Group items tagged

"The United Nations Environment Program hosts a helpful interactive map displaying more than one hundred examples of environmental change around the world. Each placemark on the map has close-up views of the land and a story about environmental change at that location. For example, clicking on the placemark for Manaus, Brazil will reveal close-up imagery of site and detailed information about the environmental changes taking place. If you click through the links in the placemarks you can find the references used in constructing the information available through the map."

Great article about changing the conversations we have about educational technology

What holds us back and causes us to resist? The following article is from the Harvard Business review, written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She explains ten solid reasons why we we fear the face of change.

"But in an increasingly connected and digital world, the things a student needs to know are indeed changing-fundamental human needs sometimes drastically redressed for an alien modern world. Just as salt allowed for the keeping of meats, the advent of antibiotics made deadly viruses and diseases simply inconvenient, and electricity completely altered when and where we slept and work and played, technology is again changing the kind of "stuff" a student needs to know."

"With the many enhancements to mobile devices, multimedia websites, e-books, interactive graphics, and social media, there's no question that the nature of reading has changed during the past decade. But has the way reading is taught in elementary schools changed as well? And what should teachers be doing to get students ready for the realities of modern reading?"

Transformion describes the kind of classroom and learning culture I am striving for. Enhancement describes how a resource or change furthers the learning opportunity. Replacement describes how a new resource or change is used instead of, or alongside, an existing resource. The outcome is the same.

"Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn't pay to memorize the route, because it's going to change soon. The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don't know which direction you're going, how will you know when you're off course?"

There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as 'generation'. I once tried to count the 'generations' that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called 'Generation Nothing'; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.

Want to change the default location from iCloud?

electricity, probability, flight, climate change, imaginary numbers, microbes, etc. -- stories of inventors who were ignored or ridiculed or so close so long before the world realized the importance of the discovery...

"  For Kane, video is also a key to the project's success.--  "Improving teaching requires adult behavior change.  Imagine trying to get someone to quit smoking by showing them a video of a bunch of happy nonsmokers … and yet that is the way we do professional development for teachers, by showing them some third person teaching instead of showing them their own work." According to Kane, teachers need to see and analyze their own efforts, and then discuss with their supervisors what they are doing well, and what they could do differently to improve. This can be done by showing teachers their own videos and by providing feedback that is related to student achievement. Heather Hill, an associate professor of education at HGSE, developed a rubric for guiding classroom observations that will be used to help score the videos. Project organizers hope the effort will help lead to a new approach to professional development. "We are trying, said Kane, "to get people to quit smoking by taking them into their closet to smell their own clothes."

"This is a world in which public is the new default. Thought leader Michael Schrage (2010) notes that "the traditional two-page résumé has been turned into a 'personal productivity portal' that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their candidate's work." The rules for building your personal brand are changing at light speed. It's not enough to suggest that we have those admirable skills of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurship; now we have to show them in action online. In short, our résumé is becoming a Google search result, one that we build with the help of others and that requires our participation. Most students are beginning to face this reality without much assistance from the schools charged with preparing them for the world beyond school. That has to change. We need to help students understand more than just the safety and ethics of participating online; we also have to give them opportunities throughout the curriculum to find and follow their passions and publish meaningful, quality work for real global audiences to interact with." Article by Will RIchardson

ABSTRACT This article outlines a learning intervention which the authors call Learning by Design. The goal of this intervention is classroom and curriculum transformation, and the professional learning of teachers. The experiment involves the practical application of the learning theory to everyday classroom practice. Its ideas are grounded in pedagogical principles originally articulated in the Multiliteracies project, an approach to teaching and learning that addresses literacy and learning in the context of new media and the globalizing knowledge economy. The need for a new approach to learning arises from a complex range of factors - among them, changes in society and the economy; the potential for new forms of communication made possible by emerging technologies; and rising expectations amongst learners that education will maximize their potential for personal fulfillment, civic participation and access to work. The authors first brought together the Learning by Design team of researchers and teachers in 2003 in order to reflect upon and create new and dynamic learning environments. A series of research and development activities were embarked upon in Australia and, more recently, in the United States, exploring the potentials of new pedagogical approaches, assisted by digital technologies, to transform today's learning environments and create learning for the future - learning environments which could be more relevant to a changing world, more effective in meeting community expectations and which manage educational resources more efficiently. One of the key challenges was to create learning environments which engaged the sensibilities of learners who are increasingly immersed in digital and global lifestyles - from the entertainment sources they choose to the way they work and learn. It was also about enabling teachers to explicitly track and be aware of the relationship between their pedagogical choices and their students' learning outcomes.

All the great things that haven't happened yet, are history waiting to happen.

So Prensky was right the first time - there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not - and that's what's important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have doubted the existence of a coherent 'net generation'. "We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis," says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation - which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work. "Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying."

"A learning environment expert and education advocate, Elyse is dedicated to improving the teaching of writing by helping educators understand the changing nature of the discipline in a digital age."

As a learning community, my school is further down the track in our understanding of inquiry learning than we were at this time last year. Teachers talk about how much they have changed. There is a greater awareness of what's possible when teachers let go and learning is more student owned.

Great tips for coaches on moving forward in the face of resistance.