Skip to main content

Home/ worldatways/ Group items tagged lessons

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Barbara Lindsey

Young Leaders of Grass-Roots Movements Meet in Mexico City - 0 views

www.america.gov/...10046GLnesnoM4.101199e-02.html

activism social justice social media

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Technology now facilitates civic involvement throughout the world, said the State Department’s Jared Cohen. In an essay for the Web site Huffington Post.com, Cohen reflected on the lessons of the AYM conference and concluded that “this new ability to connect [online] is leveling the playing field and breaking down previous age, gender, socioeconomic and circumstantial barriers to who can emerge as a leader, activist or grassroots agent for change.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 09
     
    Technology now facilitates civic involvement throughout the world, said the State Department's Jared Cohen. In an essay for the Web site Huffington Post.com, Cohen reflected on the lessons of the AYM conference and concluded that "this new ability to connect [online] is leveling the playing field and breaking down previous age, gender, socioeconomic and circumstantial barriers to who can emerge as a leader, activist or grassroots agent for change."
Barbara Lindsey

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

mark pesce higher ed technology learning control

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.
  • What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.
  • A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.
  • This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia.
  • The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.
  • That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.
  • If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.
  • the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience.
  • the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.
  • When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?
  • Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?
  • In this near future world, students are the administrators.
  • Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.
  • The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers,
  • The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens.
  • At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.
  • Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?
  • This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.
  • Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.
  • While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool.
  • the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.
  • Stanford and MIT
  • show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.
  • Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.
  • Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence.
  • here are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.
  • Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating. All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.
  • Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.
  • Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.
  • Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best.
  • learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading.
  • RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.
Barbara Lindsey

gctgone - Charting w/Google Spreadsheets - 0 views

gctgone.googlepages.com/home222222

google spreadsheets watw gctgone

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Nov 08
     
    Create great interdisciplinary lessons with Google spreadsheets
Barbara Lindsey

Please Turn on Your Cell Phone: Change Observer: Design Observer - 0 views

changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html

cellphones education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Aug 09 - Cached
  • U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, came out in support of cell phone use saying, “Finding ways to use cell phones to deliver lesson plans to students would improve education and meet federal guidelines.”
  • In the U.S., 76 percent of students ages 12 to 18 have their own cell phone. Forward-thinking educators recognize in these statistics a low-tech, low-cost solution to the ongoing technology problem in underserved schools, where hardware is dysfunctional, wireless infrastructure is weak and inadequate staffing fails to meet the demands of upkeep.
  • The bottom line is cell phones are the most affordable, accessible way to provide access to technology and narrow the digital divide.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But advocating for cell phone use in education is about more than cost, sustainability or parity; it’s about accessing points of entry. When it comes to technology integration, you need to meet students (and teachers) where they are. When you begin with a tool they already know and love, you’re less likely to be met with the kind of resistance you might otherwise get to institutional hardware or software. For teachers, eliminate the fear factor and you’ve empowered a previously disenfranchised group of self-professed Luddites. For students, who treat the cell phone like an appendage, you’re capitalizing on an existing passion for the technology.
  • In the model of the Asia Society International Studies School Network, we prepare college-ready, globally competent students by requiring them to participate in learning engagements both within and beyond the classroom. Internships, service learning, foreign and domestic travel and learning expeditions of all kinds develop students’ methods of inquiry. What’s especially exciting about integrating cell phone use into the curriculum is the opportunity to extend and better support the rich learning that’s already happening outside of our classrooms (while also allowing us to work around the ban).
  • We design inquiry-based curricula that send students out into the world to investigate, collect, report, reflect and engage. In doing so, students gain a sense of themselves as producers of knowledge. They become part of a continuous learning loop of inputs and outputs mediated by teacher and student alike. With basic mobile functions like voice, text and camera coupled with web 2.0 technologies, students’ knowledge can be shared locally and globally, all the while developing critical communication and collaboration skills. Audiocasting, photoblogging, polling, surveying and language acquisition are just a few of the activities that utilize mobile devices for learning. These are context-specific opportunities for students to share with authentic and limitless audiences. And for teenagers, to share is to be — which lies at the heart of their love for the cell phone to begin with.
  • we need to leverage this love to help students transform their communication networks into learning networks.
  • I ask teachers all the time, "how do you use technology (read: the Web, your phone, etc") to learn?" and it's difficult for many to answer. Like many students, they've never had models for effective learning with technology (as opposed to information retrieval, which admittedly, hasn't been great either.)
  • I am suggesting that if we want to take advantage of the undeniable potential for learning with technology, we have to help educators be learners in those contexts first.
  • Cell phones are not useful in school when pedagogy does not use them to support the kind of learning wanted. While the kids in a class are 'distracted' by their phones, they are learning an enormous amount, just not what the teacher intends. The easy answer is to ban the technology, the more difficult but far richer answer is to develop pedagogy that exploits it.
  • Kids fluency and engagement with mobile devices should be viewed as a wonderful resource and indication of their engagement in things they want to learn, not as a distraction that has to be silenced to make lessons easier.
  • Your post and these comments make it evident that educators, families, politicians et. al. must first become participants in using these tools prior to understanding or advocating for their use.
Barbara Lindsey

Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment) | Language Lab Unleashed! - 0 views

www.languagelabunleashed.org/...sons-learned-part-4-assessment

assessment student-centered student-created sawhill

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 30 Jul 09 - Cached
  • I see teaching as constantly re-tooling, tweaking, re-evaluating, scrapping, starting over.
  • One of my goals for this class (and for me) was to see what student-centered assessment would look like in a conversation class. I took a big leap and gave the reigns over to them. The content of the class and flow of the class was based on their interested and idea. They were there because they had personal goals that needed to be acknowledged and realized… or at least approximated.
  • What would happen if I felt they didn’t merit the grade they said they did? what if they all wanted an A+?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.
  • Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).
  • A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.
  • It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable
  • In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.
Barbara Lindsey

An Almanac of Things for Learning (Things to Learn With) - 0 views

sites.google.com/...Home

google mafla09 actfl09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Oct 09
     
    An array of lessons using Google products
Barbara Lindsey

Curriki - 1 views

www.curriki.org/...WebHome

opensource web2.0 lessons education collaboration community pln methods roml5395

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jun 10
     
    Building collection of educational resources
Barbara Lindsey

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Partnership with Carnegie Hall Connects Musi... - 0 views

www.state.gov/...113240.htm

cross-cultural students global voices new york istanbul videoconferencing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Dec 08 - Cached
  • As with the Turkey exchange, these students will communicate with their peers overseas and establish relationships to promote greater mutual understanding.
  • connect New York City music students with their peers in Istanbul, Turkey
  • During this school year, these youths have communicated with each other online and learned about their respective cultures and musical heritage. On December 16, the students were linked via digital video conference to attend, virtually, concerts by the Turkish clarinetist Selim Sesler in Istanbul and by the Maurice Brown jazz quintet in Carnegie Hall.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Carnegie Hall Cultural Exchange Program, presented by The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, provides the opportunity for students throughout New York City to explore the music and culture of a chosen country. In 2008 – 2009, students have been learning about the music and culture of Turkey through sequential lessons and an exchange of ideas with their overseas peers via an online community.
Barbara Lindsey

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...student-challenges-p.html

student student-created

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.
  • The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.
  • And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written. Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer
  • Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."
  • Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?
  • The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 09
     
    Thx to Russel Tarr
Barbara Lindsey

Tech Rav: Using Voicethread for Judaic Studies - 0 views

techrav.blogspot.com/...thread-for-judaic-studies.html

voicethread hebrew reading

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 May 10 - Cached
  • The primary challenge teachers face in teaching reading is reading is boring. It is hard to give an engaging lesson that addresses many different learning styles and excites students with higher order thinking while at the same time having the time and patience to call on many students to read. This becomes even more of an issue in high school where students cannot be motivated easily to listen to each other read.
  • Not only can students read on Voicethread, they can listen to their reading and correct it, or listen to others read to model their own reading. Voicethread also has advanced features like hidden URLs and comment moderation so teachers can easily control the Voicethread by not allowing inappropriate comments and can keep privacy concerns on a thread to a minimum.
Barbara Lindsey

50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom | Smart Teaching - 0 views

www.smartteaching.org/...tive-and-interactive-classroom

wikis education collaboration classroom

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Aug 09 - Cached
  • sk students to create study guides for a specific part of the unit you’re
  • Make it a class project to collaboratively write a reference book that others can use.
  • Get your class to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units, adding definitions and images.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Encourage students to submit words that they had trouble with, along with a dictionary entry
  • Let your students share their collective information so that everyone gets a better understanding of the subject.
  • Encourage students to draft rules and policies for the classroom.
  • Make it a class project to create an FAQ for your classroom that will help new students and those that will come in years later.
  • Using a wiki platform, students don’t have to worry about web design, so they can focus on content instead.
  • Save links, documents, and quotes related to units or your classroom as a whole
  • Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.
Barbara Lindsey

Why Wordle-By Steven W. Anderson - 0 views

www.techlearning.com/24518

wordle students examples

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • @mrsmac75-As a starter for students to try and guess where we're going with our lesson and create their own learning outcomes. @ktenkely-I use Wordle as warm up. I hate the question, "What are we doing today." I give word clues about what we are doing in class.
  • I use it as an assessment activity at the end of a topic,
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09
     
    Great examples for using Wordle with students
1 - 20 of 23 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page