Group items tagged

Expecting students to write in our classrooms for hit-or-miss praise is criminal. Their nimble fingers can text an entire piece of writing via their mobile device to a relevant audience online at the same time they publish to a worldwide network. For them, the pay is in the joy of publication, in the act of making their work known, and of partaking of the work of others.

Take advantage of over 20 digital tools for students (Sidebar #2 - Digital Tools for Students).

You can easily transition from notes and highlights kept in Diigo.com social bookmarking tool to a written piece that appropriately cites content. Check Sidebar #3 for Electronic Citation Resources.

As an early assignment, a facilitator might ask the group to vote on a question, to introduce themselves to the rest of the group, or provide a link to resources they’ve found useful in the past.

The first threaded discussions might evolve from simple polls into exercises where you ask learners to rank choices in the order of their preference and explain the reasons for their choice. Later, you might ask participants to divide into groups (or they might naturally divide into groups on their own) to argue the pros and cons of a particular situation. You can ask specific members to pose questions to the group, submit blog entries, or edit wiki entries for accuracy.

Scoring is a motivator because it provides users with feedback. If your learning environment doesn’t include a scoring strategy, look for ways to help the members of the community notice and appreciate one another’s contributions.

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.

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

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.

Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school. Google Scholar. Use this specialized Google search to get results from scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, and academic publishers. Use Google Earth’s Sky feature. Take a look at the night sky straight from your computer when you use this feature. Open your browser with iGoogle. Set up an iGoogle page and make it your homepage to have ready access to news stories, your Google calendar, blogs you follow in Google Reader, and much more. Stay current with Google News. Like an electronic clearinghouse for news, Google News brings headlines from news sources around the world to help you stay current without much effort. Create a Google Custom Search Engine. On your own or in collaboration with other students, put together an awesome project like one of the examples provided that can be used by many. Collect research notes with Google Notebook. Use this simple note-taking tool to collect your research for a paper or project. Make a study group with Google Groups. Google Groups allows you to communicate and collaborate in groups, so take this option to set up a study group that doesn’t have to meet face-to-face. Google Code University. Visit this Google site to have access to Creative Commons-licensed content to help you learn more about computer science. Study the oceans with Google Earth 5. Google Earth 5 provides information on the ocean floor and surface with data from marine experts, including shipwrecks in 3D. Learn what experts have to say. Explore Knol to find out what experts have to say on a wide range of topics. If you are an expert, write your own Knol, too.

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.

identifying something people believe in and inviting them to talk to each other. You don’t create the interest, you create the platform

The better you get to know and like your fellow members, and the more you care about their opinion of you, the more you participate and thus work towards a successful goal.

designing your community that reflects both the common interest and the individual contributions as equals.

PBL teachers need a set of tools that establish a team ethic. They also need to set aside time for this during a project and before a project.

Use a solid, detailed collaboration and teamwork rubric

Distinguish working groups from teams.

As new technologies take us through major transformations in the way we use documents, it becomes increasingly important to look beyond the conduit image. We need to see the way documents have served not simply to write, but also to underwrite social interactions; not simply to communicate, but also to coordinate social practices.

Printed documents, Anderson maintains, were essential to replacing the ideology of sovereigns and subjects by creating the idea of a self-constructed society built around shared ideals and shared practices.

Anderson calls the resulting community an "imagined" one. This is no slight. An imagined community is quite distinct from an imaginary community. It is one, Anderson notes, whose members "will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Where an imaginary community does not exist, an imagined one exists on too large a scale to be known in any other way. And the central way they can be imagined is through the documents they share.

new research suggests that even before 2-year-olds speak in full sentences, they are able to understand grammatical construction and use it to make sense of what they hear.