Group items tagged

New Pew study finds teachers believe students are now more prone to take shortcuts. "

A three-year study of 491 middle school students found that the more children played computer games the higher their scores on a standardized test of creativity-regardless of race, gender, or the kind of game played. Everyone is gifted and talented.

Research from the USA Department of Education - a meta-analysis of many studies looking at Online and Blended Learning. Mostly higher-ed focused, but still relevant points. From 2009-2010.

"Blended solutions combine contrasting learning methods and media in order to maximise effectiveness and efficiency. The More Than approach goes a step further to ensure the blend results in application to real-world tasks and the learner is supported along the whole length of their learning journey." This site includes a portfolio of resources, case studies, and video. 

"Digital pedagogy calls for screwing around more than it does systematic study, and in fact screwing around is the more difficult scholarly work. Digital pedagogy is less about knowing and more a rampant process of unlearning, play, and rediscovery. We are not born digital pedagogues, nor do we have to be formally schooled in the ways of digital pedagogy. There's lots to read on the subject, but we can't just read our way into it; there is no essential canon. In fact, expert digital pedagogues learn best by forgetting - through continuous encounters with what is novel, tentative, unmastered, and unresolved."

"Project Kaisei's 2009 Expedition. Footage from the Kaisei, one of two research vessels Project Kaisei sent to the North Pacific Gyre in August, 2009 to study the extent of the marine debris problem in the gyre, the impact it may be having on marine life and the food chain, and to find ways to catch and recover some of the debris for a larger clean-up effort. "

"Shouldn't learning be as easy and effortless as possible? Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be mostly wrong, as numerous studies have found that making material harder to learn - what the researchers call disfluency - can actually improve long-term learning and retention: There is strong theoretical justification to believe that disfluency could lead to improved retention and classroom performance. Disfluency has been shown to lead people to process information more deeply,more abstractly,more carefully, and yield better comprehension, all of which are critical to effective learning. This new paper attempted to provide the most direct test yet of the benefits of disfluency ."

60 second summary videos of major books kids would study at school (e.g. Romeo & Juliet, 1984, Pride & Prejudice). Great idea for tech integration: could do 60 second summaries of a chapter, a whole book, or of a character.  Would be good to show kids too, but had some rather inappropriate ads on some of the ones I saw, which is a shame.

The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.

Mike Farley has created a fantastic resource for teachers of social studies here. Under the headings: Energy, Environment, Global Poverty, Global Conflict, Migration & Civic Action, he has provided links to 'serious games', together with downloadable worksheets that aim to help students get the most out of the game.

You HAVE to check out this website! It would be great for our G5 unit Through the Eyes of a Child, and Energy, the G3 unit on Migration, G6 on Natural Disasters - and that's just a start...

results of an ethnographic study of college students and their relationship with libraries and level of information literacy...  Quote: "In other words: Today's college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar."

"witter seems to be here to stay. As one of the most popular ways for teachers, students, and the general public to communicate, it's becoming a must-have tool in almost every teacher's toolbox. However, numerous recent studies have shown that education in general has been slow to adopt social media."

Computational thinking is a phrase that has received considerable attention over the past several years - but there is little agreement about what computational thinking encompasses, and even less agreement about strategies for assessing the development of computational thinking in young people. We are interested in the ways that design-based learning activities - in particular, programming interactive media - support the development of computational thinking in young people. Over the past several years, we have developed a computational thinking framework that emerged from our studies of the activities of interactive media designers. Our context is Scratch - a programming environment that enables young people to create their own interactive stories, games, and simulations, and then share those creations in an online community with other young programmers from around the world. The first part of the paper describes the key dimensions of our computational thinking framework: computational concepts (the concepts designers engage with as they program, such as iteration, parallelism, etc.), computational practices (the practices designers develop as they engage with the concepts, such as debugging projects or remixing others' work), and computational perspectives (the perspectives designers form about the world around them and about themselves). The second part of the paper describes our evolving approach to assessing these dimensions, including project portfolio analysis, artifact-based interviews, and design scenarios. We end with a set of suggestions for assessing the learning that takes place when young people engage in programming.

Gaming can help growth of new neurons. 

A great case-study from a teacher who published his first novel by himself. Lots of helpful lessons along the way, including how he got his cover designed, and suggestions on marketing.

"A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature. Even Mr. Coleman erects his case on largely dispiriting, utilitarian grounds: nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won't necessarily nourish the soul. As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I'm with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing, what Mr. Gladwell sought by ingesting "Talk of the Town" stories. I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for "informational texts," few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative. What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call "narrative nonfiction": writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways."

"What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. "  Totally supports my belief that nonfiction longreads are out there on the internet and are not being taken advantage of by teachers -- enough.

This is interesting research related to students doing video lecture then try VS try then video lecture methods. The authors call this Constructivist Exploration using Tangible User Interfaces. #spoileralert - Exploration followed by Video Lecture is more effective.

History Tech website chooses 15 virtual field trips. Useful for Humanities?