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Stephanie Cooper

Techniques for Creative Thinking - 1 views

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    Link thrown out during an Edfutures podcast
Keith Hamon

Warning: Flipping Your Classroom May Lead to Increased Student Understanding | Teaching... - 1 views

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    Flipping a classroom is not a teaching technique, it is more in line with a philosophy or way of teaching. It involves using technology as a tool, not the main focus, for helping students increase their understanding of science or math concepts.
Keith Hamon

Usual Visual Thinking in the Classroom - Derek Bruff - 0 views

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    I recently put together a workshop on using visual thinking techniques in the classroom for a group of graduate students at my teaching center.
Keith Hamon

YouTube - Scott Moore : Using Technology and Collaboration to Engage Students (Part 1) - 1 views

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    Nice video that explores many of the techniques we use in QEP to promote student connectivity, PLNs, and collaboration.
Keith Hamon

How Thumbs Can Facilitate Discussion in the Classroom - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of H... - 0 views

  • “Okay, show me with your thumbs what your opinion is of the draft in front of you. Thumbs up? Thumbs down?”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is similar to Facebook or Amazon ratings of items, crowd-sourcing assessment.
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    A simple thumbs-up/down technique for peer assessment.
Keith Hamon

How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture - Teaching - The Chron... - 2 views

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    As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or listening to podcasts.
Keith Hamon

Eric Mazur on new interactive teaching techniques | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2012 - 1 views

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    This innovative style of learning grew into "peer instruction" or "interactive learning," a pedagogical method that has spread far beyond physics and taken root on campuses nationally. Last year, Mazur gave nearly 100 lectures on the subject at venues all around the world. (His 1997 book Peer Instruction is a user's manual; a 2007 DVD, Interactive Teaching, produced by Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, illustrates the method in detail.)
Stephanie Cooper

Learning through Reflection - 1 views

  • Strategies for Fostering Reflection Hatton and Smith (1995) reported four activites that in in the process of reflection: Action Research Projects Case and cultural studies Practical experiences Structured curriculum tasks: Reading fiction and non-fiction Oral interviews Writing tasks such as narratives, biographies, reflective essays, and keeping journals. However, although these strategies have the potential to encourage reflection, there is little research evidence to show that this is actually being achieved. Obviously "fact" questions do not promote reflection (e.g., What are the functional areas of an air base?). But posing hypothetical situations produced similarly disappointing results (e.g., Assume you have inherited a significant sum of money and wish to buy land in an environmentally sensitive area on which to build. What factors will go into your decision and why?). In contrast, the most successful probe asked learners to write a one page letter to a parent, sibling or other significant person in their lives.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      These are great ideas for creating opportunities for reflective practices into discussion questions and outside research.
  • Extending evaluative feedback might have even more powerful effects. Providing probes may cause the learner to continue to think about the topic, such as: "Have you thought about how a skilled operator might do this?" "But how much does safety really get compromised when you don't use safety shoes?" Pointing out other possibilities may also result in additional thinking about relationships among factors not previously considered, such as:  "Another factor you might consider is how many different tools will be required if you use different size bolts in the design?" "But what if the rate of water flow is doubled?" Although such feedback may be provided via written comments, they are probably most powerful when used interactively in interpersonal dialogue. Carrying on a dialogue with one or more learners about the work they have submitted is probably the ultimate in promoting reflection via feedback. But the logistics of doing so and having discussion leaders who are skilled in the content and possess good interpersonal skills may be beyond the capacity of the system to provide; unless it is computer mediated in some way. Other hints for encouraging reflection include: Seek alternatives. View from various perspectives. Seek the framework, theoretical basis, underlying rationale (of behaviors, methods, techniques, programs). Compare and contrast. Put into different/varied contexts. Ask "what if. . . ?" Consider consequences.
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    This may be  useful for the Reflective Practices literacy workshop.
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.
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    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.
Thomas Clancy

