhile, the Sync entertainment system in Ford automobiles already uses Nuance’s technology to let drivers pull up directions, weather information, and songs. About four million Ford cars on the road have Sync with voice recognition. Last week, Nuance introduced software called Dragon Drive that will let other car manufacturers add voice-control features to vehicles
  • “It’s astonishingly accurate,” says Brian Phelps, CEO and cofounder of Montrue and himself an ER doctor. “Speech has turned a corner; it’s gotten to a point where we’re getting incredible accuracy right out of the box
  • Sejnoha believes that within a few years, mobile voice interfaces will be much more pervasive and powerful. “I should just be able to talk to it without touching it,” he says. “It will constantly be listening for trigger words, and will just do it—pop up a calendar, or ready a text message, or a browser that’s navigated to where you want to go
Michael O'Connor

As Children's Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • In Kim’s words, the data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
  • During the immediate post-Sputnik period, the U.S. government was concerned with identifying and fostering giftedness among American schoolchildren, so as to catch up with the Russians (whom we mistakenly thought were ahead of us in scientific innovation). 
  • creativity is the central variable underlying personal achievement and ability to adapt to unusual conditions.
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  • The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota.
  • Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.
  • Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.
    • Michael O'Connor
       
      I know of several local school districts that believe that their students cannot fail. How does this prepare a student for his/her real life? It does them great harm to continue to pass them on. They will never learn to overcome the impediments that occurs in life. You will also have an apathetic student on your hands! It is necessary to allow students to fail. Not to make them feel bad about themselves...but to allow them to understand there are second chances in life (sometimes) and that they are not beyond redemption.
  • In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, ov
  • If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1] 
  • judgmental teachers and parents.
Michael O'Connor

Teaching Visual Spatial Learners - Time4Learning - 0 views

  • The truth of education is that most of traditional schooling methods are based on auditory-sequential instruction. This is unfortunate for visual-spatial students, who can begin to feel "dumb" in a regular classroom. In actuality, visual-spatial children are often highly gifted, but their classroom work may not adequately reflect their intelligence. Or, commonly, V-S kids will have incredibly high grades in subjects that appeal to their visual learning style, but might struggle to keep even passing grades in subjects such as phonics and math computation, where visual skills are seldom accessed. They also suffer exceedingly under the drill and review method of teaching. While continued practice and repetition is highly beneficial for auditory-sequential learners, visual-spatial students find it to be completely unnecessary. Once a V-S learner has mastered a concept, the learning is permanent, and does not need to be reviewed. Any type of review that highlights a visual-spatial learner's mistakes can be especially damaging to their self-esteem.
  • Although much of the traditional school environment is designed with the auditory-sequential learner in mind, there are things that teachers or parents can do to make learning more accessible for visual-spatial learners. The most obvious of these is the copious use of visual aids in learning. Any auditory instruction needs to be accompanied by something that the student can see with their eyes, or manipulate with their hands. Visual-spatial learners also usually grasp reading more easily if they are taught using the sight, or whole-word method, rather than with phonics. Pre-tests are another good idea for V-S learners, so that you do not waste time teaching them what they already have mastered. When possible, instead of writing out their work, allow them to represent their learning in visual and creative ways. Creativity is key for a visual-spatial learner.
  • The computer is an indispensible tool for a visual-spatial learner.
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  • The computer takes some of this pressure off by allowing the keyboard to do some of the work. Visual-spatial learners also enjoy the computer because of its visual impact. In fact, both the computer and the internet were inventions by people who were very likely visual-spatial learners themselves!
Garth Holman

What is Curriculum Theory by William F. Pinar (Multiple Participant Book Review) | Joy ... - 1 views

