Experimenting fearlessly is an important step in redesigning education and encouraging the development of 21st century skills.
Clay Burell is Korea's best kept secret, asking provocative questions about the changing nature of schooling. Jenny Luca is an Aussie dynamo, encouraging teachers to create meaningful service learning projects. Kevin Jarrett runs one of the most inventive elementary-level computer labs in New Jersey.
Wouldn't young adults truly prepared for the 21st century have experience using computers to learn with—rather than simply about—the world
Don't today's 12-year-olds need to recognize that future coworkers are just as likely to live on the other side of the world as on the other side of town?
This is a great point which is why worldwide collaboration in education is so important to pursue and engage in.
no one has taught them about the power of these connections
few are using those networks to pursue meaningful personal growth
Consider the potential: Students from different countries can explore global challenges together. Small cohorts of motivated kids can conduct studies of topics with deep personal meaning to them. Experts can "visit" classrooms thousands of miles away.
When does this education begin? Or, does it matter? The impulse of typing the "emotion of the moment" overides what the adolescent brain has been taught.
each conversation includes opportunities for students to ask questions and feel a push against their preconceived notions.
This sounds like such an awesome opportunity to encourage students to defend their thinking (which is something we want them to do) in a form where it doesn't feel like a teacher assignment
I began using discussion tools like VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com) to create electronic forums for my students to interact with peers around classroom content—with extraordinary results
Why twitter? Aren't there other forums to find this same information?
Clay Burell
our students have no trouble connecting, but no one has taught them about the power of these connections. Although tweens and teens may be comfortable using digital tools to build networks, few are using those networks to pursue meaningful personal growth. Our challenge as teachers is to identify ways that students can use these tools for learning.
This points to the fact that we must teach students about digital citizenship. They are creating their own rules in these online environments. They need some direction to cut down on the terrible negative sides of online life.
What if we build time into the daily classroom routine for checking and interacting with our digigal relationships. Teachers would visit their professional learning communities and students would do the same. This could be a once a week activity, or every day...
The key to becoming an effective 21st century instructor is to become an efficient 21st century learner.
Wouldn't young adults truly prepared for the 21st century have experience using computers to learn with—rather than simply about—the world?
This is exactly what I've been saying in my blog posts...
Once you've taken your digital plunge, share with students how the digital connections you engage in enhance your skills and deepen your knowledge. Model learning transparently.
I wish I had the time to keep up with all the sites out there! I remember when we first showed VoiceThread - kids loved it. Now, they are more familiar and not as excited because they use it elsewhere, which is wonderful, but requires me to keep up on the "newer" options.
Am I ready to be tethered to my phone even more than I am?
Then start by following some of the good education blogs written by teachers. Many of these are listed in the Support Blogging wiki (http://supportblogging.com) and on my list of resources (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841).
"Here are the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013 - the results of the 7th Annual Learning Tools Survey - as voted for by over 500 learning professionals worldwide. (Released 30 September 201s)
"A learning tool is a tool for your own personal or professional learning or one you use for teaching or training."
Here is a summary presentation of the Top 100 Tools and beneath it the text list. Click the name of the tool to find out more about it, its cost, availability, its past rankings and to read some of the comments from those who voted for it. "
The American Press Institute is making a number of recommendations to newspapers to create successful new models, and their number one suggestion is:
BECOME PART OF THE SOCIAL WEB. Newspaper executives should take it as a personal and professional challenge to participate in social media: Share photos and video online. Follow industry experts on Twitter. Create a Facebook or LinkedIn profile. This is extremely valuable market research. Learn all you can.
Harvard's collections are the product of more than three centuries of decisions encompassing every imaginable thematic interest. The contours of these collections also, inevitably, reflect an evolving understanding of what academic libraries are expected to acquire-at one point the basic books that any educated person would have at his command; more recently a broadening array of resources, in all formats, to support an inclusive community's discipline-based inquiries. Libraries at other colleges and universities have of course pursued similar goals. Harvard, however, is unique for the duration of its efforts, and also unusual in having consistently anticipated scholarly needs by documenting emerging social, intellectual, and political trends. A host of distinctive collections, and the uniquely rich sum of these parts, are a visible result.
What I would look for is a learning experience where the learner is propelled by continually encountering barriers, asking questions, coming to understand the barriers, and solving his or her way through them.
Inquiry-based research is so important to create a personal investment by the student in the process.
The learning experience compels a personal investment by the learner and contributes to the learner’s identity. The learning work should result in value, either value to the learner (increased self-value) or in an end product that is of value to others.
Life in the 21st century provides a whole new world of opportunities for self-directed, passion-driven, personalized learning. Educators who are ready to move on from teaching the way they were taught, and have administrators who will let them, can begin supporting students using tools and strategies available to the 21st century learner.
"Anthropology professor Michael Wesch has the awesome job of studying YouTube and thinking about what it all means. We asked him to curate a playlist of his favorite videos, and he came back with an impressive list of clips that exemplify how the "wonderfully playful participatory culture" you've created manifests itself on YouTube. Four of those videos are on our homepage today, but he also wrote this thoughtful blog post to accompany his picks. Reading it, you'll get a sense of how a single video or person can create a ripple that swells into something so much bigger than ourselves."
The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?
IfItWereMyHome.com is your gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use our country comparison tool to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. Start by selecting a region to compare on the map to the right, and begin your exploration.
You can also use our visualization tool to help understand the impact of a disaster. The Pakistan Flood and BP Oil Spill are currently featured. Check out the individual pages to gain some perspective on these awful tragedies.
Summer has officially started for many of you! I know that you will probably be relaxing for the first few days, but eventually you may feel the need to be inspired and motivated for the upcoming school year! Social media provides us with incredible opportunities to choose the way we want to develop professionally. You can choose the topic, the medium, and who you want to learn from. You can choose the way you like to learn, because social media provides us with several multimedia experiences, such as webinars, LMS, live video, and more. The experience is usually dynamic and motivating because you are learning with others around the world! Additionally, you will be developing your Personal/ Passionate Learning Network (PLN).
I sort of model this when I give exemplars for projects in which writing in their own words is part of a rubric. I'm not sure that is enough, however. I think maybe my writing doesn't sound enough like their writing in all cases
This instruction should focus on the supposedly simple technique of summarizing sources, which is in truth not simple. Many students are far from competent at summarizing an argument— and students who cannot summarize are the students most likely to plagiarize.
This strikes me as someting teachers in many learning areas could work on with kids rather than defaulting to Language Arts as the place where kids learn about plagiarism
The teacher in this tale uses the incident to teach students that using others' words without attribution is a serious crime. He then emphasizes to students the importance of citation and source integration techniques and enlists the school librarian to model how to cite outside works used in a piece of writing.
I'm not sure that I see the evil/missteps in this example. It doesn't say the student was punished it says the teacher & librarian used it as an opportunity to teach about proper attribution...
Educators should also communicate why writing is important. Through writing, people learn, communicate with one another, and discover and establish their own authority and identity.
Being able to write about things that you are passionate about will bring even more importance to students' writing.
it is easy for well-intentioned students to overlook the boundaries between what they themselves have produced and what they have slid from one screen (their Internet browser) to another (their word-processed document)
She begins by explaining that inserting synonyms is not paraphrasing. She then guides students in studying a passage and identifying its key words and main ideas that must be retained to paraphrase the passage. Shirley shows her students poor paraphrases of the passage for them to critique. Finally, she has them write their own paraphrase of a 50- to 100-word source passage that they themselves choose.