Teacher Collaboration: When Belief Systems Collide. It's impossible to explore how we can work more effectively together in schools without considering conflict -- an inevitable part of working together. Conflict can be challenging and destructive, or it can lead to a deeper understanding between people, and perhaps higher quality work from a team. There are many reasons why conflict can exist within a school or a team of educators. In December, I attended a fantastic workshop at the annual Learning Forward conference on breaking through conflict.
It was led by Robert Garmston (co-author of Unlocking Group Potential to Improve Schools) and Jennifer Abrams (author of Having Hard Conversations). 6 Belief Systems In his book, Cognitive Coaching, Robert Garmston (with co-author Arthur Costa) identifies six predominant ideologies that influence educators' decision-making: You, Your Principal, and Your Colleagues After reading these descriptions, go back and rank them according to your personal priorities and belief systems. Maria Andersen: Where's the "Learn This" Button? Learnable Programming. Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming? Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types. Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning: Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill.
Thus, the goals of a programming system should be: to support and encourage powerful ways of thinkingto enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. Alan Perlis wrote, "To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program. " How do we get people to understand programming? We change programming. Contents A programming system has two parts. The language should provide: Wait. More than child’s play: Games have potential learning and assessment tools. Google Course Builder will catalogue and deliver the world's educational content.
Following hot on the heels of Stanford's announcement that it would be taking on iTunes U with its own free course software, Google has just released a new "Course Builder" tool. Following a trial course in July that saw 155,000 registered students (with 20,000 completing it), the search giant has bundled the technologies used into an open source package available to anyone here. The tool includes all of the formalities you would expect from a full educational course, including a registration process and schedule alongside certificates and the standard content repository that you would expect.
Unlike services like iTunes U, the result is much more holistic -- this feels less like a way for a casual user to "play along" with the real course taking place at a university and more like a dedicated service in itself. Interestingly, Stanford also features as one of the first organisations said to be "considering how this experimental technology might work". Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects | Online Learning | HYBRID PEDAGOGY. This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context.
Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam. Like a photograph, a moment in a video, a discussion prompt. The problem is that learning cannot be reduced to “testable reusable units of cognition.”
A proactive (not reactionary) approach to digital pedagogy sees learning as irreducible to 1s and 0s and engages learners as more than mere columns in a spreadsheet. Shortly after “Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera” appeared on Hybrid Pedagogy, Sean received a message from Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity. A Better Way to Teach? Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item.
For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor. The research, appearing online today in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.
“It’s almost certainly the case that lectures have been ineffective for centuries. Come the Revolution. Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school. “I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”
Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. Guide to Open Learning. ABSTRACT: This document is an introduction to Open Learning. It examines briefly what "Open" means and the different facets of the open movement and what "Learning" means and how it is different for every person. Attention is brought to the issue of the digital divide and ways to reduce or eliminate barriers to education. We look at how to get started with Open Learning if you are fortunate enough to have access to the technologies, and possible ways of obtaining access if you don't. We then go over how to map out a personalized learning strategy that works for you. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ^ Issac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
" To define Open Learning is a challenge in itself. Open Learning is a system that aims to eliminate or greatly lower barriers to use, extraction, and reuse of knowledge. Start Working in the Open! ^ "Learning is growing new structure in the brain. Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey | Education. April 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot. " Similar defunding is under way nationwide.
Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects – and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12. The EPI study reviews the consequences of the transformation of the economy a generation ago from domestic production to financialization and offshoring. Why The Next Big Ideas In Education Will Come Out Of New Orleans. Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places. It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring. Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy. An Explainer Post There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes -- "How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education" -- as do the responses I've seen to the article.
As usual, there's plenty of praise for Sal Khan and his one-man-educational-video-making machine. But there's also push-back from some quarters, particularly from educators who are highly skeptical of what Khan Academy delivers and what it stands for. That dichotomy says it all, right? Technology Replacing Teachers If one person can create 2400 educational videos and these videos can in turn be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection then why do we need teachers? While "technology will replace teachers" seems like a silly argument to make, one need only look at the state of most school budgets and know that something's got to give. The Bill Gates Connection "Retain qualified people.
