Group items tagged

"writing-intensive" (WI) classes have in general found that what you write is what you learn best.

Over the last three years, the staff at the Mānoa Writing Program has interviewed nearly 200 students about their experiences in WI classes. In this issue, we focus on what most students tell us is a key to making writing matter: a well-constructed writing assignment.

In trying to answer these (and similar) questions when you give your students writing assignments, you may be taking important steps in helping your students to write and learn more effectively.    

Reading and writing gave me skills to create with and to act on the world... through assignments like these I was learning how to marshal evidence and frame an argument. And I was also becoming more adept at handling a sentence, folding information onto it, making a complex point without losing the reader. These skills played out again and again on different topics and in different settings, leading to the ability to write a research article, a memo advocating a course of action, a newspaper opinion piece, an essay like the present one... All of the forgoing helped me develop a sense of myself as knowledgeable and capable of using what I know. This is a lovely and powerful quality-- cognitive, emotional, and existential all in one. It has to do with identity and agency, with how we define ourselves, not only in matters academic but also in the way we interact with others and with institutions. It has to do with how we move through our economic and civic lives. Education gave me the competence and confidence to independently seek out information and make decisions, to advocate for myself and my parents and those I taught, to probe political issues, to resist simple answers to messy social problems, to assume that I could figure things out and act on what I learned. In a sense, this was the best training I could have gotten for vocation and citizenship.

Ask students to reflect on their writing habits and process.

Ask students to tell you about their regular or most significant interactions with technology

ongoing reflection on the writing students do, a process that will keep you informed about the writers you teach.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.

we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and learning through pull, rather than scaling efficiency through push. We call it the "collaboration curve."

The evidence for the collaboration curve is, as yet, mostly anecdotal.