Library Girl's Picks: The Best Digital Tools for Formative Assessment On Monday, I had the opportunity to participate in another fab edition of the TL Virtual Cafe webinar series. This month's PD offering was an "Edutech Smackdown" featuring the Queen of All Things Library: Joyce Valenza. I love these smackdown sessions because they are the ultimate crowdsourced PD. Everybody grabs a slide (or two or ten) and when their time comes, takes the mic to share something they love. They are fun, fast paced and the cream always seems to rise to the top. That said, for my few minutes with the mic, I decided to focus my attention on formative assessment. Which brings me back to formative assessment. When incorporated into a lesson, formative assessment provides the teacher librarian with a snapshot of the teaching and learning while it is still happening. Obviously, this is not rocket science. Admit/Exit Tickets are a beloved formative assessment strategy. Graphic organizers are another great formative assessment tool. Amen, sister.
How Can Teachers Foster Curiosity? By Erik Shonstrom Education Week Published Online: June 3, 2014 Published in Print: June 4, 2014, as How Can We Foster Curiosity in the Classroom? Commentary By Erik Shonstrom Fostering curiosity is the key to learning, yet it's difficult to achieve in the classroom. Because all students can learn, much of educational reform has been dedicated to bolstering numbers in the "meets expectations" category of student assessment. Students who do well in school are often curious or ambitious. What is curiosity? —iStockphoto.com Curiosity is a seeking and an exploration. Research supports this view. Loewenstein noted that curiosity has three attributes: intensity, transience, and associations with impulsivity. Curiosity is inherently dynamic and propulsive, not sedentary and passive. "The only rational answer to the conundrum of curiosity is to disengage our educational system from standardized testing." Teachers have turned to technology to satisfy this insatiable urge to explore. The ones who want to learn are easy.
Teaching Presentation Skills with Ignite I know that, in my project-based learning classroom, students did presentations all the time for a variety of purposes. One of the key components of a PBL project is the 21st-century skill of presentation or communication. We know that this presentation can take on any number of shapes, from something formal to a podcast or even a poster session. I always struggled with getting quality presentations from my students. I used a variety of teaching techniques and examples, but there is one that I know can really help improve presentation skills: Ignite! Ignite is a specific genre of presentation. Ignite is similar to PechaKucha, where you have 20 slides that change every 20 seconds. Final Product An Ignite session can be a great final product for a PBL project or another unit of instruction. Practice and Scaffolding Although you might demand a more lengthy or formal presentation as a final product, an Ignite presentation can serve as a great scaffolding tool. Teaching Ready? Ignite!
Downloadable Materials About the six strategies for effective learning resources: These resources were created based on research from cognitive psychology from the past few decades. To learn more about how we created the materials, see this blog. Fair use of the materials: Please use our materials and pass them along to others for educational purposes!
The Best Resources For Learning About Performance Assessment This is the second-to-last in a series of “The Best…” lists related to student assessment. The next, and last, post in the series will related to grading. This post focuses on “performance assessment.” Here’s how Linda Darling-Hammond describes it: For many people, performance assessment is most easily defined by what it is not:specifically, it is not multiple-choice testing. In a performance assessment, ratherthan choosing among pre-determined options, students must construct an answer,produce a product, or perform an activity. Because they allow students to construct or perform an original response rather than just recognizing a potentially right answer out of a list provided, performance assessments can measure students’ cognitive thinking and reasoning skills and their ability to apply knowledge to solve realistic, meaningful problems. Here are other “The Best…” lists on student assessment: The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment Feedback is welcome.
Why Do I Teach? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. As I wind up another semester of teaching at Notre Dame, I’ve been thinking about what I’m actually accomplishing in the classroom. The standard view is that teaching imparts knowledge, either knowing how (skills) or knowing that (information). Knowledge, when it comes, flares up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls. Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements. The same is true of the much more sophisticated knowledge of our adulthood. I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. What’s the value of such encounters? But what do they need to do their jobs?
