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Stephanie Cooper

Some Ideas for Motivating Students - 3 views

  • (In a study conducted on one college campus, a faculty member gave a student assignment to a group of colleagues for analysis. Few of them could understand what the faculty member wanted. If experienced profs are confused, how can we expect students to understand?)
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Supports our QEP theory that a well developed assignment will result in better student grades and participation...
  • Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it.
  • Attending to the need for power could be as simple as allowing students to choose from among two or three things to do--two or three paper topics, two or three activities, choosing between writing an extra paper and taking the final exam, etc. Many students have a need to have fun in active ways--in other words, they need to be noisy and excited. Rather than always avoiding or suppressing these needs, design an educational activity that fulfills them.
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  • Students will be much more committed to a learning activity that has value for them, that they can see as meeting their needs, either long term or short term. They will, in fact, put up with substantial immediate unpleasantness and do an amazing amount of hard work if they are convinced that what they are learning ultimately meets their needs.
Keith Hamon

Connectivism - 2 views

  • Early research results aren’t surprising: - Students are heavy users of computers, but not for education. - Teachers make limited use of computers and other technologies in class - Parents are limited computer users - Teacher training is lacking in utilizing computers effectively in classrooms
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To my mind, age is the real digital divide, not poverty. Even when given devices, olders will not use them as often or as well as youngers, which says to me that we QEP teachers must device strategies to work around our technological disabilities.
  • At the core of the discussion surrounding the future of education is a concern of how to navigate shifting power and control. What is the role of the student? The teacher? The school? The parents? If learners have the ability to do what educators have done in the past (access information directly), what role should the educator play?
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is the core question that will bedevil educators for the next decade: do we really want to create and empower independent learners? And if we do, then what role do we teachers assume when we can no longer dictate what happens in a class?
  • Perhaps face-to-face time should take on a different model than we currently utilize. We should do what we can with technology outside of classrooms. Then we wouldn’t need to meet in classrooms as often.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This matches my own experience in F2F classrooms, where more of the classwork shifted outside the room to the Net, forcing me to shift what happened in the room. Mostly we shifted away from mere transfer of information, which is more efficiently done on the Net, and more toward group interaction: discussion, debates, group presentations, etc.
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  • Most of us in education agree on our needs today: 1. We want good teachers 2. We want good educational content 3. We want to give our learners a bright and hopeful future 4. We want school systems that are relevant to learners and to society 5. We want schools to remedy the social and cultural inequalities that other institutions of society generate
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Nice list, but it omits the most common item listed by American educators: We want students to become productive members of society. Why?
  • We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We in QEP cannot assume that introducing computers and writing (both are technologies) into our classes will have no effect on either the content or the conduct of our courses. The tech we introduce will absolutely change what and how we teach. We must accept that and be conscious of it.
  • The key question for me is whether we need content in order to start learning or whether content is the by-product of an effective learning experience.
  • In terms of content, learners should create, teachers should curate.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      At least one aspect of this orientation is that teachers can provide the historical context, assuming that they are older or more experienced than their students, that students lack.
  • Technology is, possibly in a positive sense, a lever for change. The systemic innovation that many desire may not be possible through policy decisions alone.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In a reverse sense, technology can lead to change despite opposing policies. Thus, Web 2.0 will redefine how we think of privacy, regardless of our policy statements.
  • Leadership can be somewhat attended to by the contributions of many. When we distribute control, we distribute responsibility
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The wisdom of crowds can almost always help, especially in large policy decisions, and especially when the crowd includes those most affected by the decisions.
  • Today, leaders need co-leaders – people who are active in experimenting and exploring future directions.
  • Writing excellent, thorough descriptions of what is happening can be very valuable in coming to understand the nuances of a phenomenon.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Most important observation for QEP. How often do we ask our students to describe, esp. as a gateway to understanding.
  • I have not seen any studies that evaluate the effectiveness of the iPod in listening to music. For end-users, it’s not an issue. They use it because it works. Perhaps research in educational technology should have a similar focus: use it because it exists, because it is a part of society, because it is used in other aspects of their lives. By this metric, simply have computers available and using them for learning is success enough.
Keith Hamon

