Skip to main content

Home/ UWCSEA Teachers/ Group items tagged understanding

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Keri-Lee Beasley

Using iPad in Maths - 1 views

ideferrers.com/ivity-and-student-explanations

critical_thinking technology iPad mathematics

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 01 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 01 Mar 15
     
    There is an argument for creating videos as a means of engagement, as an approach involving doing something a little different; something that will hopefully result in a higher likelihood of it being committed to long term memory. These are additional benefits. The real value in these tasks is their requirement for genuine higher order thinking skills, and the resulting assessment of student understanding that can be used in a meaningful way.
Sean McHugh

11 Ways Finland's Education System Shows Us that "Less is More". | Filling My Map - 0 views

fillingmymap.com/...tem-shows-us-that-less-is-more

teaching assessment

shared by Sean McHugh on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Finland follows the basic formula that has been performed by math teachers for centuries: The teachers go over homework, they present a lesson (some of the kids listen and some don’t), and then they assign homework.
  • What if we didn’t force students who know that their talents reside outside of the world of formal academics to take three years of high school classes that they found boring and useless?  What if we allowed them to train in and explore vocations they found fascinating and in which they were gifted?
  • This system allows the Finnish teacher more time to plan and think about each lesson.  It allows them to create great, thought provoking lessons.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Elementary students in Finland often have the SAME teacher for up to SIX YEARS of their education.
  • Finland understands that the ability to teach isn’t something that can be gained from studying. It is usually a gift and passion.  Some have it, some don’t.
  • They do not try to interfere or usurp their authority and decisions.
  • Study after study
  • Imagine all of the exciting things you could do with your students if there wasn’t a giant state test looming over your head every year.  Imagine the freedom you could have if your pay wasn’t connected to your student’s test scores.  Imagine how much more fun and engaging your lessons would be!
  • teachers take their time.  They look deeper into the topic and don’t panic if they are a little behind or don’t cover every topic in the existence of mathematics in a single year.
  • math ONCE a week
  • The students get to actually understand the material before they are forced on to a new topic.
  • Finnish students have the least amount of homework in the world.  They average under half an hour of homework a night.  Finnish students typically do not have outside tutors or lessons either.
  • I won’t give you homework if you work on this while you are in my classroom.”
  • Trust is key
  • Sean McHugh on 26 Apr 15
     
    ...why are Finnish students succeeding and ours are failing?  The difference is not the instruction. Good teaching is good teaching and it can be found in both Finland and in the US.   (The same can be said for bad teaching.)  The difference is less tangible and more fundamental.  Finland truly believes "Less is More."  This national mantra is deeply engrained into the Finnish mindset and is the guiding principal to Finland's educational philosophy.
Sean McHugh

Anne Murphy Paul: Why Floundering Makes Learning Better | TIME.com - 0 views

ideas.time.com/...why-floundering-is-good

learning teaching research floundering grappling

shared by Sean McHugh on 24 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.
  • let the neophytes wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start.
  • These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The apparent struggles of the floundering group have what Kapur calls a “hidden efficacy”: they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions.
  • they’re able to transfer the knowledge they’ve gathered more effectively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else’s expertise.
  • “design for productive failure” by building it into the learning process.
  • Sean McHugh on 24 Mar 13
     
    " Kapur has identified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that "challenge but do not frustrate." Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they're doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the problems. And to those students and workers who protest this tough-love teaching style: you'll thank me later." Originally shared by JPL! Still awesome. (yes, you Jeff, and this article)
Sean McHugh

How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn? | MindShift - 2 views

blogs.kqed.org/...king-change-the-way-kids-learn

multitasking technology learning education students studying revision

shared by Sean McHugh on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • “We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”
  • media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.
  • But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
  • Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,
  • This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated
  • “The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”
  • Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.
Jeffrey Plaman

Why Teacher Coaching Can Fail - Julie Boyd - 2 views

julieboyd.com.au/why-teacher-coaching-can-fail

coaching fail policy technology

shared by Jeffrey Plaman on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 18 Feb 13
     
    Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.
  • James Dalziel on 19 Feb 13
     
    If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.
Sean McHugh

The Overselling of Ed Tech - Alfie Kohn - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/ed-tech

shared by Sean McHugh on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • the rationale that I find most disturbing — despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s rarely made explicit — is the idea that technology will increase our efficiency . . . at teaching the same way that children have been taught for a very long time
  • We can’t answer the question “Is tech useful in schools?” until we’ve grappled with a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we’d be open to the kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct — and I’m on board. Show me something that helps them make things collaboratively (rather than just on their own), and I’m even more interested
  • these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we’re already being innovative
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 17 Mar 16
       
      Yeah, so?
  • even if ed tech were adopted as thoughtfully as its proponents claim, we’re still left with deep reasons to be concerned about the outmoded model of teaching that it helps to preserve — or at least fails to help us move beyond
  • teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning
Jeffrey Plaman

There is a war coming: Cory Doctorow on the future regulation of general purpose comput... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...w-regulation-computation-video

tweet future regulation video opensource computer copyright creativecommons

shared by Jeffrey Plaman on 23 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 23 Apr 12
     
    Fascinating read: There is a war coming: Cory Doctorow on the future regulation of general purpose computation - video http://t.co/kSaGMef4
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 23 Apr 12
     
