למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up

Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.

... this particular change to the curriculum seems, on the surface, to be yet another attempt to teach tools instead of concepts.

....

We should be helping our kids understand how to write for the web, to present their ideas, to craft their online image, regardless of the tools.

The emphasis needs to be on the process, not the processor.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, כישורי המאה ה-21

Carr sees only one side of the change we are going through, the loss of book habits. But, for us over our thousands of years of learning, the book is the anomaly, not the Web. The book led us to think that one person could write a permanent compilation of truth. Books lived on over the years, separated from their authors, a single voice, implying that knowledge is a thing or a commodity, creating the legal fiction that one person "owned" the ideas in a book as though the author had grown up in isolation from all other humans and all the ideas had sprung, fully-formed, from his or her brain.

... have me ready to click “write a post” before I finish bouncing between them.

I would go even further and say that reading has become an invitation to DO something.

I once had a prof who always asked, “Now what will you DO with it?” as he handed back a good paper. The web (and email and RSS feeds and Facebook and cell phones…) asks that every time we READ.

תוויות: כתיבה, קריאה

For the second year in a row, a controversial $14.4 million federal study testing the effectiveness of reading and math software programs has found few significant learning differences between students who used the technology and those taught using other methods.

All of these software packages promise to improve student scores in reading and math. But as endless research has proven, drilling kids for tests doesn’t result in significant test score improvement, and has negative long-term results in what students actually retain. It doesn’t matter if we drill more efficiently with expensive software. Doing things that don’t work DOESN’T WORK. How much simpler can this be? As I said last year, the headlines SHOULD read, “Bad Educational Practice Proved Ineffective, Again!”

... this will have a chilling effect on creative uses of software. To me, they are as different as zebras and baseballs, but all get lumped together under the banner of educational technology.

Now, every time we talk about kids doing interesting stuff that involves a computer, we’ll get hit with this. Making movies, programming, blogging, collaboration, projects, kids making games, exploring virtual worlds, GIS, Google Earth? What are you thinking, haven’t you heard? Educational Technology Doesn’t Work.

תוויות: דוחות, טכנולוגיה

The University of Virginia plans to close most of its public computer labs by summer 2011, citing a need to save money.

A U.Va. report shows that 99 percent of the Class of 2012 brought their own laptop to school, though the university doesn't require it.

תוויות: ניידים

תוויות: לוח לבן אינטראקטיבי

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

תוויות: פני החינוך

The MLA Handbook is the association's guide for high school and undergraduate students on the preparation of research papers. It gives step-by-step advice on every aspect of writing papers, from selecting a topic to submitting the completed paper. It provides an authoritative presentation of MLA documentation style for use in student writing.

Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value.... for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs.

Every entry receives a medium of publication marker. Most entries will be listed as Print or Web, but other possibilities include Performance, DVD, or TV. Most of these markers will appear at the end of entries; however, markers for Web sources are followed by the date of access.

תוויות: הרהורים

Well, the only reasonable thing to do is laugh. And read poetry. And have a conversation with the kids. Of course, that's the way a good paperless classroom works anyway.

It's funny, but if you just walked into my classroom on any given day, you probably wouldn't even realize it was paperless. Most of the time, the kids and I are sitting around a big table talking about the material in class as well as the material of life.

Technology is really just the environment. It's not a goal.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, למידה, פני החינוך

At first it's one of the most unnatural things…. But it's an intriguing concept - it gets you away from the idea of a talking head; it's more like snapshots of learning.

We're going to show you where to dig, we're going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we're going to oversee that process.

Maybe I’m wrong (always possible, if not likely), but these colleges seem to be abandoning any idea of asking students to construct their own knowledge and instead will be leading them by the nose to the “right” answers.

Which, I guess, is pretty much what we do in many schools anyway.

It seems to me that a large part of this hyping of mini-lectures has to do with marketing, building on a fundamental misconception that most people have about the nature of learning. Most people believe in a transmission model of learning, where professors transmit knowledge from their brains to those of their students.

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles. This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation. I think all of us were literally on the edge of our seats, finding connections and debates across the literature at a level I have *never* experienced in an undergraduate setting.

תוויות: הרהורים, למידה

As I experiment with blogging in the classroom, I am convinced that that has the potential to form part of a new curriculum which takes into account that writing has changed, is changing and that many of our students are actually writers.

מניסיוני אוכל לומר, שהכתיבה בבלוגספירה העצימה אותי מאד, גרמה לי להתפתח מקצועית ולתקשר באמצעות הרשת עם אנשים שמעולם לא הכרתי העוסקים בתחומים המשיקים לשלי.

הייתי רוצה לראות עוד ועוד מורים שנכנסים למהלך, (ו)פותחים בלוגים .... הייתי רוצה לראות עוד מורים שחווים התפתחות מקצועית בעקבות הכתיבה, התפתחות שבוודאי תקרין גם על תלמידיהם.

תוויות: בלוגים, כלי ווב 2.0, כתיבה

Instead, we have numbed the brains of future teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills. We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries, but we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically unless one has quite a lot of knowledge to think about. One thinks critically by comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. One must know a great deal before she or he can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

תוויות: כישורי המאה ה-21, סטנדרטים, שינון

For the most part, they are confused and somewhat angry about it. It is, after all, a hazy story told by an unreliable narrator whose mind either deteriorates or finds lucidity (depending on how you read it) as disturbing designs start to emerge in the wallpaper of her room.

So how do we work through the story in a constructivist way without sacrificing efficient interpretation-seeking?

The word “standing” was replaced with (the) word “creeping,” and “daylight” words were replaced with “night.” Words like “one” were replaced with “we,” and many of the words grew more positive. Also, verbs jumped into the present tense and increased in their sense of urgency.

By the way--I didn't notice any of these things. My students did.

They left class, I think, realizing that their confusion was not a reflection of a story poorly told, but a story carefully designed to be nebulous.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, קריאה

... the student now has a complete list of every use of the individual word. This used to take WEEKS to do. Now it takes seconds. So the student can focus on finding the patterns, making connections, and analyzing the variety of 'meanings' the poem offers rather than the mind-numbing task of going on a word-search.

We need to teach kids how to think about how big ideas DO change and often change quickly. And that kind of meta-thinking -- which is ever evolving and will never come to a fixed 'conclusion' -- is best supported by the types of tools available in changeable, customizable, flexible, and holistic Web 2.0 apps and interactive Internet media as well as the types of tools good teachers have always used: Socratic Method, conversation, and compassion.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, פני החינוך

Society has focused on children as readers because, historically, it has been much more interested in children as receptors than as producers of the written word.

Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.

With digital technology and, especially Web 2.0, it seems, writers are *everywhere* - on bulletin boards and in chat rooms and in emails and in text messages and on blogs responding to news reports and, indeed, reporting the news themselves as I-reporters. Such writing is what Deborah Brandt has called self-sponsored writing: a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution, with the result that people—students, senior citizens, employees, volunteers, family members, sensible and non-sensible people alike—want to compose and do—on the page and on the screen and on the network - to each other.

When teaching children to write in print, we don’t insist that they spell every word correctly before they are allowed to write a sentence; we don’t expect perfect paragraphs before they are allowed to write a story. We expect complex thinking to develop alongside and with beginning skills.

תוויות: כלי ווב 2.0, כתיבה

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים, סלולארי