How Do You Teach Networking? - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

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    If business happens through networking, then what should I be doing to help my students understand both why, and how, to network? Do I have an obligation to teach the importance of networking to students in my English courses, or can I safely leave that lesson to my colleagues in the business department?
Stephanie Cooper

The Importance of Teaching Technology to Teachers - TheApple.com - 0 views

  • Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to: > 1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology > 2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally > 3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes > 4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information > 5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts > 6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This sounds right on track with our QEP mission!
  • Teachers are hungry to use technology in their classrooms. But they don’t. While part of this lack of usage stems from problems with education reform that emerges from administrators and education boards not fully understanding the technologies themselves, another part of teachers not using technology in the classroom comes from the simple fact that they don’t know how to use the technologies, let alone how to incorporate these technologies into their classrooms. In some cases, the teachers don’t know about the technologies at all.
  • How in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? (URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First )
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  • Take a minute and ask yourself what technologies you are well versed in. Have you posted to YouTube? Do you use PowerPoint to aid in your lectures? What other technologies do you use? Do you have a Twitter account? Make a list. When you have your list made, consider your colleagues. Do they know these technologies? Do they know how they can use them in the classroom? Is there a technology that you know one of your colleagues knows that you would like to be familiar with? Now, instead of waiting for somebody to put together a workshop on one of these technologies, consider creating your own workshop. Think about it. You’re a teacher. You know these technologies. Is there really a difference in teaching what you know about Google Earth to your colleagues and teaching it to your students? Within your own school you can create a technology club (much like a book club, except that instead of reading a book a month, you experiment with a technology each month). Get together as a group and discuss the technologies and how you could use these to aid your teachers. This is exactly what I’m doing with the colleagues I know are interested in using the technology but don’t know how. Sure, you may have to wait for education reform to allow you to use these technologies, but if you start using them, you can readily become one of the advocates who aids in getting the reforms to education that we need to teach these technologies to our students.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This sounds like something we could incorporate into the QEP classes/workshops that Hugh & Tom conduct. A "tech club" might even appeal to people not currently involved in QEP at this moment.
Stephanie Cooper

