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Katie Day

Paper Tigers - What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-takin... - 1 views

nymag.com/print

asia usa culture education careers article social_intelligence

shared by Katie Day on 12 May 11 - No Cached
  • while I don’t believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry that we use to sort through the sea of faces we confront
  • Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world?
  • Now he understands better what he ought to have done back when he was a Stuyvesant freshman: “Worked half as hard and been twenty times more successful.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?
  • The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation
  • It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.
  • Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured that they will be able to “keep your values, while acquiring new skills,” along the way to becoming “culturally competent leaders.”
  • The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement.
  • If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-­takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009.
  • though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.
  • Katie Day on 12 May 11
     
    fascinating article (May 8, 2011) in New York magazine by Wesley Yang
Katie Day

Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: Change Agent - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...01richardson.h04.html

teaching 21stcenturylearning

shared by Katie Day on 17 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • You’ve written that too many teachers are “un-Googleable.” What do you mean by that and why does it matter? What I mean is that too few teachers have a visible presence on the Web. The primary reason this matters is that the kids in our classrooms are going to be Googled—they're going to be searched for on the Web—over and over again. That's just the reality of their lives, right? So they need models. They need to have adults who know what it means to have a strong and appropriate search portfolio—I call it the “G-portfolio.” But right now—and this is my ongoing refrain—there’s no one teaching them how to learn and share with these technologies. There's no one teaching them about the nuances involved in creating a positive online footprint. It's all about what not to do instead of what they should be doing. The second thing is that, if you want to be part of an extended learning network or community, you have to be findable. And you have to participate in some way. The people I learn from on a day-to-day basis are Googleable. They’re findable, they have a presence, they’re participating, they’re transparent. That’s what makes them a part of my learning network. If you’re not out there—if you’re not transparent or findable in that way—I can’t learn with you.
  • Why do you think many teachers are not out there on the Web? I think it’s a huge culture shift. Education by and large has been a very closed type of profession. “Just let me close my doors and teach”—you hear that refrain all the time. I’ve had people come up to me after presentations and say, “Well, I’m not putting my stuff up on the Web because I don’t want anyone to take it and use it.” And I say, “But that’s the whole point.” I love what David Wiley, an instructional technology professor at Brigham Young University, says: “Without sharing, there is no education.” And it’s true.
  • What could a school administrator do to help teachers make that shift? Say you were a principal? What would you do? Well, first of all, I would be absolutely the best model that I could be. I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changing. I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.
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  • Secondly, I would try to build a school culture where sharing is just a normal part of what we do and where we understand the relevance of this global exchange of ideas and information to what we do in the classroom.
  • There’s a great book called Rethinking Education in an Era of Technology by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson. For me, these guys absolutely peg it. They talk about how we went from a kind of apprenticeship model of education in the early 19th century to a more industrialized, everybody-does-the-same-thing model in the 20th century. And now we’re moving into what they call a “lifelong learning” model—which is to say that learning is much more fluid and much more independent, self-directed, and informal. That concept—that we can learn in profound new ways outside the classroom setting—poses huge challenges to traditional structures of schools, because that’s not what they were built for.
  • What we have to do is build a professional culture that says, “Look, you guys are learners, and we’re going to help you learn. We’re going to help you figure out your own learning path and practice.” It’s like the old “give a man a fish” saying. You know, we’re giving away a lot of fish right now, but we’re not teaching anybody how to fish.
  • If you were a principal, in order to foster network literacy as you envision it, what kind of professional development would you provide to teachers? I think that teachers need to have a very fundamental understanding of what these digital interactions look like, and the only way that you can do that is to pretty much immerse them in these types of learning environments over the long term. You can’t workshop it. That’s really been the basis of our work with Powerful Learning Practice: Traditional PD just isn’t going to work. It’s got to be long-term, job-embedded. So, if I’m a principal, I would definitely be thinking about how I could get my teachers into online learning communities, into these online networks. And again, from a leadership standpoint, I’d better be there first—or, if not first, at least be able to model it and talk about it.
  • But the other thing is, if you want to have workshops, well, that’s fine, go ahead and schedule a blogging workshop, but then the prerequisite for the workshop should be to learn how to blog. Then, when you come to the workshop, we’ll talk about what blogging means rather than just how to do it.
  • If you were starting a school right now that you hoped embodied these qualities, what traits would you look for in teachers? Well, certainly I would make sure they were Googleable. I would want to see that they have a presence online, that they are participating in these spaces, and, obviously, that they are doing so appropriately. Also, I’d want to know that they have some understanding of how technology is changing teaching and learning and the possibilities that are out there. I would also look for people who aren’t asking how, but instead are asking why. I don’t want people who say, “How do you blog?” I want people who are ready to explore the question of, “Why do you blog?” That’s what we need. We need people who are willing to really think critically about what they’re doing.
Sean McHugh

