Skip to main content

Home/ Writing Across the Curriculum/ Group items tagged connection

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Stephanie Cooper

ACU Connected Blog » Class Blogs as a Mobile Hub - 2 views

  • Ideas to Get You Started Here are a few basic strategies for integrating student voices into your class blog this semester. Comments – Obviously the most familiar way to add student voices to a class blog is adding comments to a post. At the beginning of the week, the instructor or TA would create a post that includes a discussion question or prompt. Then during or between classes students would stop by to add comments to the main question or reply to the comments of others. Question Queue: create a standing post where students can raise questions they would like to discuss in class. Rapid Response: ask students, individually or in pairs, to contribute a 3-4 sentence position statement they will then defend or debate. Student Posts – One way students can master new concepts is by having to teach them to others. Most blog software provides user roles for secondary contributors, so with a little preparation, students can have their own dashboard and post content as a full author to the blog. If you imagine student work more like a short essay than a single observation, then allowing students to make full posts may communicate higher expectations and value of their work. Reading Journal: ask students to post a summary of preliminary research or more formal abstract to the blog for peer comments and critique. Media Mashup: have students analyze appearances of course concepts in popular media by embedding a YouTube clip and then evaluating its relevance. Post by Email – A final feature we found in many mobile blogging tools was post by email. For students and faculty with mobile devices, this provided us a simple way to share content quickly back to the class hub. Since most native apps on the iPhone offered email sharing of photos, links, and media, post by email become the common avenue connecting mobiles to the blog. (At ACU, this feature is built on a Gmail account associated with each blog and the Postie WordPress plug-in described below.) Webliography: early in a survey course, ask students to construct a bibliography of useful study materials and web sites by emailing links with annotations to the blog. Photo Shoot: send students into the community (or out onto the web) to capture images that reflect social attitudes toward a common topic then email them to the blog for discussion. (New iPhone or iPod touch users may not know they can tap and hold on a web image to copy it before pasting it into an email. Remind them to cite the original source of the image, or better yet copy and paste the URL as well.)
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is great info to make class blogging successful.
  • WPtouch – An essential plugin for mobile blogging via WordPress is WPtouch (now standard on all WordPress.com blogs). Once installed, the plugin makes reading and commenting on mobile posts and pages easy. Simple to install and MU compatible.
  • CONS: essential links from sidebar widgets in a desktop theme must be added to the WPtouch menu manually.
Keith Hamon

tengrrl v2.0 | p e d a b l o g i c a l - 0 views

  • Begin by establishing reasons for students to connect.
  • In the writing classroom, personal stories can be the best way to build quick connections
  • ask students to talk about their work as writers—their best work, their pet peeves, and their biggest challenges.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Tend the fledgling connections writers make with activities that talk explicitly about community.
  •  
    How do you take a group of individual, unrelated people and connect them in a supportive community quickly? … Here are some answers.
Keith Hamon

TeachThought8 Ideas, 10 Guides, And 17 Tools For A Better Professional Learning Network... - 0 views

  •  
    Personal learning networks are a great way for educators to get connected with learning opportunities, access professional development resources, and to build camaraderie with other education professionals. Although PLNs have been around for years, in recent years social media has made it possible for these networks to grow exponentially. Now, it's possible to expand and connect your network around the world anytime, anywhere.
Keith Hamon

Five Forms of Filtering « Innovation Leadership Network - 1 views

  •  
    Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us. We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us - it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us. These are all connections - and this is what really drives value creation. However, we can't connect without some filtering going on.
Keith Hamon

connection education with how young people use technology - 2 views

  •  
    A wiki devoted to connecting social networking to education, esp. in K12.
Keith Hamon

Marc My Words: Thinking About Mobile Learning in the Age of iPad by Marc J. Rosenberg :... - 2 views

  • We focused on providing just-in-time resources, in the context of work situations not easily predicted, rather than longer duration, more tightly targeted and structured instructional programs.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We see again the shift from just-in-case learning to just-in-time. Anybody want to do a cartoon strip with me, starring Justin Case and Justin Thyme?
  • the screen is bigger, which makes a huge difference in how we can display informational and instructional content.
  • the most important game-changer is that the iPad, and other devices to follow, are designed to be “always on,” or “always connected;” the intent being that you always have access to the Internet (of course this may not be practically true yet, but it certainly is the goal).
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the use of organization-based social networking as a mobile learning strategy.
  • the idea of downloading starts to seem antiquated.
  • Clearly, the platforms and devices becoming available are more flexible, more powerful, more portable, and more user-friendly. 24x7 access to content makes mLearning more convenient and valuable. New communication channels open up new opportunities to connect with coworkers and experts, anytime and anywhere. And the use of cloud computing makes virtually limitless amounts of content instantly available to virtually limitless numbers of users.
  •  
    Clearly, the platforms and devices becoming available are more flexible, more powerful, more portable, and more user-friendly. 24x7 access to content makes mLearning more convenient and valuable. New communication channels open up new opportunities to connect with coworkers and experts, anytime and anywhere. And the use of cloud computing makes virtually limitless amounts of content instantly available to virtually limitless numbers of users.
Keith Hamon