REACHING THE SECOND TIER: LEARNING AND TEACHING STYLES IN COLLEGE SCIENCE EDUCATION - 0 views

  • Active and Reflective Processing. Active learners tend to learn while doing something active---trying things out, bouncing ideas off others; reflective learners do much more of their processing introspectively, thinking things through before trying them out [12]. Active learners work well in groups; reflective learners prefer to work alone or in pairs. Unfortunately, most lecture classes do very little for either group: the active learners never get to do anything and the reflective learners never have time to reflect. Instead, both groups are kept busy trying to keep up with a constant barrage of verbiage, or else they are lulled into inattention by their enforced passivity. The research is quite clear on the question of active and reflective versus passive learning. In a number of studies comparing instructor-centered classes (lecture/demonstration) with student-centered classes (problem-solving/discussion), lectures were found to be marginally more effective when students were tested on short-term recall of facts but active classroom environments were superior when the criteria involved comprehension, long-term recall, general problem-solving ability, scientific attitude, and subsequent interest in the subject [15]. Substantial benefits are also cited for teaching methods that provide opportunities for reflection, such as giving students time in class to write brief summaries and formulate written questions about the material just covered [15,20].
  • reflective learners do well at individual research and design.
  • Unfortunately---in part because teachers tend to favor their own learning styles, in part because they instinctively teach the way they were taught in most college classes---the teaching style in most lecture courses tilts heavily toward the small percentage of college students who are at once intuitive, verbal, deductive, reflective and sequential. This imbalance puts a sizeable fraction of the student population at a disadvantage. Laboratory courses, being inherently sensory, visual, and active, could in principle compensate for a portion of the imbalance; however, most labs involve primarily mechanical exercises that illustrate only a minor subset of the concepts presented in lecture and seldom provide significant insights or skill development. Sensing, visual, inductive, active, and global learners thus rarely get their educational needs met in science courses.
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  • These problems could be minimized and the quality of science education significantly enhanced if instructors modified their teaching styles to accommodate the learning styles of all the students in their classes. Granted, the prospect of trying to address 32 different learning styles simultaneously in a single class might seem forbidding to most instructors; the point, however, is not to determine each student's learning style and then teach to it exclusively but simply to address each side of each learning style dimension at least some of the time. If this balance could be achieved in science courses, the students would all be taught in a manner that sometimes matches their learning styles, thereby promoting effective learning and positive attitudes toward science, and sometimes compels them to exercise and hence strengthen their less developed abilities, ultimately making them better scholars and scientists.
  • Provide time in class for students to think about the material being presented (reflective) and for active student participation (active). Occasionally pause during a lecture to allow time for thinking and formulating questions. Assign "one-minute papers" close to the end of a lecture period, having students write on index cards the most important point made in the lecture and the single most pressing unanswered question [20]. Assign brief group problem-solving exercises in class in which the students working in groups of three or four at their seats spend one or several minutes tackling any of a wide variety of questions and problems. ("Begin the solution to this problem." "Take the next step in the solution." "What's wrong with what I just wrote on the board?" "What assumptions are implicit in this result?" "Suppose you go into the laboratory, take measurements, and find that the formula we have just derived gives incorrect results: how many possible explanations can you come up with?")
  • How can an instructor do all that and still get through the syllabus? One way is to put most of the material usually written on the board in handouts, go through the handouts quickly in class, and use the considerable class time saved for activities like those just suggested. The consequent gain in quantity and quality of the resulting learning will more than compensate for the photocopying costs.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Instead of making handouts, they could put the info on the wiki: slideshow, Gdoc, etc.
Keith Hamon

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Jailbreaking Education - 0 views

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    Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.
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.
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  • 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.
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    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

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.
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  • 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.
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    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

How to Create Nonreaders - 1 views

  • have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause them to lose interest in what they’re doing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The point of a PLN is to encourage our students to write to other people (teachers too seldom qualify as other people in the minds of students).
  • every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      If we tie writing and critical thinking to grades, we will undermine both.
  • What matters is not what we teach; it’s what they learn,[14] and the probability of real learning is far higher when the students have a lot to say about both the content and the process.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The point is not to cover content, but to spark knowledge in students.
  •  
    I'd like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is "Motivating Students" by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students. … What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with:  to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people.
Stephanie Cooper

Collaboration: The Lost Skill? | Dangerously Irrelevant - 2 views

  • I have seen tweets and blog posts recently about frustration that teachers are having getting their students to collaborate. These were mainly secondary teachers and library media specialists. It was even an #EdChat topic a few weeks ago: "How do we engage students who find participatory learning uncomfortable?" What do you find most difficult when getting students to collaborate? Criticism from their peers? A bad experience with a previous teacher? It seems like there's so many factors that can come into play.
  • How are we fostering this skill beyond kindergarten? What have you found that really is motivating for students to collaborate? What gives them true ownership of their learning? There's awesome digital tools that aid in collaboration, but those tools don't MAKE the collaboration. It's a skill that still has to be fine tuned. It's a skill we should all be modeling effectively if we want our students to do it effectively. If you're looking for some great suggestions on how to foster collaboration in your classroom, I would suggest reading Michelle Bourgeois' post titled:  The Collaborative Classroom: It’s a Juggling Act. In this post Michelle tells a story of teaching students how to juggle and says. "Just like the art of juggling, there are several skills that need to be balanced and constantly monitored in a collaborative classroom to make it all come together." Please be sure to check out Michelle's post on how to monitor and keep balance of some essentials in classroom collaboration.
  • We should be fostering this skill in our classrooms, not hindering it. How often are you allowing students to collaborate? Not to say that awesome things can't come out of individual thinking, but as I always like to say, "We're better together." Sure, one mind can do awesome things, but a collective could really rock someone's world.
Keith Hamon

