למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

As a classroom teacher myself with a 3/4 teaching load plus unofficial tech coordinator duties for k-12 at my school, I don't have much time this year to stay abreast of all the great teacher bloggers out there.

As a classroom teacher who has tried to convert students to the Good News of RSS Aggregators for almost two years now, the picture is even grimmer. All those hours walking students through setting up accounts, finding feeds, and all those additional hours of trying to guide them to the explosive learning that comes from the feed-reading habit? Fast forward a year later, and almost none of them have seen the Light.

Buddha is said to have advised seekers of Truth, faced with so many dogmas and doctrines and sects and claims, "Don't mistake the fingers for the moon." ....

So to riff off The Awakened One: if reading blogs and such is the moon, and RSS is a finger pointing the way to them that the vast majority of humans are too lazy and habit-driven to adopt, let's be open to other ways.

תוויות: בלוגים, מורים, RSS

And then we hit the zimmer frame argument – it seems that despite the best intentions in Grandpa’s observations zimmer frames in dementia centres end up being “one of those things you can put in people’s way rather than put in people’s hands.” – he has rich anecdote to support this conclusion.

I loved this insight because putting things in people’s way rather than putting things in people’s hands seems to be something we struggle with a lot in education –

Identifying what are the conditions of value in teaching and learning and then identifying what might enhance these conditions (“putting things in people’s hands”) or betray these conditions (“putting things in peoples way”) is something I think about a lot with respect to ICTs and education.

תוויות: מורים, שימוש בבתי ספר

This video is the best argument I have ever seen against the schools that forbid students to have digital devices with them in class, because the school thinks the kids will cheat.

Disciplining kids is an age-old problem. The mobile in their pockets today is a brand new and awesome opportunity to put them in touch with knowledge.

תוויות: סלולארי, שימוש בבתי ספר

אחת הבעיות שמורים מרבים להתלונן עליה קשורה להספקים. העבודה במחשב מאיטה את קצב הלמידה, מכיוון שהתלמיד צריך להיות פעיל, לחשוב, לחפש חומרים. הוא אינו מקבל את הכל לעוס, מוכן על ידי המורה ומה שעליו לעשות הוא רק לשנן.

אני מאמינה מאד שיש להפוך את הלמידה למשמעותית, גם במחיר מספר פרקים פחות בחומר הנלמד.

a majority of K-12 educators view the Web either as a lesson planning tool or as a place to turn for additional information to teach a particular lesson. The majority of sites designed for use with students were passive in nature.

תוויות: מורים, שימוש בבתי ספר

Social Networks, and the social web (also known as Web 2.0) allows me to not only consume but easily produce knowledge of my own. It is this interaction with knowledge that leads to new understandings and pushes me to think.

Education in the 21st Century is not about consuming information (it changes too fast), it’s about creating new knowledge from what we know, what we think, and what we are passionate about.

This is new to education as we were all raised to be consumers. We sit in class, we listen, we do our assignments, turn them in and move on. We consume, show that we consumed and that’s it. We never were asked to produce, to think deeply about what we were learning and we never had the opportunity to share what we thought ....

If someone has 1000+ followers, but only follows 30+, are they ‘misusing’ Twitter? Or doesn’t it matter?

The thing is - there is (and always has been) an asymmetry of communication. Which is simply this: it is easier to be heard by many people than it is to hear many people. It takes no effort at all to broadcast to 1000 Twitter users - the computer does it all. But following 1000 takes some commitment. We need to understand that the whole internet is like that.

תוויות: בלוגים, כלים חברתיים, כלים מיידיים

It was a fascinating journey. I learned a lot about writing in online environments, about student interactions online, and about fostering student engagement in online spaces. However, one of the most personally relevant findings of my research was the impact that it had on me - the teacher-researcher.

What this painting says to me is that we can gain a better understanding of our classrooms-as-communities if we immerse ourselves in them. In the manner of Caravaggio, teachers should weave their readerly, personal voices into the fabric of classrooms-as-communities. What my experiences illustrate, and what the painting metaphorically emphasizes, is that teacher professional development in the 21st century requires that we look closely at how to most effectively embed ourselves in our practice and in the experiences and interactions of our students. Professional development in the networked world requires that we look closely not only at what we do as educators but also at how we are embedded in educational contexts. Much like Caravaggio, we have to narrate ourselves into existence through participation in our classrooms in a way that is non-authoritarian, readerly, and conversational.

תוויות: בלוגים, מורים

A personal learning environment (PLE) is a system of free web-based services that helps learners manage and take control of their own learning.