Reading Habits in Different Communities Released: December 20, 2012 By Carolyn Miller, Kristen Purcell and Lee Rainie Reading is foundational to learning and the information acquisition upon which people make decisions. For centuries, the capacity to read has been a benchmark of literacy and involvement in community life. As technology and the digital world expand and offer new types of reading opportunities, residents of urban, suburban, and rural communities at times experience reading and e-reading differently. Several surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reveal interesting variations among communities in the way their residents read and use reading-related technology and institutions: Book readers: Some 78% of Americans ages 16 and older say they read a book in the past 12 months. Americans and libraries: The majority of Americans ages 16 and older (58%) have a library card and even more (69%) say the library is important to them and their families. About the research Acknowledgements
Exit Ticket 100 Helpful Blogs For School Librarians (And Teachers) We love librarians. They’re the gatekeepers of knowledge and always looking to explore new ways to enhance the learning experience . I learned about the latest trends in libraries at this year’s CALICON in San Diego and love the move toward open source, cross-library sharing, and going digital. But what if you weren’t able to attend CALICON or simply want to get a regular update on all the fun stuff happening with libraries? Lucky for you, our friends at Online College shared the following post with us. It details 100 great blogs librarians around the world should add to their RSS reader. Looking for great Twitter chats for librarians? NOTE: This is an update of Online College’s previous list , as technology has changed, new voices have emerged, and some previously great blogs have gone dormant, making it necessary to revise and re-curate selections. Librarian Blogs Here you’ll find some amazing blogs written by librarians at all kinds of institutions. School Librarian Blogs Industry News
Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning Tony Bates, a Contact North I Contact Nord Research Associate, has released his latest book on technology and learning as an online, open textbook. Teaching in higher education in 2015, and beyond, requires a new approach because of changes in the economy and changes in technology. Faculty and instructors are continually facing questions such as how do I effectively teach an increasingly diverse student population, how do I engage and support my students as class sizes increase, how do I use multi-media and other resources to build a high-quality course, and a host of other questions. Drawing on his 40+ years of experience in higher education in Canada and around the world, Tony Bates has authored a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide that answers these questions and many, many more all in a single location. How do I decide whether my courses should be campus-based, blended or fully online? Download Teaching in a Digital Age Source:
The Three New Pillars of 21st Century Learning The textbook, The lecturer and the classroom are three pillars of modern-day schooling that date back hundreds of years. Each was invented to solve a problem. The textbook was invented because information was scarce, the lecturer because teachers were few and the classroom because learning was local. These enduring icons persist into the Internet age, shaping our view of learning and driving the popularity of their digital grandchildren, things like iPad “textbooks” and the Kahn Academy “lectures.” There’s just one catch – these problems don’t exist anymore. To put it simply – we need new pillars for learning. Pillar #1: “I’m only one of my students’ teachers, but I’m the most important because I teach them to connect to all the others.” This is perhaps the most fundamental shift in our assumptions – how we envision the role of the teacher in the classroom. Pillar #2: “My students should learn from me how to learn without me.”
The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning Greater understanding of our brain’s functioning, abilities, and limitations allows us to constantly improve our teaching skills and the productivity of our Brainscape study sessions and working hours (and after-work hours, for that matter). We’ve already given you tips on how to keep your brain in shape and how to boost your brain’s abilities through exercise. This article, originally published by OnlinePHDPrograms.com, shares the 10 most significant breakthroughs that recent research has made on the science of learning, providing valuable insights on how to make the best use of your brain without wasting energy. When it comes to human organs, none is quite so mysterious as the brain. For centuries, humans have had numerous misconceptions and misunderstandings about how the organ works, grows, and shapes our ability to learn. 1. This term has become a major talking point in criticisms of multi-tasking, especially given the modern information-saturated world we live in. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
ideas about information Edit: Despite my clarifications, people are still misinterpreting my original post as a proposed ‘solution’ to the problem of the Library degree, so I’ve rewritten this to stop that happening. To embark upon a Library Masters in 2014 is a huge undertaking. Assuming you do it part-time, whilst working to support yourself, you’ll spend between ten and eighteen thousand pounds over two years, along with, at a conservative estimate, 1500 hours of your time.[1] The question is, does the Library degree really represent the best use of this investment? What if you were to spend the same amount of time and money on a self-structured curriculum of study, events, conferences, training, and building an online portfolio, whilst continuing to work in an information role. Would you not emerge as a more rounded, knowledgeable, and relevant information professional? I think you would. The problem with the Library degree What do we do about it? If it were up to me, I’d do two things:
Are lectures the best way to teach students? | Higher Education Network ‘It is sad that so few modern students will ever experience a real lecture’ Bruce Charlton, reader in evolutionary psychiatry, Newcastle University, says: Real lectures are always greatly appreciated by students who want to learn. But what are called “lectures” nowadays are a travesty. Vast, stuffy venues that seat hundreds; students sitting in the dark and unable to see the speaker; a disembodied voice droning into a microphone; the lecturer reading out endless powerpoint slides which have already been posted online; the scanty audience passive instead of actively making their own notes – distracted by themselves and others intermittently browsing the internet and social networks; and the whole thing being recorded as if to emphasise to students that they don’t really need to be there nor pay attention. These atrocities are what people currently call lectures, and they are indefensible. Good lectures are possible and achievable – I experienced many of them at my medical school.