Open University research explodes myth of 'digital native' - 0 views

agent4change.net/...des-myth-of-digital-naive.html

education digital_natives Prensky age divide research technology

shared by Sean McHugh on 16 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • here are clear differences between older people and younger in their use of technology, there’s no evidence of a clear break between two separate populations.
  • 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.”
  • Sean McHugh on 16 Mar 13
     
    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."
Keri-Lee Beasley

Re-envisioning Writing for a Networked Age: A Few Moments with Elyse Eidman-Aadahl | DM... - 1 views

dmlcentral.net/...ew-moments-elyse-eidman-aadahl

writing digital writers workshop online technology literacy

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 23 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • To write still means to make something. Writers are makers.
  • much of the power of writing is that it takes thought and externalizes it
  • whether we are writing on a digital platform or in our spiral notebooks. There is a core to writing that is still about creating and sharing knowledge
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • some components that have hugely changed, mainly the issues of what we can create and how it circulates.
  • teacher who acted as the sole reader of our material.
  • The internet and 21st century tools have opened up the possibility for one individual to not only produce the text but also to design it, circulate it, and manage publicity
  • very young or beginning writers can actually participate in all of those processes
  • we think of digital writing as writing that is not only created using digital tools, but is also typically created in or for a networked environment and meant to be interacted with on a screen.
  • We need to be able to make that part of our understanding of the new normal of writing -- not an additional piece -- but the new normal.
  • As computers become increasingly networked, teachers could see the potential for the read/write web, for writing as a way to participate in online communities, to hyperlink vast amounts of information connected to a text, and to interact and even collaborate directly with others to create something
  • being a writer yourself and participating in digital environments alongside the youth you work with, you are able to observe patterns and experience the new in such a way that you could be part of remaking knowledge in the field of composition. The writing revolution is not done and we can be right in the middle of it.
  • it's all about an inquiry stance and creating learning experiences where students can do the same because the "textbook" is all around us in the reading and writing going on in the world
  • participating as a digital writer and deeply reflecting upon your work by looking for patterns and understanding what shifts are being required of you
  • shift from being the person who hands out formulas for writing success to the person who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the students to understand what happens when we write for real in world.
  • build the platforms for publishing and circulation of student work
  • It’s vital for teachers and curriculum developers to start with the assumption that every young person not only can become a participant in the public internet, but will become a participant and likely already is a participant.
  • youth are going to have to manage their online identity. How they present and represent their identities and manage the multiple footprints they leave on the web are going to be key things for students to understand.
  • develop a sense of responsibility around what they put out there
  • sense of power and authority
  • making, creating, and collaborating about real work that matters to them
  • tools are not the issue
  • They allow us to do new things and expand our capacity to make things, yet deep, consistent issues remain at the center: what am I saying? Is what I have to say warranted? Have I been accurate and credible? Have I crafted something that my reader and my audience can take in? Am I listening to response and looking at my drafts iteration by iteration?
  • it’s so important to slow oneself down and to take one’s text quite seriously.
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 23 Mar 12
     
    "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."
Katie Day

8 Must-Have Google Chrome Apps For Students | Edudemic - 1 views

edudemic.com/...oogle-chrome-apps-for-students

google apps chrome students productivity

shared by Katie Day on 03 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Katie Day on 03 Aug 12
     
