למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

It seems strange to me almost every article or comment on lecture podcasting assumes that a decreasing attendance is obviously a negative outcome. As educators we should be focusing on education, not counting bodies. If students are doing just as well and not attending class then that tells me that my multimedia channel is effective.

I would ask the students to read and they would act like they did, and perhaps some of them did, and then I would lecture over the material on the next class day. It seemed that the students were learning that they did not have to read since I would be covering the exact material in class.

So Brian decided to try to do almost the exact opposite of what he'd been doing before - have them do the lecture as homework and use class time to work with the students .... He could use class time to work with students in small groups or one-one-one, and also hopefully give him the time to explore some of the more interesting aspects of Chemistry.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, שימוש בבתי ספר

A "Creepy Treehouse" is an online place that adults build with the intention of luring kids in. Although we use "their" tools in education, students want to keep their lives separate. Let's define the difference between teaching “outside of the box” and "stepping inside forbidden social circles".

תוויות: כלים חברתיים, רשתות חברתיות, שימוש בבתי ספר

This was a departure for me. A tech-driven, student-led, designed-infused mathematical project. Things went wrong.

I overestimated my students' computer fluency. Name it: locating saved files, opening programs, using a trackpad, using modifier keys, sending e-mail. These tasks all required constant, patient re-explanation. Missed that mark by a country mile.

I'm uncertain Feltron was the best use of our time.

תוויות: מתמטיקה

don't blame inquiry or progressive education

If you're just looking at the public discourse, you'd probably imagine that the current state of play could be represented by a needle floating between "content" and "process" (or "critical thinking" or "inquiry" or whatever).

...today in actual schools, that needle is pinned to the content side, even more than it has been historically.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, למידה

In their working lives they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information.

Whether you think that allowing students to use tools like computers and mobile phones during an exam is a good idea or a bad idea is somewhat dependent on what you see the purpose of school to be. It also depends on your world view and whether you see information as scarce or abundant.

Where else but school are we given problems to solve and expected to do so in utter isolation? Isn’t all the workplace desired skills about collaborating, solving problems as a group? Has anyone in a job recently been required to go into a locked room, given a pencil and a bubble sheet and expected to solve a company problem?

תוויות: העתקה-הדבקה, סלולארי

In fact, all that new space has made me change some of my delicious habits on both ends of the spectrum. It’s made me sure to add a good deal of annotation to most of the bookmarks I save, and it’s made me start to expect others to do the same.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time looking at the networks of those in my network, finding others who I might want to add based on the tags that they use (like do they have an “education” tag, or do they have some uniquely formed ones like “mediagoesaway“), the frequency with which they save things (30 a day = not good as does 30 a year), the amount of annotation, and who they might be networked in with.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, כלים חברתיים

Yet as a new school year begins, the time may have come to reconsider how large a role technology can play in changing education. There are promising examples, both in the United States and abroad, and they share some characteristics. The ratio of computers to pupils is one to one. Technology isn’t off in a computer lab. Computing is an integral tool in all disciplines, always at the ready.

The educational bottom line, it seems, is that while computer technology has matured and become more affordable, the most significant development has been a deeper understanding of how to use the technology.

This is a definite weakness, in my view, as it feeds the delusion that it is technology itself that "transforms" education, rather than the creative practice of good pedagogy in whatever medium is appropriate.

It (הדוח) says that "At school, she [the high-schooler of 2015] and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of realtime data from remote sensors." hmmmmm - an alternative scenario is:

Learning facilitator (brightly): "and now we are going to create a wonderful collaborative 3D collage of the environmental impact of YOUR neighbourhood by downloading and analysing these really funky visualisations and statistics and mashing them all together in a really cool way! And you'll get credit! Won't that be fun!"
High school student 1: rolls eyes
High school student 2: does mime of putting fingers down throat and being sick
High school student 3 (looks up from texting her friend): "We were supposed to have listened to that really dull podcast about this, weren't we"
High school student 4: "How MANY credits was that?"

