Connected Learning: Tying Student Passions to School Subjects. Big Ideas Teaching Strategies Quest to Learn By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine. While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. “It’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.”
Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. Related. Can Twitter open up a new space for learning, teaching and thinking? | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. At the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of around 500 followers. It may have been the first time Twitter was used to deliver higher education, and given recent debate about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education?
Last month we put together an experiment that tested these limits, using a bespoke hashtag to bring together all of the content. Running a seminar in Twitter might sound like a relatively simple exercise: ensure students have devices through which to tweet, then position your visiting professor – aka Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland – in front of his computer and let rip, but there was a bit of prep time involved too. Is there something to gain by being 'alone together', as MIT's Sherry Turkle would say? Did it work? Three pros: Three cons: How Code.org’s ‘Learn To Code’ Video Starring Zuck And Gates Surpassed 12M Views In 2 Weeks. You probably wouldn’t exactly expect a short film about computer programming to be a blockbuster hit, but that’s exactly what’s happened with the ‘Learn To Code’ short film that computer science non-profit Code.org debuted last month.
The film, which is in both five minute and nine minute versions and was directed by famed documentary producer Lesley Chilcott, features Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Drew Houston, Tony Hsieh, Miami Heat player Chris Bosh, and others talking about how knowing to code has brought them the success they have today. According to numbers released today, Code.org’s film has been viewed well over 12 million times in the two weeks since it was released. And the response was incredible particularly in the first several days, noted investor and Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi tells me. Putting A/B testing to work How did it get so much traction? Another very unconventional tactic was A/B testing the film itself. Bigger goals ahead. Collaborative learning and creative collaboration. Collaboration in practice and content is increasingly accepted as a component of forward-looking educational thinking. In this session on the last day of ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2012, the presenters took a broad look at how the use of digital technologies supports creative collaboration, including examples which illustrate how content and collaborative practice change education for the Arts.
By Abe Pazos Sarah Eagle, from the University of Bristol, started by presenting examples of learning that involve collaboration and creativity. She described how a successful scientific team worked smoothly together, never really needing to explain matters to each other, because they had developed short-hands in communication. However, “by bringing somebody else in from a completely different discipline, they had to start explaining things. Eagle continued detailing the results of two different CoCreat projects, whose objective is to enable creative collaboration through supportive technologies. Controlling Social Media: Current Policy Trends in K-12 Education. Social Networking | Viewpoint Controlling Social Media: Current Policy Trends in K-12 Education As social media becomes ubiquitous, schools and districts should shift from trying to control its use and toward teaching faculty and students how to build successful learning communities.
As school boards address the overall challenge of social media use within schools, they should focus on the reality that the impact no longer lies only on the individual and local schools. Social networks include students and teachers all over the world and, therefore, teaching and coaching on digital literacy for teachers and students is where the focus should rest. Knowing how to build successful communities of learning and how to integrate social connectivity within a learning environment is a much more needed outcome than finding a way to control and monitor specific users and content. The issues of the uses of social media in schools are multifaceted. Apple co-founder Wozniak discusses importance of self-learning and mobile in letter to student.
Local teens use social media to mentor students in Chicago. Education & Social Media: Another Frontier? » Washington DC. The Power of Social Media to Engage Students Online. Teachers should want to be where students are engaging. Today that means being online, said Lisa Nielsen, New York City Department of Education’s director of digital literacy and citizenship. Nielsen is also the brain behind the Innovative Educator blog and co-author of “Teaching Generation Text.” When Nielsen looks back on her school days, she remembers being a good student, but she also remembers just not being that into it.
What was going in the classroom really didn’t connect to what was going on in life, she said. With social media, teachers today have a chance to break through to students like Nielsen used to be. Technology allows teachers to show how what students are learning — saying and writing well — connects to things students care about and gives kids a chance to make a mark on the world. “I have always been really interested in giving kids a real voice in this world,” Nielsen said. Technology has made reaching that real audience on real topics even easier. Testing students during video lectures improves learning.
In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs), through the likes of Coursera, have attracted hundreds of thousands of students from across the world. Many teachers are using a "flipped" classroom model, where students take lectures through videos at their convenience and spend the time in class delving into issues they don't understand. But are they really improving learning? The evidence is not fully convincing. A 2010 meta-analysis of the literature on online teaching by the US Department of Education revealed that there are only "modest benefits" to online learning compared to classroom learning, but more rigorous studies were needed. After all, ease of access to the learning material comes with a bundle of distractions only a single click away.
Not surprisingly, studies have shown that students suffer from attention lapses when learning through videos. Given those findings, an improvement in students' attentiveness is bound to pay significant dividends. The Right to Thrive: Connected Learning at the Digital Edge. A few months ago, I interviewed a former high school teacher and asked him what his hope was for the digital media and learning community in 2013. His answer: to push for a stronger focus on schools. “Students are in schools from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm everyday. Think about how much time that is. Do we want students to get more of the same, or should we give them a transformational education for the 21st century?” For an entire school year, Alexander Cho and a group of researchers immersed themselves in the trenches of a majority-minority high school in Austin, Texas, looking to unearth the possibilities of connected learning in a school setting.
A lot of time and money has been spent throwing technology and media at under-resourced schools. Something that is sound-bitable and repeatable is, “Yes, there are all these kids and they are so disadvantaged. One of the fundamental assertions of our project is that connected learning will always take place.