5 Great Sites for Student Collaboration. The education technology revolution has been fantastic in helping teachers get closer to students and communicate with them better, but another commonly overlooked benefit has been its ability to get students collaborating successfully and productively with one another. Check out these great tools for electronic student collaboration… 1. Debate Graph This fantastic tool enables students to participate in exciting, illuminating collaborative debate or group brainstorming.
Students can work together to build graphs and visual representations of complex topics and arguments, creating subject-maps and spider graphs to clearly show different contributors’ ideas and input. 2. This great online collaborative tool enables students to have instant, shared web-meetings where documents can be shared and pored over together no matter where participants are, as long as they each have a computer and a web connection. 3. 4. 5. What are your favourite sites for helping student collaboration online? Office of High Ability Education. What if Learners Bartered for Instruction? Background In the June issue of Edudemic Magazine for iPad (which we hope is available sometime next week), we talk about the notion of evolving currencies.
As technology evolves living patterns change–and vice versa. These kinds of changes impact a range of societal factors. Your mom starts using facebook, she gets more opportunities to see pictures of grandchildren, but perhaps seems less likely to call or physically stop by in lieu. Smartphones and GPS devices mean fewer people buy maps or stop and ask for directions, which impact sales at the local 7 Elevens. And so on. As “things” change, new “things” become valuable.
And new currencies yield new opportunities for exchange. Trading Ideas What if–in pursuit of learning–hobbies, expertise, and original thinking were currency? What if you traded one idea for another? What kind of impact might this have not simply on learner engagement and accountability, but more importantly how community members interact with one another?
How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. For example, in his State of the Union address this year, President Obama cited a recent high-profile study to support his emphasis on evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores. The study purportedly shows that students with teachers who raise their standardized test scores are “more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods and save more for retirement.” Beware the journalistically exciting result. How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved. Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.
10 Common Core Resources. Tools for the Common Core Standards. Phil Daro, Bill McCallum, Jason Zimba A Grecian urn You have just purchased an expensive Grecian urn and asked the dealer to ship it to your house. He picks up a hammer, shatters it into pieces, and explains that he will send one piece a day in an envelope for the next year. You object; he says “don’t worry, I’ll make sure that you get every single piece, and the markings are clear, so you’ll be able to glue them all back together. I’ve got it covered.” Absurd, no? But this is the way many school systems require teachers to deliver mathematics to their students; one piece (i.e. one standard) at a time.
In the Common Core State Standards, individual statements of what students are expected to understand and be able to do are embedded within domain headings and cluster headings designed to convey the structure of the subject. Standards for a Grecian Urn The analogy with the urn only goes so far; the Standards are a policy document, after all, not a work of art. Like this: Like Loading... Wondering About Common Core and Complex Text? - Common Core State Standards TOOLBOX.
"A lot of reading skills students can apply with a simple text, but can't do so much with a challenging text. "- Dr. Timothy Shanahan Blocked from YouTube? No problem. Watch this video on...SchoolTube: Watch Now >>TeacherTube: Watch Now >> Does the information in this chart* cause you concern? *CCSS Appendix A: CCSS Lexile Bands How will you help ALL of your students access the required complex text?
You may be thinking, why should I give my struggling readers such difficult text when I know they can’t read it? In a blog post from this summer, Dr. So why is the common core making such a big deal out of having kids read hard text? You can view the summary or download the ACT report right here. Watch Dr. Dr. Www.mhecommoncoretoolboxtn.com.
Complex Text. Literacy.