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

Educators could think of GOOG-411 as a model for a learning network synapse/node. With a future edu-service, could a student input a query for current data for oceanography, astronomy, electoral polling — any of many location based subjects — and get the current data as quickly as Google now delivers your pizza? Sure. Somebody just needs to do it.

תוויות: סלולארי

Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis?

there are only so many ways to state basic historical facts and dates

If the original sentences in question came from different sources, you might give the student the benefit of the doubt, but two unattributed near-quotes from the same source? Plagiarism, beyond reasonable doubt.

תוויות: העתקה-הדבקה, ויקי

their understanding of the world has come primarily from digital sources

Surrounded by digital media and technology-enhanced texts of all kinds, these students have developed specific skills and knowledge to read, understand, and create these texts (Pinker 1994). Faculty who teach these students, however, may have difficulty reading and understanding these texts.

Many faculty members developed their writing skills in a print world where text took the conventional form of paragraphs on a page or was packaged as a book or an article, a story or a novel; its production was typically conceived of as a solitary act. Consequently, their previous experiences with and understanding of text are quite different from that of the N-Gen student, which may lead to profound misunderstandings. When instructors perceive linear, print-based texts as a benchmark, the N-Gen’s texts may, at first glance, fall quite short. However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor.

I have spent too many years in staff rooms not to pick up on the fact that there are an awful lot of teachers who don't read. They can read and write, in other words they have language facility, but according to the definitions I have read of literacy, they are not literate themselves.

תוויות: אוריינויות, כלי ווב 2.0

When I learned this professor taught at OC, I enthusiastically said, “Wow, you’re going to have all your students bring iPhones to class this year!” His response was:

Boy I sure hope not. I have a tough enough time having them keep their laptops closed all the time during class.

I almost passed out on the spot, but I was torn by a simultaneous urge to weep.

The students themselves are part of the problem. It’s hard for a professor to take technology seriously when the whole second row is playing solitaire and not doing the really constructive, cool things that we know they could be. Many students are experiencing the first taste of the freedom of having technology available 24/7, since many of our high schools have resisted allowing students to bring their own technology into the buildings.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

This eSchool Report is made possible with financial support from IBM and Mainline Information Systems.

... many schools are moving toward personalized instruction, where students get to learn at their own pace within the classroom environment. To accomplish true personalized learning, however, “we have to move beyond textbooks,” says Michael King, vice president of IMB’s global education industry. “And the PC, as it stands today, is the wrong model for that.”

תוויות: שימוש בבתי ספר, תשתיות

Understand what research actually is, and what it is not. It is not the same as trying to get someone else to do it for you, or to give you what you want on a plate. In other words, expect to do some work yourself.

תוויות: הרהורים

My main research interest has been the process of developing and cultivating a personal learning network/environment and I've been pleased to see the work literacy blog devote some time to PLN/PLE. However, the more I learn about PLN/PLE, the less "new" the skill seems.

Without ever using the term, personal learning network, those pages contain the best description of the process of building a personal learning network that I have seen. Bardach suggests that "all likely sources of information, data, and ideas fall into two general classes: documents and people." He then advises that

• documents lead to people,
• people lead to people,
• documents lead to documents,
• and people lead to documents.

תוויות: PLE, RSS

Email means our attention is constantly interrupted. We're less productive. Actually, all studies I know show there is nothing that contributes more to lack of productivity than monotony. We're even learning that a monotonous job shortens your life. Truly.

Diversion is relaxing, reviving, refreshing. It renews synaptic connections, springs up that much-vaunted and necessary neural plasticity. I don't think multi-distraction (as I call it) is a bad thing at all. We thrive on it. And we need to learn when we want and need distraction. The key here, as in all things (see, Mama told you this!) is self-control and self-determination about when to be distracted. It's a good thing, but be strategic about it.

תוויות: multitasking