    "Below are some of the top web apps for students looking for helpful tools to focus while online, as selected by Google's Chrome Web Apps Guru, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. StayFocusd - StayFocusd is a productivity extension that helps you focus on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.  You can restrict entire sites or just parts of them for as long or short of a time as necessary. Todo.ly- Todo.ly is an intuitive and easy to use online to-do list and task manager. It helps you get organized and get things done by organizing your tasks into projects and subprojects, adding customized icons and labels, and assigning due dates to your tasks. Read Later Fast - This app lets you save pages to read later - online or offline, and fast. All you have to do is right click and save the page for later to avoid having too many open tabs on your browser. Write Space - Write Space is a customizable, full-screen text editor that lives in your browser. It is designed to minimize the distractions that come between you and your writing.  This app also auto saves your work and works offline. StudyStack - StudyStack helps students memorize anything with millions of flashcards that have already been added to the site or the ability to create your own.  There are dozens of flashcard categories including foreign languages, math, LSAT and GRE. Graph.tk - An app for math majors, Graph.tk is an app that brings the graphing capabilities of your calculator to the browser. It's easy to use and good for plotting graphs based on equations. WordReference - For anyone taking a foreign language course or studying abroad, this extension gets you the translations you need in a fast and easy way.  Since it's an extension and placed right next to the address bar, you don't even have to leave the site you're on for a quick translation. BONUS APP: Panic Button - Ok, this app won't help you pass your class, but it might just come in handy during
Sean McHugh

The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think - 2 views

nautil.us/...ting-and-other-education-myths

teaching handwriting research

shared by Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • here is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character.
  • if they have the time and inclination.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      But should we be dedicating swathes of curriculum time towards this? Surely not.
  • what teachers “know” about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they’re immersed than a result of research and data.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Never were truer words written.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting
  • our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate
  • Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Shouldn't we include touch typing here as well?
  • So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade
  • They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly
  • While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.
  • The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice
  • for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages
  • freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      Likewise if they can touch-type instead of wrestling with ascenders and descenders...
  • the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.
  • There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.
  • even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
       
      In other ways... the time it takes for kids to learn cursive, spread over years, compared to the relatively short time it takes to master touch-typing being a case in point.
  • that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning
  • inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence
  • How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?
  • Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
  • the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.
  • This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is “right,” unsupported by evidence.
  • it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead
  • There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
  • Sean McHugh on 01 Oct 16
     
    There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
Katie Day

Changing how teachers improve | Harvard Gazette - 1 views

news.harvard.edu/...changing-how-teachers-improve

teaching professional_development

shared by Katie Day on 05 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Katie Day on 05 Feb 11
     
    "  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."
Sean McHugh

Learning Through Reflection - 1 views

www.ascd.org/...arning-Through-Reflection.aspx

reflection learning self-assessment

shared by Sean McHugh on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience
  • we want students to get into the habit of linking and constructing meaning from their experiences. Such work requires reflection
  • Reflection has many facets. For example, reflecting on work enhances its meaning. Reflecting on experiences encourages insight and complex learning. We foster our own growth when we control our learning, so some reflection is best done alone. Reflection is also enhanced, however, when we ponder our learning with others.
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  • Reflective teachers help students understand that the students will now look back rather than move forward. They will take a break from what they have been doing, step away from their work, and ask themselves, "What have I (or we) learned from doing this activity?"
  • The teacher helps each student monitor individual progress, construct meaning from the content learned and from the process of learning it,
  • Teachers who promote reflective classrooms ensure that students are fully engaged in the process of making meaning.
  • in written and oral form
  • To be reflective means to mentally wander through where we have been and to try to make some sense out of it.
  • and journals
  • Habits of Mind
  • ask students to reread their journals, comparing what they knew at the beginning of a learning sequence with what they know now. Ask them to select significant learnings, envision how they could apply these learnings to future situations
  • the quality of students' reflections changes as children develop their reading and writing skills. When kindergartners were asked to reflect orally, they gave rich descriptions of their work. But as they developed their writing ability and were encouraged to write their own reflections, the reflections became less descriptive. This change puzzled the teachers until they realized that students are more concerned about spelling, punctuation, and other aspects of editing when they first learn to write. Because students do not have a great deal of fluency with their writing, they are more limited in what they describe. In contrast, when meeting with the teacher, the kindergartners elaborated on what they wrote about their work. And once students became more fluent with their writing skills, they were able to represent their reflective thoughts more easily.
  • stereotypical comments such as "This was fun!" or "I chose this piece of work because it is my best." Teachers realized that they needed to spend time teaching students how to reflect. They asked students, "What does a reflection look like when it really tells you something about the experience?"
  • Reflection was not a time for testimonials about how good or bad the experience was. Instead, reflection was the time to consider what was learned from the experience.
  • Students might collect work throughout the year as part of a portfolio process. Every quarter they can review the work in their collection folders and choose one or two pieces to enter into their portfolio. When they make those choices, they can take the opportunity to reflect on the reasons for their choices and to set goals for their next quarter's work.
  • superficial to in-depth reflections. Indicators of in-depth reflections include making specific reference to the learning event, providing examples and elaboration, making connections to other learning, and discussing modifications based on insights from this experience.
  • Sentence Stems Sentence stems can stimulate reflections. Use them in conferences (where reflection can be modeled), or put them on a sheet for students who choose writing to jump-start their reflections. Here are examples of possible sentence stems: I selected this piece of writing because … What really surprised me about this piece of writing was … When I look at my other pieces of writing, this piece is different because … What makes this piece of writing strong is my use of … Here is one example from my writing to show you what I mean. What I want to really work on to make my writing better for a reader is …
Sean McHugh

