Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn Flickr:AllHails At the star-studded Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching (HILT) event earlier this month, where professors gathered to discuss innovative strategies for learning and teaching, Harvard’s professor Eric Mazur gave a talk on the benefits of practicing peer instruction in class, rather than the traditional lecture. The idea is getting traction. By Emily Hanford, American RadioWorks It’s a typical scene: a few minutes before 11:00 on a Tuesday morning and about 200 sleepy-looking college students are taking their seats in a large lecture hall – chatting, laughing, calling out to each other across the aisles. This is an introductory chemistry class at a state university. Students in this class say the instructor is one of the best lecturers in the department. Student Marly Dainton says she doesn’t think she’ll remember much from this class. Most of the students in his lecture classes were not motivated to learn physics, and they didn’t seem to be learning much.
Where does 21st Century teaching begin? [Guest Blog] The 21st Century Teaching Project Findings (Part 2) Seann Dikkers 3/1/12 This post is part of an ongoing series abridged from the 21st Century Teaching Project (21CTP) – a study of expert professional development trajectories and digital age practice. Let’s assume that the goal of teacher training and professional development (PD) is to prepare teachers with powerful models, tools, and pedagogies that will inform expert practice over a career. If so, the 21CTP is designed to help us as a community, 1) hear from 39 award winning teachers, and 2) ask relevant questions about how to study and design teacher training and PD in the coming years. When over half of these teachers say they completely changed their practice mid-career, I’m particularly interested in what, who, and how those trajectories started. 21CTP Theme 2: Narrated Beginnings A beginning narrative explains ‘what started it all?’ Immediately, ‘best practice’ studies are designed to give indications for expanded inquiry. So what?
The Peer Instruction Method Peer Instruction Problems:Introduction to the Method Making Your Lecture More Interactive The Peer Instruction technique is a method created by Eric Mazur to help make lectures more interactive and to get students intellectually engaged with what is going on. In this method, The instructor presents students with a qualitative (usually multiple choice) question that is carefully constructed to engage student difficulties with fundamental concepts. This method, besides having the advantage of engaging the student and making the lecture more interesting to the student, has the tremendous importance of giving the instructor significant feedback about where the class is and what it knows. For more information, see Peer Instruction, Eric Mazur (Prentice Hall) Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, Edward F. Ways of Collecting Student Responses You can collect student responses in a variety of ways. Electronic Remote Answering Devices (RADs) are now conveniently and cheaply available.
Top 5 Unexpected Apps for STEM Education - StratoStar STEM Education Blog In today’s world, we use apps for everything from managing our bank accounts to expressing our thoughts via tweets, so why not use them for our STEM education projects? StratoStar has compiled a list of our top 5 favorite apps will make tracking, solving equations, and creating reports simpler. 1. This genius app focuses on mathematics, statistics, chemistry, and engineering. 2. All the core curriculum subject areas are covered by this innovative app. 3. Take advantage of this interactive periodic table. 4. Exploriments is an interactive science app that provides students with simulation-based learning units. 5. This app was made for a younger crowd, but can still be fun for all ages. The Benefits of Using Apps For Learning So why use an app? Would you like to learn more about engaging students in STEM education?
A Digital Humanities Manifesto » A Digital Humanities Manifesto [The content of the manifesto represents the view of the authors and does not claim to represent the views of UCLA, the UCLA Humanities, Division, and the Digital Humanities at UCLA.] Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated. Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core. The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Process is the new god; not product.
Flexible Opportunities Kickboard: A Data Dashboard for Teachers I chose "data" as one of the most important ed-tech trends of 2011, and it's one that continues to gain steam this year as well. But as it does so -- as education becomes increasingly "data-driven" -- there are numerous challenges and repercussions, many of which have a lot more to do with education politics than with education performance. (The release of the Teacher Data Reports in New York City is one recent example.) Part of the problem with the push to become more data-driven (and there are many problems and, I'd argue too, many benefits) is that this seems to be yet another initiative that is done to teachers and students, rather than done by or done for them. That's where Kickboard hopes to step in, making it easier for teachers to collect and analyze data from their classes -- both academic and behavioral data, in real-time not just at the end of a class period or school day. For its part, Kickboard is currently in beta in more than 70 schools.
The Ultimate STEM Guide for Kids: 239 Cool Sites this very short warning RSS is for skimming, not for keeping up with. It's a flow, not a queue. It's not an email inbox or to-do list. It's about attention. We only have so much of it. A journalist needs to have streams of reliable and fresh information about the journalist's beat and other relevant subjects. The web is the tsunami.Blogs, if you find the right ones, provide more manageable streams of information -- knowing how to find and assess blogs is a learnable skill, abetted by tools like Technorati and other blog-trackers.RSS is the filter.The sampling, however, is not automated. Getting sucked into RSS or feeling obligated to keep up with all the unread feeds that accumulate, is a common hazard -- I have to police myself, lest I spend all day following links. So part of finding, filtering, storing, and using the right information entails learning tools like Technorati, RSS, social bookmarking. This is definitely related to the mindfulness-about-laptops-in-class issue.
9 Characteristics Of 21st Century Learning The label of “21st Century learning” is vague, and is an idea that we here at TeachThought like to take a swing at as often as possible, including: –weighing the magic of technology with its incredible cost and complexity –underscoring the potential for well thought-out instructional design –considering the considerable potential of social media platforms against its apparent divergence from academic learning Some educators seek out the ideal of a 21st century learning environment constantly, while others prefer that we lose the phrase altogether, insisting that learning hasn’t changed, and good learning looks the same whether it’s the 12th or 21st century. At TeachThought, we tend towards the tech-infused model, but do spend time exploring the limits and challenges of technology, the impact of rapid technology change, and carefully considering important questions before diving in head-first. The size of the circles on the map are intended to convey priority. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.