What’s the Difference Between OCWs and MOOCs? Managing Expectations. by david on August 20, 2013 What’s the difference between OCWs and MOOCs? At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than managing expectations. Let’s take Physics for example. Here’s the MIT OCW Physics course from 1999. Here’s the Coursera / Georgia Tech Physics course from 2013. This OCW collection and this MOOC have a LOT in common. MIT OCW has always positioned itself as primarily teacher-facing. The commercial MOOC providers have positioned themselves as primarily student-facing. We’re seeing a huge anti-MOOC backlash now, but never saw an anti-OCW backlash. 12 Ways To Use Google Search In School, By Degree Of Difficulty Sunday, May 6, 2012 8:15 am, Posted by | Updates Topics: , , , , , , I’ve been completely obsessed with Google’s new mini-site devoted to finding better ways to incorporate proper web searches into the classroom. Dubbed ‘ Search Education ,’Google’s new site has an array of lesson plans, videos (check a sample out below), concept maps, and other tools designed to help any educator properly integrate Google. This is just the logical next step for the search (and basically everything else) behemoth as Google pushes its way into the classroom. As part of Search Education, Google has shared a bunch of lesson plans that are organized by degree of difficulty. So, if you consider yourself and / or your students Google experts, you should try out the more advanced plans. The following are just some of the many lesson plans brought to you by Google. Picking the right search terms Identify unique search terms to locate targeted sources and to use “context terms” to uncover appropriate evidence.
5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids Digital Tools Arduino It’s hard to argue with the importance of teaching students how to use computers — how to turn on, log on, search the Web, and use applications. 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. Many students don’t have access to computer science courses until college, and that’s a missed opportunity to introduce younger students to programming. Developed by the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a visual programming language for children age 6 and up. Alice is a free and open source 3D programming environment designed to teach students object-oriented and event-driven programming. Hackety Hack is an open source application that teaches the basics of programming in the popular Ruby language. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform with both hardware and software components. One of the most popular toys in history, Lego may be best known for its brick-building. Related
What the Jane Fonda Fitness Revolution Tells Us About Success in College | Robert Shireman Every time I hear about the online revolution that is occurring in higher education, I have a vision of the family room in my parents' home in the suburbs in the 1980s. There, underneath the television, was the remarkable technological innovation of its day, the VCR. And sitting on top of it was the best-selling video of the decade: Jane Fonda's Workout. Jane Fonda's fitness videos were a national phenomenon, a blockbuster like nothing else the nation had ever seen. The news media featured stories about people who were inspired by the video to get off the couch and exercise. Yet despite the sale of more than 17 million Jane Fonda fitness videos, today we as a nation are lazier and fatter than ever. Why do so many people go to a gym? College is like a gym, complete with social norms and peer motivators. The problem in education is not the availability of knowledge; it is how to get sustained, progressively more sophisticated student interaction with knowledge.
Building Research Skills for Finding Compelling Data How about those research skills of students nowadays? I remember as a child watching TV and seeing ads for toys, my eyes bulging out and exclaiming, “I want that!” I can recall parsing through “best” catalogues and dog-earing pages for stuff that my siblings and I wanted was a precursor to our childhood Christmases. Fast forward to now. Being older and wiser, I am well aware of the hold that advertisement and marketing has on entertainment, education, and arguably all parts of our lives. From huge billboards on the side of the road to commercials on YouTube, to “this might interest you” posts in Facebook, tempting you to click here and there, to get you on their website and be a customer. Enter your innocent student child, needing to use their research skills for one assignment or another. How does one help him sift through so much information to get at the best and most reliable content? Let’s have a discussion about how to teach that. Teach Your Children Well Employ Tutorials
Get Started | Submrge Welcome to Submrge! Search or browse for Games or Activities, and learn how games are or could be included in classroom activities. Each game page includes important information for teachers, like benefits of play, educational issues for discussion, easily accessible game information, and activities related to the game on Submrge. Each activity page includes important information on the level and subject, but also the activity’s relationship to Bloom’s Taxonomy, Common Core Standards, 21st Century Skills, and the H.E.A.T. Framework. Do you have a game, activity related to games, or an idea for using a game or games in your classroom and would like to share it?
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the . No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that. Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. So how do teachers cope? We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. Can we do better?
Why are we teaching like it’s 1992? On April 22, 1993, the computer scientists who developed the Mosaic 1.0 browser decided that the Internet should be available to all of us. Before that, it was mostly computer programmers, scientists, university professors and government officials who used the World Wide Web to communicate ideas. After 1993, the rest of humanity was given a new and remarkable power: Anyone with an Internet connection could publish a thought to anyone else anywhere in the world who also had access to an Internet connection. No professional publisher or editor was there to guide you before you hit “send” to ensure accuracy, logic or even common sense. In the history of human communication, there have been only a handful of technological inventions of such magnitude. What are we doing about the avalanche of information? As an educator and a historian of technology, I like to look back and see what happened in the previous Information Age, during the Industrial Era.