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...all

education motivation teaching method professional_development technology TEL

shared by Sean McHugh on 24 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.
  • In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”
  • That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
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  • “So,” Juárez Correa said, “what do you want to learn?”
  • human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum.
  • inland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
  • n Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions.
  • Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
  • They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration
  • Sean McHugh on 24 Sep 14
     
    In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills." That's why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn't a commodity that's delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students' own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion-and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
Katie Day

Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE ... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...213922

teaching attention howard_rheingold social_media literacy

shared by Katie Day on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Howard Rheingold (howard@rheingold.com) is the author of Tools For Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, and other books and is currently lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.
  • I focus on five social media literacies: Attention Participation Collaboration Network awareness Critical consumption
  • lthough I consider attention to be fundamental to all the other literacies, the one that links together all the others, and although it is the one I will spend the most time discussing in this article, none of these literacies live in isolation.
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  • Multitasking, or "continuous partial attention" as Linda Stone has called another form of attention-splitting, or "hyper attention" as N. Katherine Hayles has called another contemporary variant,2 are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention. It depends on what is happening in our own external and internal worlds at the moment.
  • As students become more aware of how they are directing their attention, I begin to emphasize the idea of using blogs and wikis as a means of connecting with their public voice and beginning to act with others in mind. Just because many students today are very good at learning and using online applications and at connecting and participating with friends and classmates via social media, that does not necessarily mean that they understand the implications of their participation within a much larger public.
  • ut how to participate in a way that's valuable to others as well as to yourself, I agree with Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins, and others that participating, even if it's no good and nobody cares, gives one a different sense of being in the world. When you participate, you become an active citizen rather than simply a passive consumer of what is sold to you, what is taught to you, and what your government wants you to believe. Simply participating is a start. (Note that I am not guaranteeing that having a sense of agency compels people to perform only true, good, and beautiful actions.)
  • I don't believe in the myth of the digital natives who are magically empowered and fluent in the use of social media simply because they carry laptops, they're never far from their phones, they're gamers, and they know how to use technologies. We are seeing a change in their participation in society—yet this does not mean that they automatically understand the rhetorics of participation, something that is particularly important for citizens.
  • Critical consumption, or what Ernest Hemingway called "crap detection," is the literacy of trying to figure out what and who is trustworthy—and what and who is not trustworthy—online. If you find people, whether you know them or not, who you can trust to be an authority on something or another, add them to your personal network. Consult them personally, consult what they've written, and consult their opinion about the subject.
  • Finally, crap detection takes us back, full circle, to the literacy of attention. When I assign my students to set up an RSS reader or a Twitter account, they panic. They ask how they are supposed to keep up with the overwhelming flood of information. I explain that social media is not a queue; it's a flow. An e-mail inbox is a queue, because we have to deal with each message in one way or another, even if we simply delete them. But no one can catch up on all 5,000 or so unread feeds in their RSS reader; no one can go back through all of the hundreds (or thousands) of tweets that were posted overnight. Using Twitter, one has to ask: "Do I pay attention to this? Do I click through? Do I open a tab and check it out later today? Do I bookmark it because I might be interested in the future?" We have to learn to sample the flow, and doing so involves knowing how to focus our attention.
Katie Day