  • primary of which is the idea that curriculum is a “complicated conversation.”
  • Pinar argues that curriculum  –  or  currere    –  is an organic idea rather than a Socraticmessage that never changes (Pinar, 2011) Teachers must discover this currere for themselvesthrough methods of self reflection and self discovery.
  • Pinar has a good grasp of the situation stating “standardization makes everyonestupid,” and “to deny the past and force the future, we teach to the test.”
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  • What knowledge is of most worth (pg. 210)? This is a difficult question that requiresreflection into what is the most at stake for us as teachers and for our students as learners.
  • The conflict within this text focuses on the loss of power and privilege of teachers over the teaching profession. Pinar (2011) states, "How could we have so fallen in the public's eyethat we are no longer entitled to professional self-governance, the very prerequisite for  professionalism?" (p. 69).
  • The inability for teachers to have a voice results in an environment in which the professionalism aspect of a professional group has been diminished to a non-existent level.
  • illiam F. Pinar‟s purpose in writing this book is to ask us [the student] to question this  present moment and our relation to it. In doing so, we are to question the very reason behind what it means to teach, “To study, to become “educated” in the presen t moment (Pinar, 2011)
  • Pinar vision of schooling is   to "understand, not just implement or evaluate thecurriculum" (Pinar, 2011). He urges educators to know what they are teaching. Reciting from a text and reading from a manual is not teaching in his opinion and it‟s not teaching in ours either. As students we are asked to brainstorm and use our imagination to picture the perfect scenario.Pinar is asking teachers to do the same
  • Pinar describes curriculum theory as: an interdisciplinary field in which teacher education is conceived as the professionalization of intellectual freedom, fore fronting teachers‟ and students‟ individuality (originality), their creativity, and constantly engaging in ongoing if complicatedconversation informed by a self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition (Pinar, 2011)
  • By tying the curriculum to student performance on standardized test, teachers were forced toabandon their intellectual freedom to choose what they teach, how they teach, and how theyassess student learning (Pinar, 2011). Failure to learn has been the result of separating the   WHAT IS CURRICULUM THEORY? 8 curriculum from the interest of students and the passion of teachers.
  • Contemporary is referring to a person in thesame field or time period as you. Pinar is trying to emphasize that we are not all moving at thesame speed when it comes to educating middle and elementary students
  • Teachers are then empowered tohave a voice to influence the curriculum in such a manner that positively contributes to studentlearning. Pinar is urging teachers to take back their classroom. Take the initiative and leadwithout boundaries. Instruct without guidelines and open your mind to learning indirectly fromyour students
  • Students are set up to fail but it is not really their fault.   They attend school where the system begs for learning to equate to test scores and they become “consumers” of  educational s ervices rather than “students” This system also encourages drop-outs becauseschools only want to teach students that have acceptable test scores which benefits the school‟s accountability. Students do not experience an environment that places importance on the development of ideas and critical thinking but rather the successful completion of atest.
  • Demonization of the teacher has been the result of the current political and economic powers have placed the teacher in an unimportant position in the educational hierarchy andassume that business leaders know more about the curriculum and teaching than the teachersknow themselves. Teachers have become “technicians” because of school deform and are encouraged to replace ideas and know ledge with “cognitive skills” that will fit into the  jobsettings of the future. According to Pinar, these skills result in historical amnesia, political passivity and cultural standardization.
  • He invites us to become “temporal” subjects of history, living simultaneously in the past, present, and future  –  aware of the historical conditions that haveshaped the current situation, engaged in the present battles being waged over the course anddirection of public education, and committed to re-building a democratic public sphere.
Jenny Sommers

Digital Natives Looking to Unplug, Connect | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

  • If you were creating a classroom, what would it look like? It would be interactive and have a lot of activities. It should be half and half activities and lecture. I do like when it’s more open, but it is important for us to know what lecture looks like because we might have to do that later. The tables should be set up in a circle so we are all facing each other and talking.
  • It turns out, however, that in this group of students, many talked as if they craved more human interaction, and wanted to unplug more during class
  • our students and these students we interviewed have been around technology so much, that when they were asked questions about technology, they had a hard time understanding the question (what do you mean, technology?). Technology isn’t technology for our students–it’s just part of their lives
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    • Jenny Sommers
       
