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Site to create your own flash cards for students to use with apps.

Things to try out

"Nelson said often times students don't connect what they learn in school to what they do out of school. So he works with teachers during the previous semester to build a summer program reflective of what they learn in class. "When students come out to the park, they're referencing things they are doing in the classroom. Then when students go back to the classroom, they're referencing things they've done in the park," he said."

The following pages give you suggestions for when and how to use music during your teaching or training. With these techniques, you, the teacher, can orchestrate a classroom environment that is rich and resonant-- and provide learners with a symphony of learning opportunities and a sound education!

Agency? "Digital literacy is less about following the rules... and more about manipulating them." https://t.co/oK0kKUrwfH #moocmooc - ℳąhą Bąℓi مها بالي (@Bali_Maha) February 1, 2015

"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"

"Some may consider online learning to be the anti-classroom.  A rebellion against the chalkboard and the Blackboard in favor of virtual classrooms, avatars in sweater vests lecturing in a Charlie Brown monotone…  I simply look at it as a different kind of team approach to learning.  More opportunities for inputs.  If anything, it makes the scholarship more rigorous.  As both teachers and students, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind airs of academia when the scholarship can be researched, published, evaluated and revised in a nano-second.  It makes educational leadership even more important when the skills necessary to synthesize information both in person and on line are changing, and changing quickly."

""One thing I've been thinking about lately is that the way I present myself in the online course is pretty different from how I present myself in the face-to-face course. In the first iteration of the course, I presented myself in a way that I assumed would be most effective." She described emphasizing a scripted, polished presentation and a no-nonsense persona of clarity and precision. "Now I am concerned less with my authority as a teacher in an online environment. Before, I presented myself in a more authoritative matter, which was not as effective, because I had a certain feeling of a barrier between myself and the class." She explained how she was willing to risk "being more effusive, more warm in written communication, more bubbly for lack of a better term" than her initial impulses dictated. "

"Reducingstereotypethreat.org was created by two social psychologists as a resource for faculty, teachers, students, and the general public interested in the phenomenon of stereotype threat. This website offers summaries of research on stereotype threat and discusses unresolved issues and controversies in the research literature. Included are some research-based suggestions for reducing the negative consequences of stereotyping, particularly in academic settings."

"This represents perhaps the most foundational of all the connections that Stephen Lehmkuhle and his colleagues have been steadily knitting together in Rochester: that between facts and ideas. Traditional college instruction-epitomized by the lecture-is largely a process of orally transmitting facts from the brain of a teacher to a student. It's a tremendously inefficient method-even harmful. UMR chemistry professor Rajeev Muthyala points to research finding that undergraduates often finish lecture-based introductory science classes with less expertise than when they started. They get worse."

"Instructional design is, or should be, nothing less than pedagogy intelligent about the medium within which learning happens. If you teach in an LMS, you are an instructional designer. If you teach in a room, you are an instructional designer. At our institutions, instructional designers or engineers or technologists should be as filled in about pedagogy as teachers are. They should not content themselves to be carriers of content from one format to the next. They should be experts in digital delivery, and consultants to collaborate with."

Do you attend conferences or workshops year after year, yet rarely adjust your teaching or leadership as a result of what you learned?

"If you've heard me speak in the last several months, you've probably heard me rail against "disposable assignments." These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They're assignments that add no value to the world - after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!"

Assessment: What are students really learning?

USA Today, "The place where the video game was invented more than 50 years ago now wants to teach teachers, entrepreneurs and students how to design games for learning - and it is hoping that the end result will be a new kind of tech tool for the classroom." The VCU ALT Lab now has an area for the exploration of games as a means of learning. The MIT online courses might be a good springboard for conversation and experiments in the ALTLab.