Learning Initiative (ELI. Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education. Kaneb Center @ ND. NspireD2 blog. Eight strategies for using blogs in a course. Flickr photo by Florian Leroy I have probably already shared that I am a blog convert. Originally unimpressed with the power of this medium, I have grown over time to value its place in the technology toolbox. Blogs provide an easy way to compose an ongoing series of writings and receive comments on them, while at the same time publishing a customized basic website with pages of static content.
Like my former self, most people have a preconceived list of circumstances under which they believe blogs may be valuable – and in some cases that list is pretty short. This article aims to help folks broaden that list. Strategies for using blogs in a course Academic reflection – students react to readings, in a sort of online “book club.” Surely there are many additional good ideas and examples. NOTE: This post coincides with a session I am presenting at Notre Dame, “Blogs for Teaching.”
Additional resources. Study connects Twitter and Engagement. A new study found that students who used Twitter over the course of a semester to contribute to class discussion and complete assignments became more than twice as engaged in class as a control group.
Reynol Junco, who conducted the research at Lock Haven University, has spent years exploring student use of technology. The results the current study will soon be published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. I am not a regular “tweeter,” but many of my colleagues use Twitter effectively to share ideas, websites, articles, and products they like. You may remember an article here a year ago about Digital Humanities Now, an excellent website that merges and distills thousands of tweets into a meta-blog.
As with any tool, Twitter can be used well or poorly. If you are not sure what Twitter is or how you would use it, try watching Twitter in Plain English at YouTube. Learn more: WCYDWT. “What Can You Do With This?”
(WCYDWT) is a concept promoted by math teacher Dan Meyer. The 11-minute video below gives you an introduction. Meyer talks about TV producer David Milch, who believes that watching too many sitcoms has shaped our brains to expect simple problems. If things don’t wrap up in 22 minutes plus three commercial breaks we experience “impatience with irresolution.” Meyer believes math textbooks too often take a compelling question and pave a smooth, straight path to the answer. For Meyer, digital images and video are key components to introducing real-world problems. All of that is fine for teaching math and other STEM fields — what about the humanities? More: Like this: Like Loading... Related Wiper blades and learning. Dy/dan. Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover.
What can you do with this? 2016 Aug 6.
Here is video of this task structure implemented with elementary students. 2013 May 14. Here’s a brief series on how to teach with three-act math tasks. It includes video. 2013 Apr 12. Storytelling gives us a framework for certain mathematical tasks that is both prescriptive enough to be useful and flexible enough to be usable. Act One Introduce the central conflict of your story/task clearly, visually, viscerally, using as few words as possible. With Jaws your first act looks something like this: The visual is clear. With math, your first act looks something like this: The visual is clear. Leave no one out of your first act. Act Two The protagonist/student overcomes obstacles, looks for resources, and develops new tools. Before he resolves his largest conflict, Luke Skywalker resolves a lot of smaller ones – find a pilot, find a ship, find the princess, get the Death Star plans back to the Rebellion, etc.
So it is with your second act. What tools do they have already? Act Three. Review of Pearltrees. Pearltrees is where social bookmarking and concept mapping meet – a cross between Diigo and MindManager.
The product of a French company, Pearltrees is a social curation community – a place where you can organize, discover and share stuff you like on the web. The tool has been well received; 15 months after launch it had amassed more than 100,000 users and reached 10,000,000 page views per month. I created a Pearltrees account and set up a “tree” of things I am currently working on. I installed a Chrome add-on that let me easily turn a website into a “pearl” without leaving the page.
I then periodically returned to the tree in order to group my pearls. You can embed a tree on a normal web page, but not on a WordPress.com blog, like this one. I looked for related trees to connect to mine, and found that someone had added a couple of my blog posts to her tree. At first I wondered how the trees were being matched up; it didn’t seem like I had much in common with my “related” items. Learning Tech Lab @ ND.