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Stephanie Cooper

Our obligation to prepare students for what is and will be, not what was | Dangerously ... - 1 views

  • What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.
  • You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).
  • In my recent experience of integrating technology into my classroom, I’ve found that the mode of communication changes but several elements of classroom do not change.
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  • What stays the same is the need students have to be engaged as active learners, not passive receptacles. (That’s an old, old idea that still sticks like tar in the minds of too many teachers.) Technology provides ways for students to enrich even the most elaborate and complex presentation a teacher can provide.
  • I guess the bottom line is this: If the content they are expected to learn is not interesting to them, they are not engaged. If they are not being asked to think critically in their learning, they are not engaged. It wont matter what tools or technology you use. However, today’s technology resources are available 24/7 and allow us to reach and engage students in ways we never could before. This is paying off big-time at my school.
Keith Hamon

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 0 views

  • The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Creativity is key to success in 21st Century, but are we creating opportunities for creativity in our classrooms?
  • The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Problem-based learning matches QEP's emphasis on moving content-delivery out of the classroom to replace it with classroom activities that apply the content to problem solving and critical thinking.
  • The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Creative problem-solving? Is creativity a part of critical thinking? What's the benefit in separating them?
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    What's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
Stephanie Cooper

A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • I developed a simple 5-point scale, which rates each post according to the level of critical thinking and engagement displayed in the post. The rubric is quick and easy and in roughly 1–2 minutes I know what to rate any given blog post:
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is a good example of a rubric for evaluating posts. Notice that the prof is placing emphasis on critical thinking and engagement - 2 of our QEP priorities!
  • gideonburton - September 27, 2010 at 12:13 pm
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      I also like the way this prof evaluates the blog as a whole.
Keith Hamon

The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. Developing 21st century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
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    Through surveys, interactive brainstorming sessions, and a final community vote, the EDUCAUSE community identified their top five challenges in teaching and learning with technology.
Keith Hamon

12 Expert Twitter Tips for the Classroom: Social Networking Classroom Activities That E... - 1 views

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    Using twitter in the classroom is becoming mainstream in many schools around the country and world. The challenge with any use of online education technology tool is the appropriate engagement of students in a meaningful manner.
Keith Hamon

"The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation" - 1 views

  • privacy in an era of social media is complicated. It’s not simply about individual data.  It's about managing visibility, negotiating networks, and facing an ever-increasing flow of information.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Social networks have highlighted the complexity of privacy, which is no longer a personal, individual issue (an issue of protecting personal data); rather, privacy is now an issue of the appropriate, value-added interplay between an individual and her environment. I think privacy has always been the negotiation of this interplay, but social networks have made it obvious.
  • Privacy is fundamentally about both context and networks.
  • People may not like having their privacy violated or being in situations where they're being surveilled, but they will always choose social status and community over privacy.  They would rather be vulnerable to more people and deal with institutions than to feel disconnected from their peers and loved ones.
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  • Participation in Facebook is not as much of an individual choice as people think.  Even if you opt out, people can still write about you, can still create groups about you, can still reference you in updates.  You become part of the network regardless of your personal choices.
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    I'm completely baffled by the persistent assumption that social norms around privacy have radically changed because of social media. This rhetoric is pervasive and is often used to justify privacy invasions.  There is little doubt that the Internet is restructuring social interactions, but there is no radical shift in social norms because of social media.  Teenagers care _deeply_ about privacy.  But they also want to participate in public life and they're trying to find ways to have both.  Privacy is far from dead but it is definitely in a state of flux.
Keith Hamon

"Fresh Thinking" in General Education | Reacting to the Past - 0 views

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    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.
Keith Hamon

Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of ... - 0 views

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    Academics have held the online, user-written reference work in some disdain, said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University, "but now I'm hearing nothing but enthusiasm, and I really think this is going to work." Ms. Banaji, the association's president, has put the prestige of a leading scholarly group-and her own name-behind the project, which involves a new interface custom-designed to make encyclopedia entries easier to write and edit, a nascent social network that links scholars who share interests, and tutorials for professors on ways to make writing for Wikipedia part of course assignments.
Keith Hamon

AJET 27(2) Guo and Stevens (2011) - Factors influencing perceived usefulness of wikis f... - 0 views

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    This study reports the findings of an investigation of the factors influencing the use and usefulness of wikis in an introductory, undergraduate information systems course. Informed by the media choice, technology acceptance model from information systems research, and group collaborative learning research from the education literature, a survey instrument was developed and administered across the entire course. The study found that wiki use was influenced by the student's prior expertise with wikis, with their perceived usefulness of wikis being strongly influenced by their teachers' attitudes towards the technology, and the ease of access to the wikis. The students' overall attitude towards wikis was largely influenced by the extent to which they saw wikis as helping with their assignment work, and their intention to use wikis in the future was driven by their perception of wiki's usefulness. The paper concludes with an outline of the lessons learned from the study and recommendations for instructors who are thinking of using wikis in their teaching.
Keith Hamon

The Necessity of Funding Failure | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • The moral is that these scientists weren’t producing better research because they were smarter or more creative or had more money. Instead, they had more success because they were more willing to fail.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      These scientists both failed and succeeded at a higher rate than the other group because they were given space to play in. How do we create those spaces in our classrooms? I think games and free, non-graded writing help.
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    A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. … The data was clear: In every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative and influential research.
Keith Hamon

Frontal Cortex | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

  • Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This suggests one of the strengths of reflective writing & ungraded writing: a space where people can be free to fail without a grade penalty and then reflect on that failure and learn from it. This works very much against our usual drive to transfer the "right answer" to our students.
  • The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Let's find ways to reward those who are willing to stretch into failure and then learn from those experiments-NOT those who seek only the safe, sure answer.
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    The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
Keith Hamon