Critical Thinking: What Is It, Anyway? - 1 views

  • The ability to think critically is arguably the most important skill for the 21st century person.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Well, critical thinking is one of five writing literacies taught in QEP classes. Is it the most important?
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      Indeed, we are all about including the five "literacies" in our writing opportunities, even though, technically, "literacy" cannot be pluralized!
  • Instead of using the Five W’s for developing content (they’re the basics for writing a successful news piece), use the Five W’s to analyze any post/piece of writing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a nice technique to add to the QEP toolbox, and has a dual use for both writing and reading. Keep in mind that QEP should also address reading, as Tom points out to us.
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    critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.
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    critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.
Keith Hamon

Can We Teach Creative and Critical Thinking? - Education - GOOD - 1 views

  • Critical thinking is, among many things, the ability to understand and apply the abstract, the ability to infer and to meaningfully investigate. It’s the skills needed to see parallels, comprehend intersections, identify problems, and develop sustainable solutions.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We have not adequately accounted for abstraction in our discussions of CT or investigation. I wonder if CT is such a large, amorphous category as to be almost meaningless? Perhaps not, but it is clear to me that almost every discussion of CT must begin with a clear delineation of just what we mean when we say critical thinking.
  • sound critical thinking is imperative to social progress.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This social imperative is somewhat troubling to me. Is not good critical thinking its own reward?
  • Cultivating critical thinking may be accomplished with modeling
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Modeling is a promising technique, but how often do teachers expose their own thinking processes to students? Don't we usually let them see only the polished final product of our thought, and not the messy critical thinking we went through prior to our polished position?
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  • School trips, service learning requirements, and various other kinds of hands-on situations allow students to make connections at their own pace
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Nice methods that change the complexion of the typical classroom from one of content-delivery to content application.
  • teachers suggest, and insist, that students investigate further, making—but more importantly, justifying—inferences and conclusions.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Is it not obvious how the focus on the "right answer" undermines this willingness to explore? Why would most students expend any energy on an issue when they already have the answer that will be on the test, the "correct answer"?
  • It’s hard to design test questions that effectively measure a child’s ability think creatively.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Note the writer's confusion of critical thinking and creative thinking. Are they usually confused? Should they be? Is there any advantage to distinguishing between them?
  • At the heart of teaching critical and creative thought is the ability to ask the right questions to students. In turn, they need to be able answer in a way that demonstrates their ability to see the parallels and intersections;
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This kind of open-ended discussion and work in class is key to the QEP classroom.
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    But how is creative or critical thought defined and taught? And by what assessment can we measure it, if at all?
Keith Hamon

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert | The Awl - 0 views

  • If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Collaboration is one of the key principles of connectivism: we must connect to collaborate, and we must collaborate to connect.
  • McLuhan drew from many, many sources in order to develop these ideas; the work of Canadian political economist and media theorist Harold Innis was instrumental for him. Innis's technique, like McLuhan's, forswears the building up of a convincing argument, or any attempt at "proof," instead gathering in a ton of disparate ideas from different disciplines that might seem irreconcilable at first; yet considering them together results in a shifted perspective, and a cascade of new insights.
  • Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an "authoritative" decision, you're given the means for rolling your own.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Again, we are forced to consider the implications of collaborative thinking in "an extended polylogue" on our traditional notions of critical thinking and reflective practices.
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  • The threat to Britannica from Wikipedia is not a matter of dueling methods of providing information. Wikipedia, if it works better than Britannica, threatens not only its authority as a source of information, but also the theory of knowledge on which Britannica is founded. On Wikipedia "the author" is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking. "Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Shirkey is often insightful.
  • If my point of view needn't immediately eradicate yours—if we are having not a contest but an ongoing comparison, whether in politics, art or literary criticism, if "knowledge" is and will remain provisional (and we could put a huge shout-out to Rorty here, if we had the space and the breath) what would this mean to the quality of our discourse, or to the subsequent character and quality of "understanding"?
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a nice summary of Morin's concept of the dialogic, the fact of knowledge as always the tension between chaos and order, truth and lie.
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    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.
Keith Hamon

10 Unique Lesson Ideas for BYOD and BYOT | Getting Smart - 3 views

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    "Bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own technology (BYOT) policies are growing in education and the workplace. Teachers are taking advantage of mobile devices for "m-learning,""
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    These techniques can provide lots of access points to information.
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