Taking a risk means that failure is an option. Many students may see taking a risk as a negative. If we want students to take risks, we must not only create an environment that encourages students to take risks, but makes risk taking seem like the best option.
I wonder why this article didn't discuss the biggest penalty to risk-taking--grades. If we assign a project and tell students how to get an A, why would they take the risk, be creative and possibly fail?
When students fail a paper, they should have the ability to re-write, learn fro their mistakes and improve their grade. But time and energy prevents most teachers from doing this.
This article talks about how to encourage students to take risks in the classroom. These "risks" can range from just questioning to imagining to trying out something new. This is a very important higher order thinking skill that many students have trouble comprehending and acting on because they would rather stick with what they know (or what they think will get them the highest grade). I think the ideas in the article can be applied to high school classrooms as well as college classrooms.
A great article about helping students be more creative by incorporating risk-taking activities in the classroom. Create an environment where taking risks are rewarded. Also start with small risk-taking activities and build up into more complex ones.
This post goes into more reasons for blogging in class. The 3 highlighted heare are distributing, discussing, and demonstrating. Each of these activities are done daily in the classroom. When and if Web 2.0 tools are available to assist the teacher and the learners they should be used to their fullest. The blog (web-log) is an easy tool to use in performing these activities.
Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, explains tells how to improve teaching online courses with active learning, and providing students to have be able to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject"
Developing these skills requires students to debate, write and master structured argument, the very activities that middle and high school teachers say they must abandon to respond to the demands of minimum-standards, test-driven curriculums. But such demands are smothering education.
Developing these skills requires students to debate, write and master structured argument, the very activities that middle and high school teachers say they must abandon to respond to the demands of minimum-standards, test-driven curriculums. But such demands are smothering education.
This article discusses the importance of differentiation and especially the need for students to "redo" their assignments until they get them correct. By allowing students to "redo" they are improving their higher level thinking skills. Good and short article with practical reminders.
I love this article! Great reminders for all of us as educators to simply differentiate learning for our students.
-vary the length or quantity of the assignment.
-extend or curtail the duration of the assignment.
-change the language of the assignment.
-scaffold the learning activity from hard to medium to easy.
-compact the activity and teach only what they don't know.
-give them learning activities that let them perform the same learning objective with multiple mediums like summarizing a story they have read through narrative, drama, song, poetry, art, or design
They also discussed the ability to redo assessments and I agree with this but somewhere in my teaching experience this has been engrained in my head only once. But I realize the feeling of success this allows a student.
In this blog, Ben Johnson reiterates the misconceptions in education about all students getting concepts in education at the same time. He goes on to discuss the importance of true differentiation in the classroom and that it is not creating an imbalance among students but a way for all students to succeed. He emphasizes the things teachers already do in the classroom to help students succeed and ends with a suggestion to allow students to redo their work in all areas (not just English and history).
This blog emphasizes the importance of stressing being a "good citizen" when using the Internet with our students. A week was spent with the following learning objective: "A renewed focus on the choices we make and how they affect us, specifically about balance, responsibility and safety." Each day time was spent on some aspect of this objective. As a culminating activity, students were invited to an assembly where the theme was " Digital Citizenship mean..... to me" Students were able to share what they learned throughout the week.
Michele
I had read this article when reviewing them for our assignment. It was great to see all of the topics touched upon, especially about balancing on and off line activities. Love that they stressed being a good digital citizen just as we stress being a good citizen in general. I think we forget to stress some of these points with our students and that they are important in our online life even outside of school. The kids and adults alike.
This article provides four points to increase parent involvement and communication: 1) Make a case for increased parent involvement, 2) Reach out to parents who want to make a connection, 3) Find ways to involve families in school culture, 4) Make the commitment to join the conversation with other teachers and parents.
Within each of these four points, there are various links to more actively engage with tips, articles, and discussion groups.
Every school has a need to increase parent involvement for a variety of reasons, with such intended results as a better sense of "community" among families, faculty and students, improved student achievement, and the like. This can be a challenge for all these entities. It's helpful from time to time to have reminders of strategies that work.
An Interesting article that focuses mainly on good Communication practices for online courses. However, having good "communication tools" is simply good practice in any learning environment. Having the right tools and using them in the right learning environment promotes Higher Order Thinking, building these skills is essential to success.
Nice blog on how to get students to communicate more efficiently in class discussions,as well as in the classroom. Getting the students to become more active and enjoy being a part of the class activity.
According to this article, "Design thinking can transform your classroom into a space of creativity, excitement and possibility". Design thinking is an 8-step process where students 1) Define the problem; 2) Research the problem; 3) Analyze the situation; 4) Redefine the problem; 5) Ideate (brainstorm); 6) Prototype (find a solution); 7) Refine; and 8) Repeat. A classroom activity is detailed where students look at the ads that recently won Clios and go through the process as if they were the ads' designers. They are basically putting themselves in the designers shoes. They are trying to recreate what was done and why it was done. A followup activity is to have the students design their own ads for the products using the steps of Design Thinking. I must admit I wanted to do it!
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These sites focus on using ELMO document cameras in the classroom. There are suggested ideas and lesson plans on how to integrate document cameras in classroom activities.
a handful of 14-year-old girls in a pilot study used critical thinking skills
independently online. "How teenagers use Web 2.0 tools has huge implications for
teaching critical thinking skills," says Ronda,
"These conversations and activities can be really important, and can teach students
valuable critical skills: how to find information online, how to examine the
accuracy and source of information they find online, and how to be not only
consumers of information, but active participants in creating it."
Finding information on-line is a learned skill of knowledge. Examining the accuracy and source of information is one of the highest critical thinking skills, which develops with time, experience, and rich schemata.
teens made decisions on who they connected to and what they shared, after
exploring options and reflecting on how these decisions would affect their
online experience.
The teachers are as good as the researches, since we have to keep up with the teens, and the technologies.
Social media tools hold great potential for developing important proficiencies
that have to do with communicating and expressing ideas and thoughts, conducting
research, and accessing and creating knowledge.