Group items tagged

Teachers are learners. If they're not, they shouldn't be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids.

Networked teachers began to use a number of types of tools and connected well beyond what was normal within a "typical" teacher network. Teachers are not just connected WITH these tools, they are connected THROUGH these tools to other humans. The most important part of PLNs, in my opinion, is how they can help us connect to other humans, to help us better understand the world, to negotiate knowledge and meaning, and of course, to help us to learn.

My work usually has me working with passionate, caring teachers who truly want what's best for kids. They dislike bureaucracy and red tape (doesn't everybody?) and will try anything if they think it will help students learn.

The LMS market today faces a strange contradiction - few teachers truly *love* their current LMS but at the same time no one wants to endure the pain of switching to a new LMS. The LMS vendors are slowly cloning each other's features and innovation is slowing. At the same time how people teach and how people learn using technology is constantly changing and evolving. Teachers continuously experiment with technologies outside of the LMS system with varying levels of success

The rapid rise in popularity of twitter in the past year has brought to mind the following question: what are some of the potential uses of twitter or other microblogging platforms in teacher education courses?

RIScienceTeachers is a free resource aimed at strengthening science education in Rhode Island schools. Because its focus is local, we hope that it becomes a valuable resource for teachers statewide. If you are a science teacher who shares a concern for what (and how) students learned science, we invite you to join the site and add your contribution.

Join us in this stimulating online program designed to bring teachers together to learn from each other, evaluate best teaching practices, and search for solutions to the unique challenges of the online environment. The engaging dialogue on teaching is the highlight of CTI.

3 weeks ago, my appreciation of the need to implement web 2.0 technologies into curriculum delivery was limited at best. I would not have considered myself IT illiterate - after all I was reasonably competent on Powerpoint and word processing, used Facebook, had a Flickr account and used I-tunes. Then I read Will Richardson's book for teachers on the Read/Write web and I had a 'Road to Damascus' experience!

Open teaching is described as the facilitation of learning experiences that are open, transparent, collaborative, and social. Open teachers are advocates of a free and open knowledge society, and support their students in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.

I constantly meet really smart non-technical people -- doctors, lawyers, teachers -- who have no clue how computers work. They treat them as magic black boxes that randomly break and never make sense. Why? Because software is a fundamentally different kind of system. It does not behave like the other things around us that we are used to.

One of the strategic initiatives approved last fall by the Strategic Planning Council, the Academy has goals that include enhancing professional development for faculty, assisting in the formation of graduate students as scholar-teachers and promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning through new areas of research.

What's the point of Twitter? Why should educators get involved? What difference does using Twitter make? Here are some answers that you might like to share.

This group is for students of the University of Albany ETAP687 course, Introduction to Online Teaching.

For A Farewell to Arms, we started with a lottery. Everyone chose a name of a junior and selected a second junior to follow. Besides choosing a quote to reflect on, students also read and commented on two classmates' blogs. The first effect: students talked about blogs during class, their own and their classmates'.

Many of us who integrate technology into our instruction have an especially difficult time staying focused on learning objectives and digging deeply enough for rigor, even if we don't like to admit it. It's the nature of our jobs. Since we work with entertaining, dynamic tools, it's too easy to become playful and veer off the track, overlooking the learning objectives.