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19Industry-t.html

cognitive_science creativity ideas thinking

shared by Katie Day on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Jump’s work has elements of management consulting and a bit of design-firm draftsmanship, but its specialty is conceiving new businesses, and what it sells is really the art of innovation. The company is built on the premise that creative thinking is a kind of expertise. Like P.&G. and Mars, you can hire Jump to think on your behalf, for somewhere between $200,000 to $500,000 a month, depending on the complexity and ambiguity of the question you need answered. Or you can ask Jump to teach your corporation how to generate better ideas on its own; Jump imparts that expertise in one- and five-day how-to-brainstorm training sessions that can cost $200,000 for a one-day session for 25 employees.
  • What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking. A few idea entrepreneurs, like Jump, Ideo and Kotter International, are companies with offices and payrolls. But many are solo practitioners, brains for hire who lecture at corporations or consult with them regularly. Each has a catechism and a theory about why good ideas can be so hard to come by and what can be done to remedy the situation.
  • “We’re not only blind to certain things, but we’re blind to the fact that we’re blind to them.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • You often hear this from idea entrepreneurs: Don’t ask us for the answers. Let us help you frame the questions, so you can answer them yourself.
  • At Jump, they prefer to brainstorm with a variation of a technique pioneered in improv theater. A comic offers the first sentence of a story, which lurches into a (hopefully funny) tale, when someone else says, “Yes, and?” then adds another sentence, which leads to another “Yes, and?”— and back and forth it goes. In the context of brainstorming, what was once a contest is transformed into a group exercise in storytelling. It has turned into a collaboration.
  • Why now? Why did innovation-mania take hold in the last decade or so? One school of thought holds that corporations both rise and die faster than ever today, placing a premium on the speedy generation of ideas.
  • Other ideas entrepreneurs offer a “great man” theory, pointing to the enormous influence of Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and an author of books including “The Innovator’s Dilemma”and “Innovation and the General Manager.”
  • Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric.
  • “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology — photography — showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis.
  • Most idea entrepreneurs offer what could be described as Osborn deluxe. Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger.
  • Katie Day on 20 Dec 10
     
    long article on creativity, innovation, and people who are dedicated to the process of coming up with ideas....
Keri-Lee Beasley

A Difference: You, Your Kids, and Your Phones - 1 views

adifference.blogspot.ca/...your-kids-and-your-phones.html

technology digital_citizenship digital_literacy parents safety

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 02 Mar 15
     
    Digital Citizenship isn't an expression often heard outside of school. The ways in which it's discussed in main stream media are quite different from how it's discussed in schools. Most often the popular press shares sensational negative stories how kids use the internet and their phones to hurt each other. We have to have open and honest conversations about how things can and have gone wrong and what we can do to make things better in the aftermath of things like cyber bullying, online harassment, or sexting. That said, it's a far more powerful message to talk to kids and parents about how engendering empathy helps us understand each other so we choose not to hurt each other. It's also important to share stories and ideas how our modern mobile technologies empower us to effect positive change in the world around us in ways that weren't possible 10 or 15 years ago. We have to move beyond stranger danger and scare tactics. Sharing frightening stories (often overstated) does nothing to model positive outcomes or move the conversation to discussions of how to deal with something gone wrong. Kids need more models of empathy and empowerment. Parents do too.
David Caleb

How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-child-step-one-back-off.html

creativity gifted

shared by David Caleb on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves.
  • What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers.
  • only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.
  • “Emphasis was placed on the development of one’s own ethical code.”
  • parents didn’t dream of raising superstar kids. They weren’t drill sergeants or slave drivers. They responded to the intrinsic motivation of their children. When their children showed interest and enthusiasm in a skill, the parents supported them.
  • A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable.
  • Research reveals that the more we practice, the more we become entrenched — trapped in familiar ways of thinking.
  • what motivates people to practice a skill for thousands of hours? The most reliable answer is passion — discovered through natural curiosity or nurtured through early enjoyable experiences with an activity or many activities.
  • In fashion, the most original collections come from directors who spend the most time working abroad.
  • winning a Nobel Prize is less about being a single-minded genius and more about being interested in many things.
  • Relative to typical scientists, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music.
  • “Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said.
  • You can’t program a child to become creative. Try to engineer a certain kind of success, and the best you’ll get is an ambitious robot.
  • If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
  • David Caleb on 03 Feb 16
     