" What does all of this have to do with Sal Khan? Old Wine, New Bottles, Bad Pedagogy. Report: School turnaround mostly failing in Wash. The federal school turnaround program is mostly failing in Washington state, even though teachers and administrators are trying their best to make a difference for kids, according to a report issued Thursday by education researchers at the University of Washington. The federal government is spending more than $3 billion nationwide to help districts turn around their worst-performing schools. Washington school districts are failing to make aggressive reforms with their more than $50 million share of the money, researchers from UW's Center on Reinventing Public Education say. Teachers are working very hard but their efforts are mostly wasted because the districts don't have a good plan, said Sarah Yatsko, a UW research analyst and lead author of the study. She said part of the problem is that districts were rushed into reform by the federal government.
Another issue is the hodgepodge approach they are taking. "We've got the money. Online: Tinkering Toward Transformation: S Education Arcade Uses Online Gaming to Teach Science. Science teacher. Bennett. Seattle University | Seattle U teacher honored for innovation. Originally published November 17, 2011 at 12:03 AM | Page modified November 17, 2011 at 11:18 AM Fourteen years ago, Vicky Minderhout did something very radical for a university professor: She set aside her biochemistry-lecture notes, moved away from the lectern and began teaching from the center of the classroom.
She wanted to coach her students at Seattle University to think about how biochemistry works, to puzzle their way through the structures of proteins and work out the functions of carbohydrates. She wanted them to discover answers for themselves. "I view it as a coaching role," Minderhout said. "We're really trying to coach thinking. " Today, Minderhout, 61, is being honored as Washington's professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in recognition of her student-centered method of teaching science.
Minderhout never gave a lecture, and her small-group work "was really good for building critical-thinking skills," Ryskalczyk said. Filling in gaps. Critical & Creative Education. Why Education Needs to Get Its Game On. Gerard LaFond is the VP of marketing for Pearson’s College and Career Readiness division and the co-founder of Persuasive Games. He’s currently working on the gamification of education through the Pearson start-up, Alleyoop. Kids spend hours a day on sites like Facebook and YouTube. They play highly immersive video games, watch engrossing shows on their HDTVs and interact with apps on their mobile devices. All of this is in stark contrast to how they spend their days at school, where educators lecture and write on blackboards, then ask kids to read boring textbooks and practice abstract skills or memorize obscure facts. The cycle of lecture, test and repeat is not the best way to engage kids. In fact, it might be the best way to alienate them.
We are wasting the huge opportunity offered by technology to engage and immerse kids in curiosity-based learning and discovery. SEE ALSO: 4 Excellent Indie Games With Real Educational Value The Freedom to Fail in a Safe Environment. The Case for the Virtual Classroom. Online education is often dismissed as a pipeline for expensive degrees of little value and a sponge for veterans’ tuition payments. But while it’s true that for-profit universities have made a hefty business out of e-learning, it’s becoming apparent that learning online can also benefit almost everyone else. “It’s very clear that five years from now, on the web, for free…you will be able to find the greatest lectures in the world on the web,” Bill Gates recently predicted in an interview at Techonomy 2010. Gates is not the only smart guy pulling for online education to extend the reach, affordability, and even quality of education. Here’s why the virtual classroom counts deans of prestigious universities, entrepreneurs, and people who want to change the world as its advocates. 1.
This July, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's business school will enroll the first students of its online MBA program. According to the U.S. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. More Education Resources from Mashable: Social Media in Education. Noriko Hara - Homepage. Gates to help schools adopt common core standards. Think You're An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely : Shots - Health Blog. iStockphoto.com We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement. But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths? Several psychologists say education could use some "evidence-based" teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use "evidence-based medicine.
" Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented. In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory.
Youth Joblessness Creates Ripple Effect. Roger Schank Homepage. 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning. How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education | Magazine. Yes, The Khan Academy IS the Future of Education (video.