How to Connect With Other Teachers in the Social Age In the 2012 Primary Sources Survey conducted by Scholastic and The Gates Foundation, teacher respondents claimed to spend only about 4% of each day collaborating with colleagues, while 44% of teachers surveyed responded that they would like that collaboration time to increase. Traditionally, the teaching profession has been an isolating one—if you’re not spending every minute at school teaching classes, tutoring during your breaks, or covering someone else’s class, then you’re likely spending that time disciplining, administrating testing, or scrambling to the microwave to reheat leftovers during your 15-minute lunch break. In addition, as state and district mandates swing from one end of the pendulum to the other, teachers are so completely overwhelmed with trying to follow all of the rules that they are left with no time to develop themselves and their practices. Feeling isolated and crunched for time used to mean that teachers weren’t able to collaborate. In Short
6 Excellent YouTube Channels Created by Inspired Teachers Outstanding Math, Science, Art, History, and Social Studies Content for Flipped, Blended, or Traditional Classrooms! A HUGE “THANKS!” to Hip Hughes, who responded to a tweet I wrote the other day seeking great YouTube channels created by teachers. He singlehandedly provided what I needed for the post I wanted to write! Check out these outstanding channels of content created by a half dozen different inspired educators. Hip Hughes CHANNEL: ABOUT: “The most important events in History explained by HipHughes, YouTube EDU Guru & TV Talking Head (History Channel/American Hero Network). Keith Hughes has taught US History and AP Government for the past 15 years as well as edu classes in New Literacy and Technology for the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo. HipHughes History is a series of upbeat, personable and educational lectures designed for students and lifelong learners. Sample Video: Beat Master Matt ABOUT: “Mr. Prof Rob Bob
Getting Technology Right in Schools – A Word with José Picardo An interview with José Picardo, Assistant Principal, exploring technology implementation at Surbiton High School ALT: What was the strategic technological framework adopted by your institution? JP: In too many schools the strategy is “we need to use more ICT” — often responding to a critical inspection. It always seems logical to pass the technology baton to ICT “experts”. ALT: What relationship needs to be adopted by developers with schools? JP: Even a marginal improvement in teachers’ understanding of the application of technology in an educational context can result in more informed choices. “Truly illuminating uses of technology are those where the technology is there, but invisible.” ALT: How might you apply a cost benefit analysis of using technology in your school? This approach is flawed because you are not comparing like for like. ALT: Are we over-thinking the role of technology in education? ALT: How can assessment bodies help schools to innovate? JP: The million dollar question.
HEROES & VILLAINS: AN ACADEMIC HONESTY AND INTEGRITY WEBSITE Read the information below first, as it will inform you of what to expect from working through this site. There are eight main sections to the site - each covering all aspects of Academic Honesty and Integrity. Each section contains information essential to your studies along with quizzes and links to other useful resources. Much of the information is downloadable as a PDF (so that you can print off and read at a time that best suits you). You can of course also save the PDF (or Word document) electronically onto your mobile device. A brief description of each section is given below it and is accompanied with direct links. ‘Academic Honesty’ and ‘Academic Integrity’ will be explored as key concepts underpinning and informing academic good practices. We explode a few myths about academic writing, for example, it is not fully true that we should never put our own ideas in our work. Instead, we recommend taking your time. Please do let us know what you think!
Five reasons why you should 'do digital' Even as digital technology becomes ever more pervasive in learning and teaching, 'I don't do digital' is still a comment we hear from teachers and staff in further education. Yet, this attitude completely overlooks all of the excellent things that can be achieved by using new technologies and systems. Here's five reasons why people should embrace digital in the classroom. New platforms for reaching learners As an educator, the learner should be at the heart of what you do. Digital actually gives teachers more opportunities than ever before to converse with and support learner development, on their terms – whether that’s through the virtual learning environment (VLE) or social media. Recent research from Jisc found that 40% of students in further and higher education were using social media to keep in touch with tutors. More engaging It's easy to blame technology if learners get distracted, but in a lot of cases it’s a conduit rather than the cause. Boosting employability More sustainable
Breaking down digital | David White I was delighted to be asked to keynote at the Designs on eLearning conference last month. It’s run by my group based at UAL and Penn State with a different host institution each year. This time it was Texas State with Claudia Roeschmann et al doing an excellent job bringing us all together. Part of my job as Head of Technology Enhanced Learning is to develop institutional strategies around digital and learning so I thought the DeL keynote would be a great chance to propose a simple way of setting out the territory: ‘Digital’ is too broad a term to be useful now but it is still an area which is ‘different’ enough in the mind of institutions to be dealt with as a distinct entity. (The term ‘mundane technology’ was brought up by Jo Morisson from UAL who pointed out that smartphones are now ‘mundane’ but are integral to students day-to-day learning and creative practices i.e. the fundamental incorporation of the digital into practice tends to be around the use of ‘boring’, not-new, tech)
Key Issues in Language Teaching #1: influences on curriculum design Professor Jack Richards joins us this week for an exciting webinar on teaching beyond the classroom – sign up here! – and over the next five days, we’ll be sharing a short series of extracts from his new book. Key Issues in Language Teaching is a comprehensive and extensively researched overview of the key issues in language teaching today, available in paperback and soon as an enhanced ebook with embedded video content. The book surveys a broad range of core topics that are essential in understanding contemporary approaches to teaching English as a second or international language, and which form the content of many professional development courses for language teachers. In this extract, Jack looks at influences on the design of language courses. Many innovations in language teaching arise from within the field of language teaching itself. Current approaches to methodology reflect many of these principles. Many countries see English as important to their economic development.
