"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."