Half an Hour: Connectivism and Transculturality - 1 views

  • you need a mixture of materials, you need a collection of different perspectives, different points of view, in order to come to any new understanding.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Do teachers approach any class with the ambitions of gaining new understanding? Why not? What would change about a class if they did?
  • Communities have to be open, they have to have some source of new material coming in, whether its raw material, resources, ideas, etc., and then they have to have some place where they can send their creative product, the things that they make, the ideas that they have.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      How in QEP do we overcome the static curriculum closed to any new information?
  • A third criterion that distinguishes a community defines as a network from a community defined as a group is autonomy. And what that means is that each of the members of that community are working toward their own sense of values, their own sense of purpose, their own goals or endeavours.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      College classes too seldom incorporate the value of the student into the mix, ignoring the purposes, goals, and experiences of the student and delivering a plain vanilla product, one-size-fits-all.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When I say 'interactivity' I say the knowledge in the community is created by the interaction of the members of the community rather than created in one person and then spread through the community.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key to connectivism: that learning emerges, either in our minds or in our communities, from the patterns and interactions of individual people or neurons.
  •  
    Our knowledge, our intelligence, must be based on something emergent from the connective activity of many individual neurons, can't be based on the content of a neuron, has to be based on the pattern of connectivity of these neurons. We replicate that in connectivist teaching.
Keith Hamon

NCTE Inbox Blog: Building Community in 15 Minutes a Day - 0 views

  • you can easily adapt the project for any students and class.
  • Be sure that the writing prompt you choose require a personal response.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      QEP seeks to connect new knowledge to what the student already knows, which is key to connective knowledge.
  • Remember that writers have more authority when they can choose a topic that they are comfortable with.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Building a sense of authority is key to good writing. Real writers always try to write from a position of relative authority. If they can't, then they ask good questions or keep quiet.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Invite students to do whatever kind of writing they want to. The important thing is to write. Exactly how they write is less important.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In QEP, we seek first to encourage student writing, build participation, regardless of the kind or quality of the writing. Those issues emerge ONLY after people are writing in a group.
  • Once students do their writing, it's time to use their texts to build community.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key: we must find ways to pull student ideas into the classroom. This invests the students in their own learning and connects them to the class, the content, and to each other.
  • Using Anderson's project as a model, you can jump start community building in the classroom this fall. The first days of school can be very scary. As teachers, we need to make students feel comfortable with each other as quickly as possible. Writing is the answer. Welcome students as writers, give them advice and encouragement, and watch discussions about writing blossom as students build connections and encourage one another to write. And you can do it all in about 15 minutes a day!
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is why our QEP focuses so much on writing in social networks.
  •  
    Laurie Halse Anderson… invites readers to spend 15 minutes writing every day during the month. She provides writing prompts, advice, and encouragement. All readers have to do is set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes and write.
Keith Hamon

Why Flip The Classroom When We Can Make It Do Cartwheels? | Co.Exist: World changing id... - 4 views

  •  
    In some ways, the flipped model is an improvement. Research shows that tailored tutoring is more effective than lectures for understanding, mastery, and retention. But the flipped classroom doesn't come close to preparing students for the challenges of today's world and workforce. As progressive educational activist Alfie Kohn notes, great teaching isn't just about content but motivation and empowerment: Real learning gives you the mental habits, practice, and confidence to know that, in a crisis, you can count on yourself to learn something new. That's crucial in a world where, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, adults change careers (not just jobs) four to six times or where, as an Australian study predicts, 65% of today's teens will end up in careers that haven't even been invented yet. We don't need to flip the classroom. We need to make it do cartwheels.
  •  
    I find this paragraph particularly telling: "The cartwheeled classroom not only connects text books and classrooms to the real world, but it also inspires, uplifts, and offers the joy of accomplishment. Transformative, connected knowledge isn't a thing--it's an action, an accomplishment, a connection that spins your world upside down, then sets you squarely on your feet, eager to whirl again. It's a paradigm shift." Imagine what this could mean for our ASU QEP, for example, if we told our twelve 2012-2013 teachers that each of their QEP courses was going to be taught within the larger context of being meaningful to the population of a Haitian, African, Muslim, or Afghan village or community. The difference for the students in their real-world learning would be immeasurable.
Keith Hamon

