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Deron Durflinger

Recipe for high-school success: be curious, work late, ignore the textbooks - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • High-school textbooks are devices that regurgitate the universally accepted and least debated ideas from the field of science and technology, almost placing us in an isolated prism where we learn to accept knowledge.
  • our second biggest obstacle lies in the method of evaluation we have accepted to assess all students. I feel that much of our attention is channelized towards evaluating the amount of knowledge a student possesses. This focus would be better shifted if we start to question what the individual is able to do with their knowledge and to what extent they can they apply their learning toward writing textbooks of their own.
  • ack on the assembly line, our society didnʼt need innovators and thinkers shaping a shared vision for the field of their expertise. Now that weʼre getting trained for jobs which potentially donʼt exist today, itʼs crucial for educators to turn their attention to building the right aptitude just as much as they focus on instilling the informational aspects.
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  • The important moral is to simply keep trying until you find a passion worth working long hours even over rough nights.
  • best goal a young high-school student can set is to gain a balance between a wide range of skill sets; any and all of the skills can help them succeed when they eventually find their niche.
Deron Durflinger

Iowa universities adjust to burst of interest in online learning | The Des Moines Register | DesMoinesRegister.com - 0 views

  • “I work almost full time while getting my master’s degree,” he said. “As an undergraduate, it allowed me a better balance between school, my work and my social life.”
  • online courses are a cost-effective way for universities to meet increased demand while coping with steep reductions in state funding in recent years, administrators say.
  • The number of online courses offered at Iowa’s three public universities has grown by nearly 25 percent from 2005-06 to 2010-11, data from the Iowa state Board of Regents show.
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  • Last year, Iowa’s universities launched an effort to share language courses online. The first was in classic Greek, which an ISU student took from a U of I professor in Iowa City. This year, three ISU students enrolled in classic Greek. The universities may expand to Arabic or Chinese, officials said.
  • “the octopus room.” The classroom’s brain is a motion-sensing camera that follows an instructor around the room. Microphones triangulate the location of a voice so that the camera can focus on the person speaking. Six black arms with video monitors are attached to the “brain” in the center. This allows students in the class and those taking it online to see and hear each other.
  • They do a very good job of simulating the classroom experience,” he said. “But you have to have the discipline to stay up with it. If you get a week or so behind, it’s hard to catch up
  • blend of in-person and online instruction. Students taking finals at the U of I’s secure testing rooms, for example, might be enrolled in a daily Spanish language course where two days of class every week are completed online. That allows the instructor to focus classroom time on refining conversation and reading skills, faculty said.
  • “Part of that land-grant mission is educating the masses, and the masses have changed.”
  • Offering experienced faculty teachers and classroom space filled with well-equipped laboratories is a key way for Iowa’s universities to differentiate themselves from online-only colleges, officials said.
  • However, disciplines that don’t require physical space may one day be based mostly or entirely online, said Marcus Haack, a U of I professor who teaches future principals and superintendents in an education leadership program that many participants take online.
  • In 40 years in this business, I’ve learned we will never put the brakes on technology. It’s always going to expand our opportunities, our thinking and creativity
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      How can we channel the power of this learning/teaching style at Van Meter?
Shannon McClintock Miller

Share and mark up documents online | crocodoc - 2 views

shared by Shannon McClintock Miller on 08 May 10 - Cached
  •  
    have students highlight, mark up websites.... Larry F's favorite site to use in his classroom. 
Deron Durflinger

Education Week: Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead - 0 views

  • It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      The most important part of the article. It is about using the data to make quality instructional decisions.
  • Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier. The Los Altos Pilot Administrators, teachers, and students in Los Altos School District share their experiences with Khan Academy. Source: The Khan Academy Administrators Teachers Students “In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”
  • “I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear
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  • For example, in one small-scale experiment at Alhambra High School in Martinez, Calif., Mr. Smith found that students in a computer-aided-design class whose teacher incorporated digital lessons for use at home performed better on a post-test than did students using the standard textbook and lecture.
  • Dr. Kramer’s colleague John Willis, who teaches freshman physics at Gwinnett, a 705-student district-run charter school, had just started to experiment with requiring students, two or three times a week, to view his recorded lectures and other materials online before class. He used short automatic-response quizzes at the start of each class to make sure students had seen the material; he then used the class time to dig into demonstrations and experiments
  • Mr. Willis said that what used to be a two-class-period process to set the groundwork for a laboratory assignment has been moved online—mostly with student-made videos explaining the setup procedures and hypothesis planning.
  • “It allows me to improve the connections I’m making with students, because now I can get into the material in a deeper way,” Mr. Willis said.
  • For a recent experiment using microscopes, Dr. Kramer and another biology teacher posted YouTube videos of scientists discussing the equipment, photos of the school’s microscopes for the students to label, and their own videos explaining common problems in setting up the experiment.
  • It basically led us to a set of conclusions without him telling us the conclusions,” Ms. Doksansky said. “We had to test it out on this little applet and figure it out. It was a much better explanation than the really boring one in the book.
  • because the flipped-classroom format requires students to commit to doing a lot more work on their own
  • For Gwinnett’s Mr. Burmester, the proof will be in classroom practice. “The critical thing about all this [technology] is, what are you going to do differently, based on it?” he said. “Without a change, it’s just more stuff.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Well said!
Deron Durflinger

Education Week: Building the Digital District - 0 views

  • I think a lot of his decisions are based on leadership,” Smith says of Edwards and his management. “You’ve got to have the right people on the bus, but not only that, they’ve got to be on the right seats on the bus.
  • instead, it tells teachers to seek their own content and align it to the subject curriculum
  • Teachers are expected to share lessons with colleagues electronically via ANGEL, the district’s content-management software, created by Washington-based Blackboard Inc., and all four schools in the district’s 1-to-1 program each employs a technology facilitator to aid that process. The district’s three elementary schools only began distributing laptops to its third graders this year.
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  • I would say the biggest challenge teachers have is the lack of time
  • It’s a constant challenge for teachers to go out and to find new innovative resources and what actually matches the new curriculum they need
  • going back is not really an option.”
  • acknowledge that the district’s modest size was a key factor in helping it change its culture and improve its achievement so quickly
  • saying the digital-conversion model “may be the one last great hope for our nation.”
  • Colleagues insist any such effort in other districts must be led by a superintendent in the same mold. “He just doesn’t allow anybody around him to make excuses or build obstacles,” Principal Wirt of Mooresville High says of Edwards. “That’s not his ride at all.”
  • e did so bent on changing what he recalls as a “complacent” attitude among teachers and other staff members in a school where achievement data were average. As he walks the halls nearly four years later, he takes perhaps his greatest pride in seeing most of the same faces standing in classroom doorways
  • by all accounts Mooresville’s teachers were given little choice but to join a new culture where 6,000 district-issued laptops to students and staff served as the centerpiece of Superintendent Edwards’ educational improvement strategy
  • Similar compliance was also expected in accompanying changes to curriculum, teacher collaboration expectations, and even staff conduct, all of which began to be implemented in the fall of 2008
  • I think ‘expectation’ is the right word,
  • ‘Here is your laptop, and you will learn how to use it. You will make it an integral part of your classroom, and you will incorporate it into 21st-century teaching.’ ”
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