Principal fires security guards to hire art teachers — and transforms elementary school Orchard Gardens, a school in Roxbury, Mass., had been plagued by bad test scores and violence -- but one principal's idea to fire the security guards and hire art teachers is helping turn it around. NBC's Katy Tur reports. By Katy Tur, Correspondent, NBC News ROXBURY, Mass. — The community of Roxbury had high hopes for its newest public school back in 2003. A pilot school for grades K-8, Orchard Gardens was built on grand expectations. But the dream of a school founded in the arts, a school that would give back to the community as it bettered its children, never materialized. Instead, the dance studio was used for storage and the orchestra's instruments were locked up and barely touched. The school was plagued by violence and disorder from the start, and by 2010 it was rank in the bottom five of all public schools in the state of Massachusetts. That was when Andrew Bott — the sixth principal in seven years — showed up, and everything started to change. The end result?
The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter Part of an occasional series about the way digital culture affects the way we think, learn and live. Sara: Haha there was a weird comercial for computers that had flying sumo wrestlers John: Hahaha saweeeeet I’m still tryin to picture how that works Sarah: Haha yeah so am I this opening ceremony is so weird John: It must be Sarah K: Now there’s little kids doing karate This is a typical teenage text exchange captured by an academic. Add five hours or so a day spent online, where the most common activity is yet more typing away on social networks. This outpouring often produces an anguished outcry, particularly in September as kids head back to school and screen time starts competing with homework: Technology, pundits warn, is zombifying our young and wrecking their ability to communicate clearly. But is this actually “the dumbest generation”? In fact, there’s powerful evidence that digital tools are helping young people write and think far better than in the past. Literate? It hadn’t.
Advice From Teachers to Parents | Pete Mason Like many teachers, I have a good relationship with the parents of my students. I have been both a general education teacher (social studies and math) and a special education teacher, and found both ups and downs working with a variety of parents. I spoke to colleagues from across my teaching career and asked them what they would say to parents of their students, to provide perspective towards the workload that teachers have on their plate for 180 days of the year, plus professional development, planning, research and coordinating with fellow teachers on interdisciplinary curriculums. Our combined input has led to the following pieces of advice that hopefully sheds some light on this side of the teacher-parent relationship and encourages open communication for the benefit of students. After all, that's why we're here, right? Mind you, these are not a list of gripes, or an unfiltered telling off of parents. - Teach your children to be prepared; it's not just for the Boy Scouts.
Teacher Resources The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching. Find Library of Congress lesson plans and more that meet Common Core standards, state content standards, and the standards of national organizations. Discover and discuss ways to bring the power of Library of Congress primary sources into the classroom. Go to the blog Subscribe to the blog via e-mail or RSS. Using Primary Sources Discover quick and easy ways to begin using primary sources in your classroom, with teachers' guides, information on citing sources and copyright, and the Library's primary source analysis tool. TPS Partners The Teaching with Primary Sources Program builds partnerships with educational organizations to support effective instruction using primary sources. The Teaching with Primary Sources Journal
Resources and Downloads for Differentiated Instruction Tips for downloading: PDF files can be viewed on a wide variety of platforms -- both as a browser plug-in or a stand-alone application -- with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Click here to download the latest version of Adobe Reader. Click on any title link below to view or download that file. Resources On This Page: Lesson Plans & Rubric - Reteach and Enrich Sample materials used to teach, assess, reteach, and enrich one week's fifth grade math objective: differentiating prime and composite numbers. Back to Top Tools for Data Assessment Teachers at Mesquite meet weekly with the student achievement teacher to review the most recent assessment data and plan instruction for each student accordingly. 5th Grade Math Formative Assessment Tracking Sheet Sample spreadsheet used to track student performance on each objective. Culture Websites & Readings
Interview with Educator Heidi Echternacht Q: What do you say to educators who say they don’t have time to be more connected? Time is definitely a precious thing! An even less talked about consideration regarding connected education is ENERGY! On the other side, I would say that teachers, as exhausted and stretched as we are, are in need of friends, colleagues and people who know what we are going through. Q: What are the keys to making connectedness worth the time, even a time-saver, rather than a time-sink? I would say that at first, there is a definite pattern in terms of the thinking, coincidentally running parallel to most any subject in school. Once you persist past the learning curve of struggle, what do you get out of connection? Q: How is connected education particularly valuable for educators in early childhood? Early childhood folks are a particularly wonderful group of people. Q: What impact has connected education had on student achievement in your experience? Oh, there is so much to do; it is hard to keep up!