"A year after seventh grade teacher Elizabeth Delmatoff started a pilot social media program in her Portland, Oregon classroom, 20% of students school-wide were completing extra assignments for no credit, grades had gone up more than 50%, and chronic absenteeism was reduced by more than a third. "
More and more teachers have the opportunity to cut a slice of the Internet pie and share content with administrators, students, and parents. Many, however, are unsure what to do with this slice or how to serve it up to waiting guests. Fear not, I have a few suggestions that might get you started. I've broken it down to "Should" and "Should Not" lists in hopes of making it easy.
"Developing thinking dispositions-whether it is a disposition to strive for understanding, to figure out the complexities of fairness, to seek truth, or hunt for creative solutions-occurs within a cultural context. It is within cultural contexts that we develop our patterns of behavior and thinking that become our habits. Therefore, Visible Thinking uses an enculturative approach to develop students' thinking, immersing students in a rich culture of thinking in schools and classrooms."
Here are Edutopia's most highly rated resources this week. Note that our resources can be rated along three parameters:
PRACTICAL Practical materials are ones that you can use to improve your classroom or school right now. These include lesson ideas, tips and strategies for implemeting a new practice, or anything else that is useful RIGHT NOW (as opposed to something that may take 10 months and several committee meetings to implement.)
INNOVATIVE These are materials that inspire you with their cutting-edge ideas. Not necessarily something you can implement right away, but if they're Practical too, then you can certainly choose both.
PERSUASIVE Persuasive resources are those that make the case for a particular practice or idea. Maybe they helped to change your mind. Or maybe they could change someone else's mind. You could use these materials to persuade your school board, for instance, or your principal to adopt a new approach.
This is a collaborative project to generate Social Media Guidelines for school districts. The goal of this guideline is to provide instructional employees, staff, students, administrators, parents and the school district community direction when using social media applications both inside and outside the classroom.
AS technological devices have become more portable and more popular, they've enhanced our connectedness at work. But they have also led to a greater degree of incivility - a trend that is damaging our workplace relationships.
Increasingly schools are having to deal with this issue, in classrooms with students and with colleagues in meetings. At conferences delegates seem to be hiding behind their screens and I wonder what level of engagement is taking place between them and the speaker/s? What messages are being sent and received..on a number of levels?
cybernetic takeover might mean a redefinition of "teacher" as a research
assistant or intellectual coach,
Just as the Internet replaced telephone operators and the nightly news anchor
as the default source of information, teachers may be next on the chopping
block. Automated learning is a cheap solution to recession-swelling
class sizes and renewed calls to make technological innovation a centerpiece
of education.
“Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on
average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face
instruction.”
Unlike one-size-fits-all lectures, the report finds that computers can custom
tailor the pace of learning to each individual student.
Department of Education found that online learners spend more time learning and on
task.
The lure of video games and other mindless online activity quickly eclipse the
fleeting intrigue of scientific exploration.
Professors Barbour and Reeves find that they still favor students with “independent
orientations towards learning, [who are] highly motivated by intrinsic sources,
and [who] have strong time management, literacy, and technology skills.”
"Just as the Internet replaced telephone operators and the nightly news anchor as the default source of information, teachers may be next on the chopping block. Automated learning is a cheap solution to recession-swellingbclass sizes and renewed calls to make technological innovation a centerpiece of education."
These aren't really ClassPortals - they stand in contrast as they focus on the "business of the classroom", but the widespread use of blogs in this way by one middle school is really impressive.
It's a means of sending an email to various other people at once. For example, you might send an email addressed to a parent concerning a manner but you'd CC the same email to your year level co-ordinator so they know exactly what you're communicating to said parent.
c Set
up your own collection of RSS feeds
Once RSS is demonstrated to staff through sites such as Pageflakes staff may see how the benefit of the web working for the user rather than trawling through google.
Yes, what about great online presentation tools? How much (if at all?) do we still have to play by the "Everyone needs to know MS suite so schools need to do this as 'Job Prep?'" Do you feel this as a need in your schools?
ito
Juxtapose
other stimulus prompts ito challenge thinking
Edit a word processed document by: using find and replace, checking word
counts, inserting page breaks, accessing the spellcheck and thesaurus
functions
Is this more of a "basic" skill that we assume that all educators already know? If this section is regarding posting documents, we are talking about a different set of skills.
I assume this is a somewhat mandatory skill that users of Word Processing applications should have. How unprofessional to read a doc that has spelling errors etc!!
Yes, any means - Moodle, Wordpress, Sharepoint, etc. - the idea is that we have a professional responsibility to make core documents available. Do you agree?
Consider
taking an active role in an online community.
That's why setting up an in-house system where you can create a large number of individual student accounts at the start of the year (such as VBulletin) comes in very handy.
Any ideas about the best way to do this? Should it be a WEB 2.0 application, such as Dropbox? Or is bandwith use a concern, so a LAN setup should be used?
Just to save on costs, you'd probably have to do it over a LAN. It would also create a more reliable system, since an intranet/local network is less likely to fail than the connection to outside resources.
Create
opportunities for students to synthesise their learning through projects that
call for a creative, problem-solving or innovative response.
Join
a professional learning community and follow
posts for several weeks
c Join
a
professional learning community and follow
posts
for several weeks
c Join
an online chat, webinar or presentation as an observer
c
Choose one aspect of the learning framework to research
Twitter is excellent for following like minded people and sharing thoughts, opinions and ideas about education and web 2.0 technologies.
Choose
at least one work that you are willing to publish to the Web and do so. This may be in any format: visual,
written, video, audio, presentation, etc. The forum may be a wiki,
professional journal, educators’ social network, iTunes, etc.
How do you ensure appropriate content, privacy of other students, etc, in an environment where students can publish content for the world to see? Can you effectively?
This is GREAT. Now we just need an online database so we can take a good long hard look at our own skills and those of other staff. I don't think this should be threatening to anyone, but guide them through some essential skills.
Explore a new Web application and use it yourself for a
lesson