    "Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher's pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves." Gifted kids don't often produce something new but excel in the 
Keri-Lee Beasley

Being a Better Online Reader - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...being-a-better-online-reader

digital_reading online digital literacy reading technology professional_development

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 13 Aug 15 - No Cached
Sean McHugh liked it
  • Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)
  • no difference in accuracy between students who edited a six-hundred-word paper on the screen and those who worked on paper. Those who edited on-screen did so faster, but their performance didn’t suffer.
  • It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • students performed equally well on a twenty-question multiple-choice comprehension test whether they had read a chapter on-screen or on paper. Given a second test one week later, the two groups’ performances were still indistinguishable.
  • “We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.”
  • Maybe her letter writers’ students weren’t victims of digitization so much as victims of insufficient training—and insufficient care—in the tools of managing a shifting landscape of reading and thinking.
  • In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how.
  • multitasking while reading on a computer or a tablet slowed readers down, but their comprehension remained unaffected.
  • Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention.
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 13 Aug 15
     
    Really interesting information on being a better online reader. The author suggests the following: "Maybe the decline of deep reading isn't due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)"
Sean McHugh

The Overprotected Kid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...358631

shared by Sean McHugh on 01 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Sandseter began observing and interviewing children on playgrounds in Norway. In 2011, she published her results in a paper called “Children’s Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences.” Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear. In the paper, Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.” (2) Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. (3) Being near dangerous elements—playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that there is danger nearby. (4) Rough-and-tumble play—wrestling, play-fighting—so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. (5) Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. (6) Exploring on one’s own.
  • This last one Sandseter describes as “the most important for the children.” She told me, “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.”
  • the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood. As Hart’s research shows, children used to gradually take on responsibilities, year by year. They crossed the road, went to the store; eventually some of them got small neighborhood jobs. Their pride was wrapped up in competence and independence, which grew as they tried and mastered activities they hadn’t known how to do the previous year. But these days, middle-class children, at least, skip these milestones. They spend a lot of time in the company of adults, so they can talk and think like them, but they never build up the confidence to be truly independent and self-reliant.
  • Sean McHugh on 01 Apr 14
     
    Sandseter began observing and interviewing children on playgrounds in Norway. In 2011, she published her results in a paper called "Children's Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences." Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn't mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear. In the paper, Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) Exploring heights, or getting the "bird's perspective," as she calls it-"high enough to evoke the sensation of fear." (2) Handling dangerous tools-using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. (3) Being near dangerous elements-playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that there is danger nearby. (4) Rough-and-tumble play-wrestling, play-fighting-so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. (5) Speed-cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. (6) Exploring on one's own.
Mary van der Heijden

Mathematically Speaking | kindergartenlife - 3 views

kindergartenlife.wordpress.com/mathematically-speaking

shared by Mary van der Heijden on 11 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mary van der Heijden on 11 Nov 12
     
    One of the most powerful things I have learned is how amazing young children are in their thinking around mathematical concepts.  In Kindergarten I began developing a culture that not only had examples and artifacts of our learning, but ways for children to begin to use "math talk", which is the language I began modeling in explicit ways for children to see and began to practice in their own understanding of the concepts we are exploring. Through daily, explicit modeling through our daily number corner, math dyads and other mathematical work stations the children began to apply their understanding in meaningful ways throughout the day which has helped to build self-confidence in all of the children. What is important to understand here is that I did have to add something new onto my already full plate, but rather this was an opportunity to learn some new tools and a different way of thinking about what I was already teaching. This is one example of  where I started to see how rigor and relevance applied in my teaching and how vital it is and has become in my daily teaching practice.
Louise Phinney

Make It Work: Sharing Class Sets of iPads - 1 views

digitaldollar.edublogs.org/...rk-sharing-class-sets-of-ipads

sharing ipads

shared by Louise Phinney on 01 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Louise Phinney on 01 Nov 12
     
    "Do NOT allow the iPads to live in mobile carts - when I see an iPad in a cart, I see money being burned. The carts should be where the iPads sleep when school is closed. This is where they re-charge. But there should be a school-wide routine that as soon as kids enter a room with an iPad cart, they each walk up to the cart and get their assigned iPad. They should keep that iPad on their desk until the end of the day and return it to the cart as they walk out of the classroom. iPads should be as essential to a student desk as pencils were 20 years ago. Teachers (and kids) will be much more likely to pick up and use the devices if they're right there, as opposed to having to plan to take them out and use them for "tech time" and then put them away. Think about how you use mobile tech in your everyday life - you pull your phone out of your pocket to look up information when it's relevant, rather than waiting until your "computer time" later in the week. Students should be able to do the same."
Louise Phinney

