Live Training – Search Education – Google With these webinars, you can improve your own search skills and learn how to bring search literacy to your school. Browse the archive of past trainings, and make sure to follow us on Google+ to stay up to speed on the latest tips and trainings from Google. Even better search results: Getting to know Google search for education Google makes it simple to find the information you need, but there are strategies for finding higher quality sources even more easily. Power searching: Advanced Google search for education When you realize that the information you want will be a presentation or PDF, what can you do? Beyond the First Five Links Looking for new ways to motivate students to look beyond the first five links in a search engine? Modern search literacy: Leveraging literacies to get the most from popular tools Once you've run your search, how do you interpret your results for the highest impact? Sensemaking: Organizing information to gain better understanding Writing Successful Queries Pt.
Hacking the Classroom: Beyond Design Thinking Design Thinking is trending is some educational circles. Edutopia recently ran a design thinking for educators workshop and I attended two great workshops at SXSWedu 2013 on Design Thinking: Design Thinking is a great skill for students to acquire as part of their education. But it is one process like the problem-solving model or the scientific method. As a step-by-step process, it becomes type of box. Sometimes we need to go beyond that box; step outside of the box. Design Thinking Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand ( As a further explanation of this process, here is an exercise by the d.School about how to re-design a wallet using the design process. “What does it take to create education in this age of imagination?” Hacking the World
Ten Secrets To Surviving As A Teacher Ten Secrets To Surviving As A Teacher by Terry Heick Surviving as a teacher isn’t easy. Between the sheer work load, diversity of tasks, brutal pace, and seemingly divergent initiatives pulling you in a thousand directions, education can break even the most noble spirits. 1. 2. 3. 4. If you have to move mountains to extract and implement data you’re going to fail. 5. Be yourself, not “a teacher.” Make trying new things a habit. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Only it’s not. Whether you view your job as taskmaster, inspirer of lifelong learning, or somewhere in between, your job is to bring learners to content. To survive as a teacher, you have to constantly find ways to make content fresh, exciting, and literally life-altering. And that’s teaching in a nutshell.
How-to Remain Relevant in Higher Ed with ‘Active Learning’ Active learning…. the topic frequently polarizes faculty. Active learning has attracted strong advocates … looking for alternatives to traditional teaching methods, while skeptical faculty regard active learning as another in a long line of educational fads.” (Prince, 2004) Is active learning a fad? Flipping the classroom, peer teaching and collaborative learning are active learning methods that appear to be ‘in’ right now. What is Active Learning? Yet the lecture method is proving to be problematic in today’s digital culture. When using active learning students are engaged in more activities than just listening. The words, ‘involved’ and ‘problem solving’ are worthy of emphasis; active learning is not busy work, but is purposeful instruction that guides students towards learning outcomes. These findings are consistent with Harvard’s Professor Eric Mazur, a pioneer of active learning who developed a method called Peer Instruction. IndividualCollaborationCooperative Resources: Like this:
Students as Teachers – Designers of Weekly Activities Start this month by discussing with students your Do Now questions and make explicit your daily goals. Shift the responsibility to your students while supporting them as they create the check-in activity. Goals Start class with an engaging activity.Empower students to design, evaluate and reflect about a student check-in activity.Foster a more collaborative student centered classroom. Activity Plan: Students as Designers Organize your class into pairs, then assign each group a week and topic during the fall term. What are Do Nows? Since your last class there have been numerous opportunities for students to improve their understanding or make false connections and lose track of where you left off. So how do you gauge what your students understand at minute zero of class? As students trickle into class have them log into your Socrative room and engage in an entrance activity of two to three questions. Examples Do Now activities:
Seeing Students As Co-Collaborators The traditional model of education is hierarchal, with organizations and administrators of learning on top and students and their families receiving the learning somewhere below. While this made sense in the past when public education–inclusive systems of public education at that—were still finding their way, there is little excuse for such a workflow as we approach 2013. Embedded in this simple pattern are troubling implications that sabotage learning processes from the beginning. In informal and as they occur learning circumstances, the concept of power and currency is highly dynamic, constantly shifting based on context. If you are researching for the best fix for a leaking roof or an injured lower back, you might seek experts, or demonstrated expertise. In these situations, you are constantly evaluating information and re-contextualizing it—understanding what you hear or read, and seeing how it makes sense to the specifics of your situation. But what would be the benefits if it did?
Top 10 Posts of 2012: Deep, Meaningful and Creative Learning Flickr: CriCristina It may come as no surprise that the ideas that are top-of-mind for educators, parents, and policymakers are the very topics conveyed in the most popular MindShift posts this year. Giving kids the tools to create, teachers the freedom to innovate, making students’ work relevant in the real world, giving them access to valuable technology. These are the aspirations that have resonated most with MindShift readers this year. Being able to use the Internet and operate computers is one thing, but it may be just as valuable to teach students how to code. So much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. The conversation in education has shifted towards outcomes and training kids for jobs of the future, and in many ways the traditional classroom has become obsolete. Can creativity be taught? At its core, the issues associated with mobile learning get to the very fundamentals of what happens in class everyday.