From Groups to Teams: The Key to Powering up PBL | Edutopia - 1 views

  • 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.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Team ethic is key to successful collaboration.
  • Use a solid, detailed collaboration and teamwork rubric
  • Distinguish working groups from teams.
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  • Help students focus on the core element that distinguishes a group from a team: The commitment to each other’s success.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We don't teach students how to identify & capitalize upon the different strengths they each bring to a team.
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    PBL is still kind of a cool way to address standards and, too often these days, is simply coverage by another name. But its ultimate benefit is to help students think, learn, and operate in the new century by challenging them at deeper levels. That requires reversing the equation between skills and content: PBL is method for teaching students to find, process, understand, and share information, not a way to extend the industrial landscape of regurgitation and recall.
Mary Ann Scott

Materials for Faculty: Methods: Syllabus and Assignment Design - 0 views

  • Are your goals for the course significantly content-directed?
  • Is one of the goals of your course to introduce students to the important research and writing conventions of your particular discipline?
  • Is the primary purpose of your course to improve your students' critical thinking skills?
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  • Professors who don't use writing prompts argue that an important part of scholarship is learning to raise questions that will yield a good academic argument
  • Whatever you decide, do note that a prompt-less writing assignment needs a good infrastructure in order to succeed
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      a "good infrastructure" is essential in any assignment, not just English/Composition assignments.
  • Consider what you want the assignment to do, in terms of the larger thematic goals of your course.
  • Consider what kinds of thinking you want students to do
  • your prompt should address the importance of context and suggest things that you want students to consider as they write
  • Provide context
  • Break the assignment down into specific tasks
  • Break the assignment down into specific questions
  • Craft each sentence carefully
  • Be clear about what you don't want
  • Be clear about the paper requirements
  • Try to write (or at least to outline) the assignment yourself
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      While this can't be done for all assignments, choosing a few pivotal moments to model for your students will have a significant impact on how they learn overall.
  • Discuss the assignment with the class
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    Some excellent questions for building an assignment. Look beyond the writing assignment pedagogy to the general aspects of any assignment.
Keith Hamon

The Writers' Workshop at Work - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • When I run a workshop, no one—including me—is allowed to say "I want" about someone else's writing. It's not about what you want. That might be an entirely different essay. It's about what the writer is trying to do and how you can help.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      So why don't we evaluate student writing this way? To begin with, why don't we create writing opportunities that encourage students to want to say something, and then give them feedback that teases out what they want to say and helps them say that? 
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    I think the writers' workshop is an appropriate model for academics who want to make their manuscripts better. Creative writers have been "workshopping" each other's stuff for a long time. The workshop model can lead to tears, to bruised egos, and, occasionally, to black eyes. But the right group can produce better work.
Stephanie Cooper

The e-Portfolio story - Tales from the magic wand - 0 views

  • Students revisit the framework several times throughout their program and use artifacts from their evidence collection to demonstrate learning. Justification for their selection is part of the task and engages students in reasoning about the alignment of evidence with particular indicators. This is coupled with a reflective writing task that asks students to discuss their growth in each of the domains (and over time). This is the central task of many teacher education programs that require e-portfolios.
  • I am drawn to the notion of having students participate in a professional discourse community that interacts around entries and artifacts, which both contributes to their thinking and learning about what it means to be a professional in their chosen field, as well as allows them to monitor their learning over time.
Keith Hamon

How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education | Magazine - 0 views

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    Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She's now on her way to "flipping" the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids' own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It's when they're doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.
Keith Hamon

Videos of 'Teaching students to write mathematics' | Mathematical Sciences HE Curriculu... - 1 views

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    Students don't write mathematics correctly. They throw down a mess of symbols with the answer underlined at the bottom and rely on the examiner's intelligence to get the marks. Teaching them to write in a more orderly and logical way has numerous advantages: it makes marking easier; allows students to demonstrate understanding (or not); forces an improvement in their thinking skills. Expressing their ideas clearly and correctly is a valuable skill for graduates in further study, employment and life in general.
Keith Hamon

Flipping The Classroom… A Goldmine of Research and Resources To Keep You On Y... - 4 views

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    If you are beginning to investigate what a Flipped Classroom is, with the thought of possibly trying some kind of Flip yourself… then this is also the right place. I have researched and tried to find you the very best resources to get educators in all positions thinking about what a Flipped Classroom" really is"? I know that if you take a look at the resources provided you will walk away with a better understanding, and a well thought out implementation.
Stephanie Cooper

Looking for "Flippable" Moments | Flip It Consulting - 0 views

  • For me, the FLIP is when you “Focus on your Learners by Involving them in the Process”
  • This is the moment when you stop talking at your learners and “flip” the work to them instead.  This is the moment when you allow them to struggle, ask questions, solve problems and do the “heavy lifting” required to learn the material.
  • Students can look up the content on their own and find the answer to a question within a matter of seconds.  What they can’t always do on their own is analyze, synthesize, and experience the process of engaging in higher levels of critical thinking. This is when they need to do the messy work of learning, evaluating, and critiquing. This is when they need your structure and guidance, but not your answers. They have to make meaning for themselves. This is a “flippable moment.”
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is what Oprah would call an "aha" moment.  I've always wondered EXACTLY how to utilize the lecture-free time during class.  This puts it into perspective.
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    Great advice and tips for using the "Flipped" model
Keith Hamon

Make students curators - 0 views

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    Strategies for using student curation in the classroom.
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