    The battle against copyright is only the beginning... the war will be over how much we understand and care about computers themselves and the kinds of "spyware" they run to lock us out of our own property... (I'm looking at you iPad)
Jeffrey Plaman

Educational Leadership:Giving Students Ownership of Learning:Footprints in the Digital Age - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...prints-in-the-Digital-Age.aspx

digitalfootprint reputation willrichardson ascd google

shared by Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12 - Cached
  • these shifts demand that we move our concept of learning from a "supply-push" model of "building up an inventory of knowledge in the students' heads" (p. 30) to a "demand-pull" approach that requires students to own their learning processes and pursue learning, based on their needs of the moment, in social and possibly global communities of practice.
    • Jeffrey Plaman
      Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12
       
      This is the BIG shift in the way we see our jobs as educators. How much push do you do each day VS how much do students pull if from you? How can we help them want to pull, know where to pull from, etc? How does what we do in class day in and day out change if we believe that THIS is the way we need to be heading?
  • Our teachers have to be colearners in this process, modeling their own use of connections and networks and understanding the practical pedagogical implications of these technologies and online social learning spaces.
    • Jeffrey Plaman
      Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12
       
      What are we modeling for our students?
  • makes us findable by others who share our passions or interests
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Get Started!Here are five ideas that will help you begin building your own personal learning network.
    • Jeffrey Plaman
      Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12
       
      Great ideas on how to get started
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12
     
    "In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks."
  • Jeffrey Plaman on 10 Feb 12
     
    "In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks."
Keri-Lee Beasley

Yes, and… Thoughts on print versus digital reading by Kristin Ziemke | Nerdy ... - 0 views

nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/...ital-reading-by-kristin-ziemke

technology professional_development literacy readingworkshop writingworkshop #tcrwp

shared by Keri-Lee Beasley on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • Sean McHugh on 27 May 15
     
    Brilliant perspective in the need to broaden our understanding of literacy.
  • Keri-Lee Beasley on 03 Jun 15
     
    Take a moment to reflect: How many minilessons have you taught this year that guide students to become effective digital readers? Do you have anchor charts or scaffolds in place that will support them as they attempt to read digitally with independence? Have you provided ample time for them to read diverse genres or self-select their onscreen reading material?
Katie Day

Understanding Science - explore an interactive representation of the process of science - 1 views

undsci.berkeley.edu/index.php

science teaching resources scientific_method

shared by Katie Day on 04 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Katie Day on 04 Oct 10
     
    developed by the Univ of California Museum of Paleontology
Katie Day

Oxfam Education: Resources index | Mapping Our world - 0 views

www.oxfam.org.uk/...mapping_our_world

united_nations teacher_resources un_day

shared by Katie Day on 30 Nov 10 - Cached
  • This unique interactive website works with maps and globes to transform pupils’ understanding of the world. Winner of a Geographical Association Gold award and a BAFTA award for primary learning, Mapping Our World allows pupils to flatten a globe, turn a map into a globe, and merge different map projections. The nine structured activities come with teachers’ notes and are designed for whole class learning on an interactive whiteboard or PC. The website supports the Geography curriculum and is also ideal for bringing a global approach to Citizenship, PSE and ICT.
  • Katie Day on 30 Nov 10
     
    How maps affect our worldview - interactive whiteboard stuff
Katie Day

Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of H... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...29041

design writing teaching

shared by Katie Day on 05 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • I teach document design. When I teach composition, I spend a significant amount of the semester on visual design. I’m also a scholar of visual design. Obviously, then, I care about design, perhaps unhealthily so. And I want everyone else to care, too. But, even if you can’t bring yourself to care about visual design, then you should still care about formatting requirements on assignment prompts and/or syllabi. Everything we put on these documents tells our students something about us, about what we value, and about what they should value
  • while the ability to follow conventions of all stripes is certainly important, the ability to understand, historicize, negotiate, and even resist those conventions is far more important. Formatting conventions do not exist in a vacuum, and while they are solidified in style guides and other texts, they are often fluid and change depending on technologies and rhetorical situations. For instance, the gold standard of student paper formatting exists for several reasons, not the least of which involves Microsoft’s push to use Times as the default font in word processors and web browsers. A knowledge of why those conventions exist, how to negotiate them, and the consequences for following and/or breaking them is far more useful for students than simply being forced to follow them blindly.
  • Katie Day on 05 Dec 10
     
    An argument for encouraging the positive criteria/skill of designing a document rather than prescriptive formatting requirements
Katie Day

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...128789

attention teaching differentiation assessment digital

shared by Katie Day on 26 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.
  • had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.
  • Katie Day on 26 Aug 11
     
    Cathy N. Davidson on experiments at Duke University in instigating digital devices and teaching ..... what the students learned and what she learned....
Sean McHugh

Education Update:Finding New Ways to Assess Students' Learning:Purposeful Reflection - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...Purposeful-Reflection.aspx

shared by Sean McHugh on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Purposeful reflection is a critical attribute for innovative lesson planning, for meaningful interaction with adults, for increasing student achievement, for effective supervision and evaluation, for good curriculum design, and for assessment with understanding
  • A reflective school culture, Prolman remarked, makes the "thought muscles" stronger for both teachers and students and is directly related to higher achievement.
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?
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 75 of 75
Showing 20▼ items per page