Teachers Guide to The 21st Century Learning Model : Connected Learning - 1 views

  •  
    Connected Learning is " when you are pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you're supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose".
Keith Hamon

Personal Learning Network - 2 views

  • An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Okay, so PLNs as an educational concept have been around for a while, at least since 1998. And not just in education, but in the "real world." The significant change today is that we cannot speak of PLNs without talking about online networks.
  • we are all inundated with data (Stage 1) -- all those manuals, brochures, memos, letters, reports, and other printed material that cross our field of vision every day, not to mention all that we receive electronically
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Data overload has simply been complicated and exacerbated by the Internet. We have WAY more data than we can possibly deal with. We have moved from an age of information scarcity to information glut.
  • when you take data and give it relevance and purpose, you create information. Information (Stage 2) is the minimum we should be seeking for all of our learning activities.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key component of QEP: to find ways to make the class data relevant and purposeful information-purposeful beyond simply making a good grade. We suspect that most students never move beyond memorizing the class data so that they can repeat it on the test and then forget it. They never turn the data into useful and purposeful information, much less turn the data into knowledge or wisdom.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Even when we have information, we must use that information by applying it to our work before we can say we "know it." Until we use it, it remains information. Knowledge (Stage 3) comes from applying information to our work. This is the stage at which most company training programs fail -- too often the content of company training programs never gets applied to the employee's work. To me, this means that the investment in that training is totally wasted.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Applying information to our work is the tricky part for students: as most of them do not yet sense that they have any real work. QEP is looking for ways to turn their data processing into knowledge management.
  • Wisdom (Stage 4), that most precious possession, comes from adding intuition and experience to knowledge.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I think that many believe wisdom is beyond the reach of most classrooms, but I'm not willing to give up on it. However, it means that we must provide real, relevant experiences in class through which the student can develop wisdom.
  • This is why having a personal learning network is so important -- to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work.
  • First, we must sort through all of the available data to find only that information that is relevant to our learning needs and for which we have a purpose.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Too often missing from our classes, which too seldom address a common question among students: how will I use this in the future?
  • Once we have gathered and learned the needed information, we need to apply it to our work in order to transform it into our personal knowledge.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Applying new data to our own work to transform it into personal knowledge. This is as fine a statement of the aims of QEP as I can think of: we use online writing to help students create PLNs as engines for churning the data they are exposed to in their classes into personal knowledge.
  • Who should be in your personal learning network? The members of your network do not need to be people with whom you work directly. In fact, you do not even need to know the people personally. The members of your network should be people, both inside and outside of your work group and your company, who have the knowledge that you are trying to master and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      A student's PLN should, of course, include fellow class students and the teacher, but also students, teachers, experts, friends, and others outside the class. We do that online.
  • To establish a learning network, you can ask other people in your group, or with whom you have gone through a training program, to participate in periodic discussions as you all try to implement a new way of working, to support each other and share experiences with each other. Most people are happy to help -- people generally like to talk about their own work and are honored to be asked to share their knowledge and wisdom.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key to social networks: most people LIKE getting together, talking about common interests, and sharing what they know. We need to connect our students to such networks-connectivity, connectivism.
  • the value of knowledge increases when you share it with others.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We need to explore when knowledge is best considered a cooperative, connect-and-collaborate property and when it is best considered a competitive, command-and-control property. When should knowledge be part of the Commons and when should it be proprietary? What about on a test? What about in an essay or research document?
  • Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The principle of reciprocity is a key element in building PLNs, and one that most students never learn in grade school, where they are kept in their seats, eyes on their own work, hands to themselves, and forbidden to talk to their colleagues. Who could possibly run a real organization with those rules? It's a model of behavior for an assembly line worker, but not a knowledge worker. Why do our schools have this mismatch?
  • A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This one sentence should be in all correspondence, advertisements, and discussions about QEP.
  •  
    An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
Keith Hamon

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com - 1 views

  • David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.
  •  
    David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.
Keith Hamon

What's the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom? | p e d a b l o g i c a l - 0 views