      Interesting. I feel that some of our college courses tell us to use technology just so we can say we are using technology.
    • Jenny Sommers
       
      I never thought about it that these young people that have grown up with technology don't realize what technology really is.
  • Educators say not to incorporate technology for technology’s sake, but more often than not, it is assumed that a new tech tool will effectively engage students
  • As teachers, we shouldn’t be taking away real opportunities for students to engage with each other and simply replacing those opportunities of connection with technology
  •  
    Interesting read about what some young people want from technology
Michael O'Connor

A Warning to Young People: Don't Become a Teacher | Randy Turner - 0 views

  • Teachers are being told over and over again that their job is not to teach, but to guide students to learning on their own. While I am fully in favor of students taking control of their learning, I also remember a long list of teachers whose knowledge and experience helped me to become a better student and a better person. They encouraged me to learn on my own, and I did, but they also taught me many things. In these days when virtual learning is being force-fed to public schools by those who will financially benefit, the classroom teacher is being increasingly devalued. The concept being pushed upon us is not of a teacher teaching, but one of who babysits while the thoroughly engaged students magically learn on their own
  • But there is no way that eighth graders' opinions should be a part of deciding whether I continue to be employed.
  • It is hard to get past the message being sent that our teachers are not good enough so we have to go outside to find new ones
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  • Merit pay and eliminating teacher tenure, while turning teachers into at-will employees are the biggest disservice our leaders can do to students.
  • The teaching of history, civics, geography, and the arts have shrunk to almost nothing in some schools, or are made to serve the tested areas.
  • Even worse, in some schools weeks of valuable classroom time are wasted giving practice standardized tests (and tests to practice for the practice standardized tests) so obsessive administrators can track how the students are doing
  • . Pearson
  • received the contract to create the tests, has a full series of practice tests, while other companies like McGraw-Hill with its Acuity division, are already changing gears from offering practice materials for state tests to providing comprehensive materials for Common Core.
  • Common Cor
  • Why would anyone willingly sign up for this madness?
  • I cannot remember a time when the classrooms have been filled with bad teachers. The poor teachers almost never lasted long enough to receive tenure.
  • there are exceptions
  • here is nothing to stop administrators from removing those teacher
  • tenure
  • provide teachers with the right to a hearing. It does not guarantee their jobs.
  • Times have changed. I have watched over the past few years as wonderfully gifted young teachers have left the classroom, feeling they do not have support and that things are not going to get any better
  • That framework is being torn down, oftentimes by politicians who would never dream of sending their own children to the kind of schools they are mandating for others.
  • After all, what other profession would allow me to make $37,000 a year after 14 years of experience and have people tell me how greedy I am?
Michael O'Connor

What Inspiring Leaders Do - Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

    • Michael O'Connor
       
      Isn't this what educators are already doing or at least encouraged to do?!
  • The three leadership traits that most mattered were the ability to focus intensely on customer needs, the ability to collaborate with colleagues — and the ability to inspire.
Michael O'Connor

Getting Started - ISTE Community - 0 views

  • This open community is for ISTE members and the wider educational community. It’s here to facilitate learning, networking, and sharing for anyone with an interest in educational technology. Two heads are better than one, and we think the more heads, the better!
  • What can I do here? Spiff up your profile page: In the right navigation, click Settings and tell us about yourself, your work, the web 2.0 tools you use, and what you like to do. Most of all, have fun customizing your page!  Watch this great Getting Started video  Join a group: Looking for like-minded individuals? We have special interest groups, tools, and topics—there’s a group for every interest!  Start or join a discussion: Ask a question, give advice, or leave a comment for a friend.  Write a blog: Got a lot on your mind? Consider writing an ongoing blog and reading others’ posts and comments
  • ISTE Community is a public network
Christen Cowley

The Cleveland Art Museum - 0 views

  •  
    Cleveland Art Museums home page. They do virtual tours of some exhibits as well.
Michael O'Connor

