The Flipped Classroom: Turning the Traditional Classroom on its Head. 3 tips for teachers new to Twitter SmartBlogs. A colleague who knows that Twitter is my favorite social space stuck her head in my room the other day with a complaint. “Bill, Twitter’s not working for me. No one ever replies to any of my questions. What’s the point of posting if no one is ever listening?” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Anyone who has taken the digital leap into the Twitterstream has felt lost and unloved at some point in their early work to use the short messaging service as a learning tool. Having heard that Twitter makes it possible to instantly connect with really bright people, new users expect more than Twitter gives in the first few months — and that simple truth leads to a wasteland of discarded accounts.
To convince similarly frustrated peers to give Twitter another chance, I always offer three bits of advice: 1. Educators have embraced hashtags — unique identifiers that start with the # sign — as a way to efficiently share information with each other. 2. I probably should have known better, right? 3. Three Essential Shifts in Learning. I recently asked a group of middle school students to name their favorite use of technology for learning. An eager eighth-grade girl said, “My work has gotten so much better since we started using Facebook to do homework at night in my math class.
We’re all online together, so if I have questions, I get them answered while doing my homework, instead of the next day or even later. Sometimes my friends even explain the math better than the teacher, and we send each other links to stuff online.” Wanting to learn more, I asked her which teacher had set up the group. Her face turned horrorstruck, and she said, “You’re not going to tell our teacher, are you?” Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of education in the 21st century: a student describing her most powerful learning experience—and begging me not to tell her teacher about it.
Three Shifts Scratch the surface of this anecdote and it reveals several essential shifts in the way we think about learning. One Last Shift. Blogging is the New Persuasive Essay. Teaching Strategies thinkstock By Shelley Wright As an English teacher, I’ve had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. I spend three years teaching my high school students how to write a persuasive essay.
Part of the problem is that our current school systems — and not just in Canada — aren’t great at producing independent thinkers. I love writing essays. So for three years, I write for them, and with them. The truth is lately I’ve come to question the point of much of this. While traditional essay writing may not help alleviate this situation, I think blogging can. For one, the paragraphing is different. Instead, blog paragraphs tend to be shorter. Sometimes a paragraph is one simple sentence, used for emphasis. Another thing is the thesis statement. Blogging also requires a different voice. Truth is, I love writing essays. The solution? Related. QR codes and documenting brilliant learning. One of the most powerful influences on a student’s passion for learning is how others notice their efforts.
To notice what they have done; the hard work, the progress made, the energy used, the mistakes learnt. This is going to be my number one priority to work on developing this year. I have always been a teacher who gets ridiculously enthused about what students are capable of creating (I am an Art teacher after all), but apart from letters home, praise in lessons for genuine hard work and creativity and displaying of work in it’s most traditional form, I don’t exactly push the boat out. The passion which students have to develop, improve, to search for greatness can be seen as an intrinsic quality. A fixed mindset; where people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. Do our schools make students believe that through determination anything is possible? So here is an idea for celebrating and archiving brilliant learning. Now.. So. Developing the growth mindset in schools. There is often an uneven balance between lessons which provide a platform for instruction and information, and allowing students to explore the characteristics of the mindset needed to be an expert in a subject.
The ability to notice, analyse and record are a group of skills which feed into many subject areas. In my subject, Art, the key skill of the artist is to notice. Notice the contour of shapes, the subtle nuances in colour, the way light affects a subject. Think of Monet’s fascination with light. As a student, the teaching I received in Art was superficial. We had 2 to 3 hours to work on this. Week after week, we turned our drawings round and there would be 20 or so strong, confident and fairly accurate drawings and then my, well.. Interviews for universities were coming up fast and I knew how important life drawing was seen by the colleges I wanted to apply for.
An artist has the ability to notice. Now, back to the growth Mindset bit. Author: Pete Jones. Computer programming and the trouble with collective nostalgia. Lord Puttnam said something every interesting at an E-Learning Foundation Conference. Having been a film producer, he said that up to about ten years ago, to be a successful cinematographer you had to be able to take a camera apart and put it together. Now, none of those sort of skills are required: you need a whole different set of skills in order to find employment in that occupation.
I believe a similar thing is true in the realm of “digital education”. Almost nobody needs a gasp of computer programming, and even fewer need to know how computers actually work. You don't need to know how it works Now, if you’re talking about computational thinking, to use the Royal Society’s term (Shut Down or Restart?) , as a reason to study Computer Science, that’s different: “Computational thinking” offers insightful ways to view how information operates in many natural and engineered systems. There is currently a sort of collective nostalgia for the time when you had to do real programming. 12 signs your tech leadership is obsolescent. ...soft skills are hard and hard skills can be outsourced.Nathan Mielke The adjective obsolescent refers to the process of passing out of use or usefulness -- becoming obsolete. The adjective obsolete means no longer in use--outmoded in design, style, or construction. (about.com) If a person became a technology director before about 1995, he/she probably came up through the teaching ranks.
Being able to manage the Novell server took precedence over being able to help teachers use an Apple IIe with students. I sense another change in the technology director hiring practices is overdue. Anyway, here are few ways to know if your school's technology leadership may be past its expiration date. 12 signs your technology leadership is obsolescent*: Your district still uses school-based Exchange or Groupwise servers for e-mail. Your district's tech budget does not include funds for staff development. To a degree we are all obsolescent. See also: COSN's Framework of Essential Skills for the K-12 CTO. 10 Reasons Teachers should give Twitter a go.
If you can’t decide whether or not to give Twitter a go, here are some ideas to sway you. I’m pretty biased as I’m lucky enough to interact with thousands of teachers who find twitter invaluable – maybe one day you will too. If you’d like to learn more, you’ll find lots of useful information on my Twitter for Teachers page. There’s a fantastic exchange of ideas This has to be the number one reason for teachers to tweet. My timeline is constantly filled with fantastic links and ideas. A huge number of resources and relevant blog posts are shared every day and there are always plenty of interesting education based conversations to join in too.
It breaks down social barriers One of the things I’ve found most refreshing about Twitter is how it puts everyone on the same level. You can find the information you need fast If you’re struggling with something, anything, Twitter can help you. You can get input from all over the globe It keeps you up to date You can ask all those silly questions. Digital literacy case study: 'We have to nurture our talent' Josh Pickett had a problem: his teacher couldn't mark his homework. The cause of the problem: his teacher, who had set his Information and Communication Technology (ICT) class the challenge of "design and create a multimedia product", had expected people to come up with a PowerPoint presentation. Pickett, by contrast, designed, coded and built an iPhone app, using Apple's Objective-C programming language – which the teacher installed on his own iPhone and played with. And then the teacher failed Pickett, then 13, on his assessment.
Why? Because although he and the rest of the IT staff at the school who had tried it loved it, the teacher "didn't understand how it worked. So he couldn't assess it," Pickett, now 16, recalls. "I argued the case and managed to scrape a pass by teaching him the basics of Objective-C from scratch, and by commenting [adding explanations to] every single line of code I wrote – all 3,400 lines. " As he notes, doing that ended up being a "huge time sink".