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A slideshow about open educational resources and what that means.

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.

Here are a few suggestions both for the bigger picture and for the apps you can use that can help you ensure a school year that's both academically satisfying and technologically savvy.

An ongoing debate has ensued around the status of George Siemens' (2004) connectivism theory and Stephen Downes' (2006) connected knowledge theory as learning theories for the network age (Kop & Hill, 2008).

A survey of 1,000 educators to learn their awareness of and use of social media.

There are as many reasons to teach as there are reasons to learn.  One reason item-response testing (the twentieth-century's dominant method of testing) is so deficient is that it tends to reduce what we teach to content (especially in the human, social, and natural sciences) or calculation (in the computational sciences).  Think of the myriad ways of knowing, making, playing, imagining, and thinking that are not encompassed by content or calculation.  This semester, I've moved over to highly experimental, collaborative, peer-led methods in my two undergraduate classes

This project seeks to explore how "Reacting" might be employed as an alternative approach to fulfill the broader objectives of a liberal arts education.  The success of the "Reacting" pedagogy in engaging undergraduate students has been confirmed by faculty reports, student evaluations and formal double-blind assessment studies (Stroessner, 2009).  The latter studies show that "Reacting" students, when compared with those enrolled in other general education courses, improved in certain salient categories associated with learning, including the development of an appreciation of multiple points of view on controversial topics and a belief in the malleability of human characteristics over time and across contexts.  Speaking skills also improved substantially.

Students learned more than twice as much in the new "interactive" classes than they did in the lectures by the tenured prof with more than 30 years of experience, according to a report on the experiment to be published in the journal Science on Friday.

structuring learning experiences around frustration/reward dynamics can lead to engaged learners.

The tools we discuss below can be embedded into any open source LMS and down the road we plan to revisit other platforms.

Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

This wiki is a collaborative learning space. If you want to contribute to this e-portfolio or digital portfolio page, please join the wiki and then add your thoughts, your notes or describe how you created digital portfolios for your students.

This year, as an Instructional Coach, I've had the pleasure of assisting 4 teachers and 100 5th graders in their own blogging journey. This time as a writer myself. What a difference that has made! We are now working on the same playing field and truly learning from each other and each living our motto inspired by Seth Godin and Angela Maiers: We are geniuses and the world demands our contribution!

Writing in math is an excellent way to determine if students' understand or do not understand the math they are learning about. Allowing students to explain how they solved a math problem, how they developed a formula to solve a problem, or how they applied a math concept requires critical thinking.

Current practices of our educational institutions-and workplaces-are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.

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.

I suspect that many of us ask students to do some kind of writing in class: whether reflecting on the day's topic, responding to a brief prompt, or outlining their ideas. I include those kinds of writing-to-learn activities in my classes as well.

So what happens between the end of that two-course sequence and the start of the rest of those students' college careers? If pressed I would offer a hypothesis or two: In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors' expectations are, and A different issue is whether or not the student understands the course material: a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.