  • the key to a successful community is “connecting a group of people online and making them feel a part of something special.” Students aren’t going to launch into discussion just because we throw them together. We have to give them reasons to connect.
  • Give students time to bond and make connections.
  • the class needs to do things together.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • community challenges can also be effective.
  • Consider community participation projects as well.
  • do all you can to encourage authentic conversation. Allow students to discuss topics freely and without fear of criticism.
  •  
    Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. … The FeverBee Primer About Successful Online Communities can help. While meant more for corporate and public community building, the lessons apply to the classroom just as well.
Keith Hamon

Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 1 views

  • The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
  • For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Here, Siemens effectively captures the shift from command and control structures in education to connect and collaborate structures.
  • we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This effectively distributes the burden of education, taking it off the teacher solely and moving it to the individual learner, where it must be.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and to reflect.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a great model for teaching within QEP.
  • Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of have a presence in order to participate in networks.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      QEP teachers must create a credible and persistent online identity through which they can connect to and collaborate with their students.
  •  
    Given that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.
Stephanie Cooper

Powerful Learning Practice, LLC » PLP Overview - 1 views

  • Global, online learning communities offer an unprecedented opportunity for teachers and students to follow and connect around their passions. But they also challenge almost every aspect of traditional schooling as we know it. The Powerful Learning Practice cohort model offers a unique approach to introducing educators to the transformative online technologies that are challenging the traditional view of teaching and learning. A PLP cohort for professional development is an ongoing (7-8 month), job-embedded opportunity built around emerging social Web technologies. Each cohort connects: 20 school or district teams from around the state (or world) 5 educators (administrators/teachers) from each school 10- PLP Fellows (Champions) selected from participating districts Within these cohorts, participants are supported in an intensive community building process online and in person by an passionate team of experienced educators. Outcomes for participating Administrators and Teacher Leaders By participating, you can expect your team and your leadership to gain: Knowledge: An understanding of the transformative potential of emerging technologies in a global perspective and context and how those potentials can be realized in schools Pedagogy: An understanding of the shifting learning literacies that the 21st Century demands and how those literacies inform teacher practice. Connections: The development of sustained professional learning communities and networks for team members to begin experimenting, sharing and collaborating with each other and with online colleagues from around the world. Sustainability: The creation of long term plans to move the vision forward in participating districts at the end of the program. Capacity: An increase in the abilities and resources of individuals, teams and the community to manage change.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This sounds mighty close to the aims of our QEP program. We might be able to get some ideas from this blog.
Stephanie Cooper

Weblogg-ed » Connected Teaching - 2 views

  • I’ve recently been working with a district that over the last two years has given over 300 workshops on various tools, but when I asked them to talk about what significant, real change had come about because of those workshops, there was basically silence in the room. I’ve started saying that the only workshop we should offer our teachers is one titled something like “How to Learn Online,” one that gives teachers some context and some strategy for directing their own learning but places the expectation for DIYPD squarely on their shoulders. That’s what I find really compelling about PLP, that it supports teachers in developing their own learning goals and strategies, yet at the same time gives them a great sense of potential of these online communities as well. Ultimately, this still is about us, about the decisions we make as “solo practitioners.” But we have to have a different frame, a different context for those decisions now, one that helps us understand our roles as truly connected educators as well.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Like the people who commented on this blog, I too would like to know which technologies he covers in his workshops. What strategies does he use to teach them??
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      I found my answer! It's in his other cross-listed blog: http://plpnetwork.com It's very similar to our QEP staff training goals.
  •  
    I like this one a lot. Could be another workshop for us and/or for our faculty group. Not to overlook the fact, these activities also count as professional development, just like attending a conference, and actually with more personal benefit.
Keith Hamon

Connected Knowledge, collective learning - 0 views

  •  
    A slideshow about connected knowledge and collective learning.
Keith Hamon

Thinking In Network Terms | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

  •  
    We always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it. We were aware of it down the line, that we're not independent from our environment, that we're not independent of the people around us. We are not independent of the many economic and other forces. But for decades we never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels.
Keith Hamon

The Reflective Student: A Taxonomy of Reflection Part 2 - 1 views

  •  
    Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning - patterns, connections and progress.
Keith Hamon

Connectivism & Connective Knowledge » Narratives of coherence - 1 views

  • narrative of coherence
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I really like this phrase - narrative of coherence. I think it captures nicely one of the main techniques of all successful learners: they are able to build a narrative of coherence that connects new knowledge to their existing knowledge base and makes it all coherent.
  •  
    In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator's bias influences what is included and excluded. What we're talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence.
1 - 20 of 54 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page