A presentation about Pappas' ideas about integrating reflective practices into education.

Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning - patterns, connections and progress. Likewise teachers and principals need encouragement and opportunities to think more reflectively about their craft.  In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection." - modeled on Bloom's approach.

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.

When Jason B. Jones wrote about "Gamifying Homework" in November, I felt inspired to try something new with one of my courses this spring. As an avid World of Warcraft player used to completing silly tasks for nothing more than a badge of completion, I definitely believe that motivation through achievements and other rewards systems works. But implementing these types of elements in a class can be a challenge.

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

zanran is a search engine for data.

Open source textbooks for K12.

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!

This page contains tutorials for using Google tools.

A simple thumbs-up/down technique for peer assessment.

What is it about connectivism that stirs up such strong emotion? In my experience it has now been strongly attacked in public at least twice - the first during CCK08 by Catherine Fitzpatrick - who voiced her objections in no uncertain terms and more recently by Marielle Lange in Wikipedia. Perhaps the interesting thing about both these instances is that they end up as personal attacks on Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Why?

Basically, creative commons licensing provides the creator with a way from an "all rights reserved" model to a "some rights reserved" model on copyrighted material.

Students around the world are increasingly bringing their own mini-computers (or some connected device) to class. Whether this creates a distraction or a boon to learning is debatable, but these four uses of mobile phones in education - and countless others - could one day help prove the latter.

I used Google Docs Forms to structure an in-class peer review workshop.

Several of the most prominent words are included in the title for this blog post. While the word cloud did not write the title for me, it helped me identify important elements from my post and served as an ideal starting point for creating an interesting and informative title for potential readers.

It's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you? Well, if you want to spruce up your documents, blog posts, and presentations, there are some free tools online that can help.

Although wikis, with their collaborative approach and vast reach online, have been around for at least 15 years, their use as a general teaching tool in higher education is still relatively recent. But an increasing number of universities are now adopting them as a teaching tool. As part of that trend, a handful of Singapore universities are using the wiki platform as a way to engage students.

Tagging allows you to find content in other blogs that matches yours and possibly can provide you with additional insights and information about a subject area you are passionate about. But tagging can also serve a very valuable service for faculty using blogs as a class assignment. If your students are writing individual blogs for a class assignment/project, you can ask them to identify their blog posts with a specific tag, such as your name course name and section number.