Free Technology for Teachers: Three Ways to Watch Videos & Discuss Them in Real-time On... - 2 views

www.freetech4teachers.com/...watch-videos-discuss-them.html

collaboration discussion YouTube

shared by Louise Phinney on 22 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Louise Phinney on 22 Mar 12
     
    YouTube can be a good place to find educational videos to support your lessons. We've all had students who struggle to hold their comments until the video has stopped. One strategy that many teachers have used in those cases is to tell students to "write it down." The web makes it possible to take that strategy a step further and have students not only "write it down" but also enable teachers to instantly respond to students' comments while watching a video. Here are three tools that enable users to watch videos online and discuss them with others at the same time.
Katie Day

The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools | P... - 0 views

www.pewinternet.org/...rs-technology-and-writing.aspx

writing tools technology digital_literacy secondary_school middle_school

shared by Katie Day on 02 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Katie Day on 02 Aug 13
     
    "A survey of teachers who instruct American middle and high school students finds that digital technologies are impacting student writing in myriad ways and there are significant advantages from tech-based learning. Some 78% of the 2,462 advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project say digital tools such as the internet, social media, and cell phones "encourage student creativity and personal expression." In addition: 96% agree digital technologies "allow students to share their work with a wider and more varied audience" 79% agree that these tools "encourage greater collaboration among students" According to teachers, students' exposure to a broader audience for their work and more feedback from peers encourages greater student investment in what they write and in the writing process as a whole. At the same time, these teachers give their students modest marks when it comes to writing and highlight some areas needing attention. Asked to assess their students' performance on nine specific writing skills, teachers tended to rate their students "good" or "fair" as opposed to "excellent" or "very good." Students received the best ratings on their ability to "effectively organize and structure writing assignments" and their ability to "understand and consider multiple viewpoints on a particular topic or issue." Teachers gave students the lowest ratings when it comes to "navigating issues of fair use and copyright in composition" and "reading and digesting long or complicated texts.""
Keri-Lee Beasley

Using Technology to Break the Speed Barrier of Reading - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...k-the-speed-barrier-of-reading

visual_literacy literacy technology comprehension reading

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, the system of reading we inherited from the ancient scribes —the method of reading you are most likely using right now — has been fundamentally shaped by engineering constraints that were relevant in centuries past, but no longer appropriate in our information age.
  • search for innovative engineering solutions aimed at making reading more efficient and effective for more people
  • But then, by chance, I discovered that when I used the small screen of a smartphone to read my scientific papers required for work, I was able to read with much greater facility and ease.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • hen, in a comprehensive study of over 100 high school students with dyslexia done in 2013, using techniques that included eye tracking, we were able to confirm that the shortened line formats produced a benefit for many who otherwise struggled with reading.
  • For example, Marco Zorzi and his colleagues in Italy and France showed in 2012 that when letter spacing is increased to reduce crowding, children with dyslexia read more effectively.
  • A clever web application called Beeline Reader, developed by Nick Lum, a lawyer from San Francisco, may accomplish something similar using colors to guide the reader’s attention forward along the line.  Beeline does this by washing each line of text in a color gradient, to create text that looks a bit like a tie-dyed tee-shirt.
  • one aims to increase the throughput of the brain’s reading buffers by changing their capacity for information processing, while the other seeks to activate alternate channels for reading that will allow information to be processed in parallel, and thereby increase the capacity of the language processing able to be performed during reading. 
  • The brain is said to be plastic, meaning that it is possible to change its abilities.
  • people can be taught to roughly double their reading speed, without compromising comprehension.
  • Consider that we process language, first and foremost, through speech. And yet, in the traditional design of reading we are forced to read using our eyes. Even though the brain already includes a fully developed auditory pathway for language, the traditional design for reading makes little use of the auditory processing capabilities of the brain
  • While the visual pathways are being strained to capacity by reading, the auditory network for language remains relatively under-utilized.
  • Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper.
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 12 Sep 15
     
    "Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper."
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