Global Connections: Powerful PD with Craig Kemp – PTE011 It’s powerful Professional Development and it’s right in the palm of your hands. Top Tips and Insights for Connecting Globally with Craig Kemp. CLICK PLAY & LISTEN NOW + SUBSCRIBE : ITUNES – RSS – STITCHER (It’s Free) Show Guest – Craig Kemp Craig Kemp I’m a Kiwi (New Zealander) living in Singapore, teaching in an Australian Curriculum School.I’m a globally connected educator and support people to do the same. Episode Summary It’s a phrase that’s often met with groans and rolls of the eyes – Professional Development. But what if you could tailor that Professional Development or PD to your circumstances – making it relevant to you and your class? And what if you had access to ongoing support and advice at any time of the day? Well that’s the situation for many educators today – as they reach out and connect with others like them across the globe. In this Episode: Why would you want to connect globally? But that’s not all. And to bring us home, Education, a Bucket and Fire. Episode Highlights
Reading List: Using Social Media for Research Collaboration and Public Engagement The bulk of discussion around why academics use social media primarily focuses on social media as a dissemination strategy to get more citations and views of scholarly articles. But social media has also opened up new and exciting ways for researchers to collaborate online. Following an exchange on Twitter, we volunteered to pull together a reading list of posts on how researchers are using social media for collaboration and public engagement purposes. Why do researchers use social media to communicate and collaborate online? Academic blogging is part of a complex online academic attention economy, leading to unprecedented readership.Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson find blogging is now part of a complex online ‘attention economy’ where social media can help your work travel further. The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? Image credit: Melissa Terras “What happens when you tweet an Open Access Paper“ How-to guides for using social media in research settings
Statistician explores how faculty can excel in blended learning environments Want to be rated an excellent instructor by your students? Facilitate learning, show respect for students and communicate well and you are virtually guaranteed to get an overall rating of excellent, irrespective of anything else. The University of Central Florida's Chuck Dziuban said this unbreakable rule is based on data mined from 1.2 million end-of-course student evaluations of their professors and instructors. If the students rate them excellent in all three of those categories, they will inevitably be rated as excellent overall. Dziuban explained this and more about today's blended learning environment in a recent speech entitled "Teaching and Learning in an Evolving Educational Environment." "Whether you call it online learning, distributed learning, hybrid learning, blended learning, lecture capture, learning in a cloud, virtual learning, MOOCs, adaptive learning — buzz words enough for you? "It changes; it morphs. At UCF, "we have 60,000 students and growing.
Copyright & Attribution – a mistake = lesson learned! Straight to the point …. We all make mistakes! Mistakes are OK, mistakes help us learn! I used an image without citing its source. Image source: Something, I am sure, we have all done! If you have been to an event or worked with me in a school, you will know that I always share other people’s resources and ideas and give them credit. Last week I missed an attribution on a quote I used in a presentation. Using others images without attribution is not OK. Here are some tips: Most importantly, remember that mistakes happen and we are all learning. Don’t be scared away from using other’s work – use the steps above to avoid any unnecessary issues. Happy sharing Craig Kemp I am a passionate New Zealand educator living in Singapore.
Flipping the flipped classroom For a while now, the paradigm of ‘flipping’ the classroom and reversing the way teachers and lecturers traditionally approach developing students knowledge has been gaining quite a lot of credence in educational circles. The flipped classroom has been made popular by Salman Khan and the Khan Academy and is based around the concept of students getting the input they would traditionally receive from the lecture or lesson in the form of videos or set texts that they study before class. Then in the classroom they do more practical work (similar to the kinds of tasks they would usually do as homework) while the teacher monitors and acts as support. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially in the traditional lecture based classroom, but for us as communicative language teachers I often wonder if this is really anything new. I’ve known teachers for years who have been setting grammar study as homework and then doing the more practical communicative tasks in the classroom.