More important are the methods. But probably most important are the mental models or frameworks that people use to understand what they need and turn it into methods and tools.

תוויות: PLE

ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print.

"I remember in my own childhood in the 1940s, early '50s, I and my parents would sit around the table and look at the encyclopedia together," said Larry Hickman, director of a center at Southern Illinois University devoted to the education pioneer John Dewey. "In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Book encyclopedia was regarded as authoritative," he recalled, laughing as he agreed, "That's why you would copy it for your book report."

But Mr. Hickman said that parents and children can have the same discussions "seated in front of the computer, the electronic hearth, as I like to call it." And he said that losing a set of books considered infallible was actually a good thing for developing critical thinking.

תוויות: העתקה-הדבקה

too much student identifying information

risk and management issues

Please Note ... Let’s embrace this as an opportunity to promote the value of blogs and online learning generally. There is no benefit in looking for blame here, there is enormous value and potential in celebrating our voices.

oh for goodness sake ... what century are we in?

could be interpreted as an invitation to post completed answers to assignment questions, which would be a clear instance of academic misconduct.

It was students talking about methods to solve, how to look at questions and answers for the weekly lab.

What’s the difference between slurping coffee in a fluorescent lounge and tip-tap-typing “I don’t get this, can you help me out?” via computer keyboard?

How does this differ from, “Let’s all meet in the quad at 10 and go over our notes for our test tomorrow?”

תוויות: אתיקה, העתקה-הדבקה, רשתות חברתיות

Inventing Wheels in Cyberspace

Column No. 140 of the Boidem

בו אני מנסה לבחון מה עדיף –

להשתמש בחומרים מוכנים מהרשת, או להכין כאלה בעצמנו

תוויות: פרסום אישי

It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.

Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

The problem is, this cuts against the conventional wisdom about how to do computing in schools, which is to have an ambitious, expensive program front loaded with professional development, aiming to meet short term goals. I've long argued that we would be better off aiming for inexpensive, sustainable, ubiquitous computing that is sufficiently cheap that it doesn't carry significant short-term performance pressures.

A teacher must feel that the computers are here, they work, and they aren't going away, ever. EVER.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, פני החינוך, שימוש בבתי ספר

In the past, I have had administrators tell me “I walked into the teacher’s room and all the students were on laptops.” As though just the site of students working on laptops meant they were engaged in the learning process.

I have been trying to wrap my head around a simple way for administrators to evaluate the use of technology in the classroom.

1. Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?


2. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?


3. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?


4. Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

I am not advocating that every lesson should use technology or that every lesson should try to answer “New things in New ways”. However, it is good to know just how the technology is being used.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, כלים חברתיים

I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and that even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens.

I will also say that on a personal level, when people ask me the answer to content overload, I tell them (counter-intuitively) that it is to produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, פני החינוך, שימוש בבתי ספר

There is a fundamental difference between brainstorming and publishing. We do our students a grave disservice if we lead them to believe that they are so precious that every thought they have or sentence they type is worthy of an audience. Kids are wonderful and it’s great that educators have the potential to network online, but unless a venue is specifically for the purposes of peer-editing or review, publishing should remain at the end of the creative process.

Rough drafts “published” online disrespect the audience the web so generously affords.

it’s about helping adults, kids, everyone being able to distinguish, “in draft” work from “this is my best”.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

"...I don't take TV away from my kids for punishment when they do something wrong. I take away their nightly computer time, and their IM ing- -oh they live for IMing their friends- and for my oldest- I take away text messaging on her cell phone.... I don't take away TV because my kids dont watch TV at all...."

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, כלים מיידיים, נוער

Here's how to begin using the mouse:

1. Rest the heel of your hand on the table in front of the mouse.
2. Place your thumb on one side and your ring and little finger on the other side.
3. Use those fingers and your thumb to move the mouse around on the mouse pad.
4. Move the mouse until the cursor is positioned on the underlined number one below.

Recently at work we whiled away a coffee break discussing the controversy over writing famous people’s obituaries in advance. While we were having the discussion Anna Nicole Smith came up. Not her name; nobody could remember her name. We were totally stumped. We knew she had passed away shortly after her son, but that’s all we could remember.

Eventually someone went to Google and typed:

that woman who died after her son died

... and Anna Nicole Smith in a CNN story was the second result, and had her Wikipedia page on the first page of results.

I was rather surprised. After all, I do a lot of talking about how people should get as specific as possible. And while the query above presents a couple of facts, it was very generic.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

תוויות: הקנייה, חיפוש