From Degrading to De-Grading - 0 views

  • Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they’re learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they’re also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn’t help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
  • what grades offer is spurious precision – a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation
  • Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other.  The quality of students’ thinking has been shown to depend partly on the extent to which they are permitted to learn cooperatively (Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Kohn, 1992).  Thus, the ill feelings, suspicion, and resentment generated by grades aren’t just disagreeable in their own right; they interfere with learning.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In QEP, we seek to enable students to connect to one another. Grading systems that promote competition among students tend to undermine that willingness to connect and collaborate.
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  • The competition that turns schooling into a quest for triumph and ruptures relationships among students doesn’t just happen within classrooms, of course.  The same effect is witnessed at a schoolwide level when kids are not just rated but ranked, sending the message that the point isn’t to learn, or even to perform well, but to defeat others.  Some students might be motivated to improve their class rank, but that is completely different from being motivated to understand ideas.  (Wise educators realize that it doesn’t matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated.  It is the type of motivation that counts, not the amount.)
  • Even when students arrive in high school already accustomed to grades, already primed to ask teachers, “Do we have to know this?” or “What do I have to do to get an A?”, this is a sign that something is very wrong.  It’s more an indictment of what has happened to them in the past than an argument to keep doing it in the future.
  • Research substantiates this:  when the curriculum is engaging – for example, when it involves hands-on, interactive learning activities -- students who aren’t graded at all perform just as well as those who are graded (Moeller and Reschke, 1993).
  • abolishing grades doesn’t mean eliminating the process of gathering information about student performance – and communicating that information to students and parents.  Rather, abolishing grades opens up possibilities that are far more meaningful and constructive.  These include narratives (written comments), portfolios (carefully chosen collections of students’ writings and projects that demonstrate their interests, achievement, and improvement over time),  student-led parent-teacher conferences, exhibitions and other opportunities for students to show what they can do.
  •  
    Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
  •  
    The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.
Keith Hamon

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

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    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.
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    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

Communities of practice - 0 views

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    Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
Keith Hamon

10 Tips for Successful Online Research in Adult Education - 0 views

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    The online world is vast, often making such research a time consuming drain on valuable study time. So what do you do? The following top 10 tips for successful online research below will help make time dedicated for research more efficient.
Keith Hamon

Use Diigo To Help Write Your Next College Essay or Term Paper - 0 views

  • since most research papers are based on quotes used from various sources, Diigo provides a way to not only bookmark your sources, but also to manage and access your quotes, notes, and analysis.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This post assumes that most college research papers are based on secondary sources easily found on the Internet.
  • The best way to do research is know what your thesis is for a given topic.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I'm not sure I agree. Many students start with a subject, such as gun control, but don't develop a thesis until after they have done some reading and investigation.
  • Having a thesis in mind can help you narrow research, even if you change your thesis during the process.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I do believe that students should be taught to do research after they know what they are looking for. 
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  • create a list for your topic. This list will be used to manage all your bookmarks and highlights.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Any item can be added to many lists, or more precisely, can be tagged with many items.
  • install the Diigo bookmarklet, or diigolet, in your favorite web browser
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is an essential tool for using Diigo. You can bookmark without the Diigo tool, but it is much more cumbersome to do so.
  • You might consider color coding your highlights, e.g., yellow for quotes that support your thesis, and green for quotes that are against your thesis.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Visual cues work for some people.
  • If you’re working on a group research project, Diigo can be used for the same purpose. Simply create a group for which everyone can bookmark sources to.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Diigo is a great tool for collaborative writing.
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    Diigo can be a very useful tool for helping you to write a college essay or research paper.
Keith Hamon