Apple case seen as possible spur to tax action - Yahoo! News - 0 views

    • Michael O'Connor
       
      This is the bottom line. They don't have enough money to pay the deficit off...so lets punish successful companies to do so
  • The focus on Apple's taxes comes at a time of heated debate in Washington over whether and how to raise revenues to help reduce the federal deficit
  • "We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar," Cook said. "We don't depend on tax gimmicks."
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  • He punched out words when stressing the 600,000 jobs that the company supports, and underscored that Apple is the nation's largest corporate taxpayer.
  • Cook did so voluntarily
  • In effect, Apple is holding out for a lower corporate tax rate, and Cook spent some of his time in the spotlight to advocate for one, as well as a streamlining of the tax code to eliminate deductions and credits.
  • At the same time, lawmakers must tread lightly as they attack Apple, a company held in high esteem and whose ubiquitous products are seen as both innovative and indispensable
  • "What Apple is doing is pretty mainstream," said accounting expert Robert Willens, in an interview. Shifting around the intellectual property rights has a minor effect compared to the simple avoidance of U.S. taxes by not repatriating profits, he said.
Michael O'Connor

Visual Learners | Online Learning Tips - 0 views

  • Visual learners learn best through their eyes.
  • If you find yourself doing a search for videos and podcasts then you should focus on tuning your skills in the auditory direction
  • Visual learners learn best through their eyes. In a traditional classroom they prefer to sit where they can best see what is going on in order to have an advantage when reading a teacher’s body language, studying charts and graphs, watching video, following visual presentations such as PowerPoint, observing demonstrations, and so on.  When learning online visual learners benefit from the ability to replay simulations or videos, trace an outline on the screen, note color coding, interpret pictures, and interact with a wide variety of interactive visual media.
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  • There are some tactics a visual learner can employ to maximize learning. These learning methods can include: constructing graphic organizers to represent information that may have been presented orally studying diagrams outlining notes locating sites or placing symbols on a map watching videos, demonstrations, simulations, and reenactments color coding notes drawing pictures to represent events writing summaries direct copying of notes and vocabulary using flashcards
  • Auditory learners attain information best through their ears. In a traditional classroom they tend to sit away from noisy distractions, where they can hear best the teacher or other instructional media such as video, recorded books, poems, or songs. 
  • They have an advantage in listening to lectures or relating to auditory cues.  When learning online auditory learners benefit from being able to replay recordings of lectures, videos, and other auditory sources of information. 
  • Tactile learners, sometimes referred to as kinesthetic learners, learn best through their hands. In a traditional classroom they prefer to be able to move around, touch objects, conduct physical experiments, perform reenactments, and change their physical proximity with learning materials.  When learning online tactile learners do not have a distinct advantage, but may recall spelling via the muscle memory of keyboarding.
Michael O'Connor

Museum Box Homepage - 0 views

  •  
    One of the coolest sites around! I could do a whole unit using this one piece of software. Each box can hold enough different types of information that it will cover a subject in depth!!! USE THIS!!!
Garth Holman

Create What people think I do, What I really do | meme images builder - 1 views

  •  
    Cool tool for sterotypes. 
jackie waterman

Transition: Special Ed to Adult Services - 0 views

    • jackie waterman
       
      how could you reinforce this??
  • Well, I have had the opportunity to see many programmatic innovations and individual changes that go a long way even in a tough job market.
  • The parent may need to assist with this process but ..."no show - no call" is one of the best ways to get fired in a job...so learning to do that while you are still a student even when you don't feel good and even when you are too tired and maybe especially when it is hard to do...SHOULD BE REQUIRED!
james grubbs

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
    • james grubbs
       
      What do you think?
Terrance Carson

What Do You Want to Learn This Year? - Attention Deficit Disorder Association - 0 views

  • Choosing what you want to learn begins with a question; how do you want your life to be different?
Rikki Elmore

Do2Learn: Educational Resources for Special Needs - 0 views

    • Rikki Elmore
       
      Nice teaching tool
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