Study Shows How Classroom Design Affects Student Learning As debate over education reform sizzles, and as teachers valiantly continue trying to do more with less, a new study suggests that it might be worth diverting at least a little attention from what’s going on in classrooms to how those spaces are being designed. The paper, published in the journal Building and the Environment, found that classroom design could be attributed to a 25% impact, positive or negative, on a student’s progress over the course of an academic year. The difference between the best- and worst-designed classrooms covered in the study? A full year’s worth of academic progress. The study was conducted over the 2011–12 academic year, with 751 students in 34 classrooms, spread across seven primary schools in the seaside town of Blackpool, England. So what did they find? Read more here. [Hat tip: Wired] [Image: Brain and Board via Shutterstock]
30 Habits Of Highly Effective Teachers Editor’s Note: We often look at the qualities and characteristics of good teaching and learning, including the recent following pieces: How A Good Teacher Becomes Great What You Owe Your Students Ten Secrets To Surviving As A Teacher The Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment How To Be A Mediocre Teacher So it made sense to take a look at the characteristics of a successful educator, which Julie DuNeen does below. 25 Things Successful Teachers Do Differently by Julie DuNeen If you ask a student what makes him or her successful in school, you probably won’t hear about some fantastic new book or video lecture series. What students take away from a successful education usually centers on a personal connection with a teacher who instilled passion and inspiration for their subject. Are teachers reaching their students? 1. How do you know if you are driving the right way when you are traveling somewhere new? 2. We can’t all be blessed with “epic” workdays all the time. 3. 4. 5.
7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning Big Ideas Culture Teaching Strategies Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning. Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. Their book, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice and the accompanying practitioner’s guide, lay out the key principles for designing learning environments that will help students build skills useful in a world where jobs are increasingly information and knowledge-based. “Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. [RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World] Educators can also test ideas with students before implementing them.
20 Tips To Promote A Self-Directed Classroom Culture 20 Tips To Promote A Self-Directed Classroom Culture It’s an age-old saying, “Give a man a fish, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.” What separates good teachers from the excellent ones? The excellent ones are handing out fishing poles; creating a culture in the classroom of independence and self-reliance. So how do you cultivate a culture of “I can…” in your classroom? 1. The more I study education and psychology, the more convinced I become that failure is one of the most important tools for learning. Failure can be the doorway to great accidental inventions. 2. Curiosity is what propels a young child to venture away from the safety of his/her mother to explore the environment. 3. Students who have a platform and a voice feel more empowered than those that don’t. 4. Terry Heick writes about the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model. 5. 6. Do you remember the last time you touched a hot oven? 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Teaching Without Technology? Lenny Gonzales By Aran Levasseur New technology is a lightning rod and polarizing force because it not only begins to influence what we see and how we see it, but, over time, who we are, writes Nicholas Carr in his book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” It makes sense then, that debate of digital technology’s role in society is naturally being played out in microcosmic form within schools. Anti-Tech in America’s Tech Capital While critique of new technology within schools is healthy and to be expected, a recent New York Times article revealed an unexpected source: Silicon Valley. Students who do best within the current system are those who can capture the transmission — as unfiltered as possible — and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. “Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. Inquiry-Based Learning and Technology Technology shapes habits of mind.
12 Things Teachers Must Know About Learning 12 Things Teachers Must Know About Learning By Bill Page closeAuthor: Bill Page Name: Bill PageSite: About Bill Page ... Bill Page’s book, At-Risk Students; Feeling Their Pain is available through his web site www.billpageteacher.com, or through Amazon.com. In the midst of the worldwide psycho-neurological revolution, knowledge about the brain and learning is exploding. When information is presented to students, it goes into the working memory of their brain, but the information quickly fades away unless something is done to trigger its move into the brain’s long-term memory, where it can be stored and recalled later. 1. 2. 3. 4. New knowledge must connect to previously learned, relevant, meaningful experiences and knowledge. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The easiest lessons to teach are the hardest to learn. With joy in sharing, Bill Pagebillpage@bellsouth.netwww.At-RiskStudents.com At-Risk Students:
The 8 Elements Project-Based Learning Must Have If you’re contemplating using Project-Based Learning or are already trying out the latest craze to hit the modern classroom, you should know about this checklist. It details if you’re actually doing it correctly. For example, does your project focus on significant content, develop 21st century skills, and engage students in in-depth inquirty (just to name a few)? See Also: What Is Project-Based Learning? The checklist is by the PBL masters over at BIE and they’ve outlined 8 different ‘essential elements’ that must be present in a project in order for it to be considered PBL. These elements are actually useful for even more than PBL. What do you think about this PBL Checklist? Via TeachBytes and BIE.org