Critical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

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    Critical thinking can occur whenever one judges, decides, or solves a problem; in general, whenever one must figure out what to believe or what to do, and do so in a reasonable and reflective way. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening can all be done critically or uncritically. Critical thinking is crucial to becoming a close reader and a substantive writer. Expressed most generally, critical thinking is "a way of taking up the problems of life."
Stephanie Cooper

I hate writing but love to blog….why? | The Thinking Stick - 0 views

  • o why is it that I hate to write and love to blog? First, I think a lot of it has to do with the computer and word processing. As I type this in my Firefox extension Performancing every misspelled word is underlined in red for me, giving me instant feedback on what I have misspelled. Does it catch all my mistakes, heck no, but you should see a post before it actually goes live. Secondly, I can type faster then I can write…about 75 words/minute and you can actually read what I’ve written when I’m done. Finally, I don’t see blogging as writing…it’s idea generation, it’s the free flow of ideas between people and it is a conversation. I love to talk (if you have a hard time writing you usually do…coping skill). I would rather stand in front of a group of parents and give a presentation, or have a face to face parent conference than write a letter home.
  • Blogging gives me an audience, just like giving a presentation…I almost feel that way sometimes…like I’m presenting information, my thoughts rather than writing. It could be a podcast, a video, or blogging…it’s about having an audience. I wonder if I would have blogged in school, given the chance? It would have depended, I bet, on how the teacher used it as a tool. Was it a reflective journal to layout your thoughts, or did every period, capital and ‘ie, ei’ combination have to be perfect. If that was the case I’d have hated it. Blogging is different…it’s not writing in the sense we think about it. People ask me why I blog and I truly can’t give them an answer…I just do, because it’s an outlet for me. I’d bet that I’ve blogged more in the past year then I wrote my whole life leading up to it. It’s been that powerful for me as a tool, and I see it in my students as well. In myspace and youtube…this networking, conversation, sharing atmosphere is contagious!
  • I think you hit on the larger issue, though, is that blogging is much less structured (mostly) than a typical piece of writing. Blogging is much more stream-of-consciousness than writing. As I am writing this, it is a direct connection from idea to publication. I think that is the blogging revolution. I would wonder how different your post would have been, or my comment for that matter, had we outlined it before writing it.
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  • Good writing is really about good editing. Too much time in school is spent on conventions–grammar, spelling–and not on helping people find their voice. Blogging is not writing in the sense that much of blogging comes from a very authentic, unedited perspective. We say what we feel. We mean what we say. We just do not always overprocess it. We have chosen our audience by virtue of the topics and themes we choose.
  • Blogging offers realtime, real world feedback. How many people actually comment on misspellings? Who cares if I end a sentence with a preposition? Perhaps monitors in somepeople’s houses have red circles on them. People comment on the usefulness, the humour, the passion, the ideas. Call it what you will, Blogging is writing with an attitude. Yours. And yours alone. Sure someone might flame you, but you can delete their posts. Now I could proof read this. I could let it sit an daim to craft my thoughts better, but I like the rawness of this.
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    I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.
Keith Hamon

10 Jaw-Droppingly Awesome Infographics on Education | Socrato Learning Analytics Blog - 1 views

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    Infographics can change the way we learn, the way we see information put in front of us.  They help us digest that information and leads us to draw important conclusions more swiftly. After doing a little research online I was able to discover 10 gorgeous infographics on education that do more than simply show information, they relay it in a really potent and amazing way.
Keith Hamon

Andrew Cullison » Grade Student Papers Using Google Forms - 0 views

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    If you can break down what you're looking for in a good paper into a set of categories and assign a numerical value to each category, then you should definitely consider using Google Forms to help you grade. I just developed a quick and easy way to do this. Here's what I do.
Keith Hamon

Reacting to the Past: An Open Game Based Pedagogy Workshop at Duke, January 19-20 - Pro... - 1 views

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    Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to "win" the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games' time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class-read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments-but in the guise of a game.
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