Group items tagged

"Teaching and learning may rest on processes invisible to the naked eye; but lessons and courses are spatiotemporal things: activities with extension and duration, leaving traces, demanding behaviors. And in order to get a hold of teaching and learning, at some point we need to move from the abstractions to the concrete activities. Teaching a course or a lesson, and taking a course or a lesson: these are concrete physical activities. And project management gives us a good analogy for what the dimension of learning which is not theoretical but is absolutely necessary."

"Would you be shocked if your teacher assigned you to play Minecraft at school? At a few area schools, teachers are doing just that. The Lego-like building game has become a popular tool for classroom lessons as well as life lessons."

A fantastic teacher demonstrates her thinking process as she realizes a lesson is not working. See how important it is not only to show our success, but also our failures and our own learning. Check it out.

60 Second Adventures in Economics is clearly not a replacement for actual lessons in economics, but they could be good introductions or reviews of a lesson.

The question being asked is completely backward. Why aren't the lessons being recorded by the schools and made available online for the students to review later at home when they're working on home work. Or, the students could study for a test by reviewing any lessons they didn't do well on.

There are a number of ways IPEVO and Evernote can help both teachers and students be more successful in and out of the classroom. Teachers can use the document camera to project a lesson, then easily save their lesson sheet to a Shared Notebook in Evernote so students can access the material at home or later in the year. For students, the document camera makes collaborating easier; groups can project a document to easily work on it together, then save completed work to a Shared Notebook to submit to the teacher or to share their work with the rest of the class. Together with Evernote, the IPEVO document camera can also help students create and maintain a digital portfolio. Students can capture projects, papers, and artwork using their IPEVO document camera and seamlessly save these artifacts to Evernote.

Use our new Scope & Sequence tool to find the lessons that are just right for your classroom. These cross-curriculular units spiral to address digital literacy and citizenship topics in an age appropriate way. Browse by grade band or click a category to highlight the lessons that address that topic. You can download a PDF of the new Scope & Sequence here. Read more about the recent updates to the curriculum in our blog. Also, take a look at the definitions of our 8 categories in our Curriculum Overview. And for reference, you can access the former Scope & Sequence here.

Screencasts can provide learners a student-centered and engaging learning experience in both distance and traditional learning settings. To align screencasts with lesson objectives, goals, assessment practices, and standards, instructors can create their own screencasts rather than searching through the thousands of educational screencast videos on the web. Good educational screencasts depend not only on thorough planning but also on thoughtful and careful editing to re-sequence lesson elements, eliminate awkward and unnecessary portions, and craft a focused, easy-to-follow presentation that uses students' time efficiently.

"The Online Research and Media Skills (ORMS) model takes a closer look at ways to effectively integrate skills and strategies needed to support all literacies when working with Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT) in classrooms. This class will focus on the planning, implementation and assessment of an inquiry-based lesson. The lesson will involve objectives deemed appropriate by Common Core Standards, but accelerated through the use of ICTs. Participants will leave with effective ways to embed literacy and research skills in the technologically equipped classroom. "

"Each day, our NYC-based team produces one-minute video lessons covering every change to the world's most popular websites, mobile apps and online tools and we deliver those lessons in real-time."

"Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that's going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities."

Lessons Worth Sharing 

This video list of insights comes from experts in the field of online teaching. Here is a collection of 8 lessons that might improve your online course!

"Following my 8th grade block of social studies, students left arguing whether or not they should include Mao Zedong as a major person in the "birth of communism, China or Korean War" section of their virtual museum.  Less specifically, students left my class in an argument which reflected not only an interest in the lesson and activity but also a deep understanding of the content.  Isn't that what we want our students to do?"

The more able students careened through the work at double quick speed but did not seem to understand that they can move on to the next section with no supervision. It proved impossible for me to break their habit of "returning to teacher" for the next part. I was a new teacher for most of them doing something new and in hindsight this is obvious. I did not want to shoo them away - I had only just met them! I had sixteen times thirty second conversations at the start of each lesson - all different - most not needed.

"I often find it difficult to convince those in "real" colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they're not "our kind of students". This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits' uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can't build prestige so they'll just borrow it from existing institutions."

This semester (spring, 2013), I integrated my on-campus Duke University class (which I've taught twice before using a "traditional" lecture format) with my online class (which I'd taught once before via Coursera MOOC), both bearing the title "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution." My on-campus class had 453 students, while the online one peaked at 27,000 enrolled (though MOOC enrollment figures are misleading). Needless to say, I was more than slightly nervous about this experiment messing up, given the number of students who would be affected! My initial reaction is that the integration (via "flipped classroom") was a success and thoroughly enjoyable by me (I'll have to wait to see the formal course evaluations before I know how much most of the students liked it), but I learned some lessons for future iterations.

After only three months for planning and development, Duke University and Dr. Roger Barr successfully delivered a challenging open online course via Coursera to thousands of students around the world. Lessons learned from this experience have contributed to the strategic goals of Duke's Online Initiatives.

I have learned a few things along the way, which in fact have improved my teaching to some extent, as I have become more understanding of the need to express some things visually. Now i encourage students to incorporate photos and videos to support their written projects - to make the project more interesting for the students, but also to inspire them to think in different ways.

Please join Ivy League LMS experts, Wendy Drexler and Catherine Zabrieske of Brown University for this informative webinar during which they will discuss five lessons they learned in their search for an open access LMS, how they formed their selection committee, involved faculty and students, and why they ultimately selected Canvas as their LMS. Drexler and Zabrieske will also discuss the latest on MOOCs in general as well as specifically how using Canvas Network as a platform for their MOOC "Exploring Engineering" has allowed them to create a more interactive course that engages students and keeps participation high rather than merely providing lectures and quizzes.