Becoming an Unteacher: Do the Unexpected I had the pleasure of seeing Jeremy K. Macdonald’s Soiree of Slides at the Instructional Technology Strategies Conference this past weekend . . . a beautiful five minutes. His message was that as teachers, we learn to do the expected. Jeremy’s Follow-Up Jeremy reported what happened next via his blog post #Unexpected. My student was at school today. My Own Doing the Unexpected: A Peak Experience I had a similar experience with 8 year old Sherry a while back. Sherry was a tough little third grader in my counseling group at a local elementary school. Sherry loved coming to the group, but was especially defiant this day – I wasn’t feeling so patient, tolerant, or compassionate on this day. I was ready to make the adult-in-charge-type-statement. I did the unexpected . . . Like this: Like Loading...
7 Top Tips to Attract EdTech Twitter Followers Eager to get involved in the thriving and enriching EdTech Twitter community? Take advantage of these top tips to help you bag a host of followers in no time! 1. Promote Yourself Remember, when they first come across you on Twitter, all other users have to go on when deciding whether or not to follow you is your brief profile description. Avoid the temptation to make a sarcastic or witty comment and focus on getting across the main points about your interests and expertise – let them know why you’re worth following and what you’ll be tweeting about. 2. Getting involved in a particular Twitter community means putting your ear to the ground and immersing yourself thoroughly in the trending topics and important issues being discussed. 3. A great way to ensure that you are ‘on trend’ is to keep up to date with some of the education technology community’s most popular hashtags. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Study Links Academic Setbacks to Middle School Transition Published Online: November 28, 2011 Published in Print: November 28, 2011, as Learning Declines Linked to Moving to Middle School Includes correction(s): March 24, 2012 While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students’ transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school. The study , part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University, found that students moving from grade 5 into middle school show a “sharp drop” in math and language arts achievement in the transition year that plagues them as far out as 10th grade, even risking thwarting their ability to graduate from high school and go on to college. “I don’t see eliminating the transition at the high school level as important or beneficial as eliminating the transition at the middle school level,” said Martin R. Mr. Losing Their Edge For the Florida study, Mr.
Top 10 Social & Mobile Educational Games That Make You Smarter The Hague, The Netherlands (PRWEB) September 12, 2012 Gramble’s mission statement is ‘to make the world a better place through social gaming’, so it’s no surprise that Gramble has an interest in educational games. “Gaming can be productive, educational, and time well spent,” says Gramble CEO and co-founder Adam Palmer. “We all know students will spend many hours on their devices playing games anyway, so we are happy to offer some ideas for games that are not only fun but can also help make you a little smarter.” Here’s Gramble’s top-ten list of social and mobile games to learn from: 1- Apparatus (Engineering/Math/Problem Solving) Using the laws of mechanics, players build complex machines to perform simple tasks. 2- Words with Friends (English/Grammar/Spelling) Players take turns forming words horizontally or vertically on a Scrabble-like board trying to score as many points as possible for each word. 9- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? About Gramble
Mass customization in education Seth Godin and Ken Robinson have again taken schools to task for their industrial model of educating students, complaining that we are turning out robots and fail to encourage the natural creativity and problem-solving abilities of every student. Read Godin and watch Robinson. It's hard to disagree with anything about which they pontificate. What neither acknowledge, however, are the benefits that mass production have brought to society - the affordability of more goods for people at a wider range of economic levels. Mass producing cars, washing machines and blue jeans essentially made these items sufficiently inexpensive that almost everyone could purchase them. So too with education. Public schools were (are) designed to be economically efficient enough to provide a basic education for everyone. What Godin and Robinson argue for is an individualized education for every child. At one time, Levis had a website to which one could submit one's physical measurements.
TeacherTube - Teach the World Community Forums Perhaps the larger questions are these: 1. To what extent are teachers selected into teaching based on their lack of critical thinking abilities? 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. If the ability to teach something to someone depends on possessing that something to a high degree, then it is vital that teachers have high degrees of critical thinking ability. if this is true, however, the only fix (if we care to fix it) is to create a system that selects differently -- and hope we can find enough different people to select. It's not the old saw that "you get what you pay for." At the same time, to nurture a national teaching corps with higher degrees of critical thinking ability would require not only a complete overhaul of teacher training, selection, and retention. Critical thinking may be best thought of as "evaluative thinking" or the ability to understand what is good, bad, right, or wrong about an idea or situation. Steve Peha
50 Free Collaboration Tools That Are Awesome for Education April 7th, 2010 Whether you are looking for tools that can bring a distance education class together or tools to help students and teachers in traditional classrooms working on group projects, the following collaboration tools will help with any need. From group papers to file sharing to group communication, the following tools will help bring any educational group together seamlessly to produce awesome results. Group Projects and Papers When working on group projects or research papers, these tools make collaboration a breeze. Nicenet. Discussion Groups and Communication Don’t let a little thing like distance stop your group or class from communicating. MemberHub. Research, Note Taking, and File Sharing Share your research, notetaking, and files with these great tools. CiteULike. Social Networking Social networking provides an opportunity for students and teachers to connect beyond the classroom walls in new and innovative ways. ePals. Wikis and Blogs Wikispaces. Task Management
The Procrastinating Caveman: What Human Evolution Teaches Us About Why We Put Off Work and How to Stop July 10th, 2011 · 63 comments Survivor: Paleolithic Edition Rewind time 100,000 years ago: several different species of humans co-exist on earth.There was, of course, our own species, Homo sapien, but we were joined by our more athletic siblings from the Tree of Life, Homo erectus, who had left Africa and colonized Asia long before we ventured beyond the mother continent, all the while another sibling, the stocky Neanderthal, was hunkered down in a European ice age. Advance another 90,000 years, however, and our species is the only game left in town. Scientists have worked hard to figure out why we survived while other early humans did not. The Planning Edge “The most obvious answer [to the question of Homo sapiens’ survival] is that we had bigger brains,” explains paleoanthropologist John Shea, in a recent article from BBC News. Complex planning is a subtle skill: it requires you to both conceive of future steps and evaluate whether these steps are a good idea. Let me flesh this out.
HarlemCam : I want this book... Harvard Education Letter Students in Hayley Dupuy’s sixth-grade science class at the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., are beginning a unit on plate tectonics. In small groups, they are producing their own questions, quickly, one after another: What are plate tectonics? How fast do plates move? Why do plates move? Do plates affect temperature? What animals can sense the plates moving? Far from Palo Alto, in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Mass., Sharif Muhammad’s students at the Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA) have a strikingly similar experience. These two students—one in Palo Alto, the other in Roxbury—are discovering something that may seem obvious: When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own. The origins of the QFT can be traced back 20 years to a dropout prevention program for the city of Lawrence, Mass., that was funded by the Annie E.
5 Uses of Augmented Reality in Education Last week I mentioned augmented reality during a presentation and I could tell from the looks on some people's faces that augmented reality was a new thing to them. That's not uncommon. Sometimes when people hear "augmented reality" their minds drift to some vision of a science fiction world. Here are five potential uses of augmented reality in education today. Create 3D, augmented reality stories with ZooBurst. The Getty Museum offers a neat way to view art through augmented reality. Fetch! Spacecraft 3D is a free iPad app produced by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Star & Planet Finder enables you to locate the planets and stars in the night sky through your iPhone or iPad.