למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

I think as learning professionals we should be alarmed when someone walks in and spouts so much unsubstantiated drivel as if it were fact. I’ll go even further: I think as learning professionals in this time, in the middle of the seismic shifts that are going on, it is our responsibility to point out the recklessness of these sorts of claims.

It's almost like this guy took a bunch of pop-culture buzz words and threw them all together because he didn’t know anything about education.

I want to use social media to effectively solve problems. Because of that, I’m not interested in half-truths and forgetting about doing the hard work to analyze problems.

תוויות: כנסים, מידענות

Reading is NOT the goal

Let me say it this way: There is no reason, in and of itself, to "read." We read to access the information in written form. There is no reason, in and of itself, to "write." We write to distribute information to others.

"Oh, they can read," he said, "but I'm not so sure they know how to think. That's where teaching has to go."

Reading matters because we want our students to have effective and efficient ways to access stories and information. Writing matters because we want our students to be creators and distributors of stories and information.... But you know what? How they get to these things, should matter a whole lot less to us.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, כתיבה, קריאה, רכישת מיומנויות

לקרוא, לנבור, לחפש, להתעניין, לחשוב, לכתוב, לנסח, לנתח, לסכם, להעיר ולהאיר, לשתף ולהשתתף, לחלוק ולהתחלק, להגיב, להגיע לתובנות, לקטלג, לשים תוויות, לאפיין, לתת כותרת, להמשיג, להסתכל אחרת על דברים, לפקוח עיניים, לעצום עיניים, לקבל, לדחות, לחוש תחושת סיפוק, להתרגש.

מקווה שעוד לא תמה לה הדרך גם אם הסתיים פרויקט הגמר. וכאן אני קוראת לחבריי ללימודים, בואו נמשיך לכתוב ולהגיב זה לזה.

תוויות: בלוגים

Dad, Dad! He's looking up answers on his iPod!

Obviously, there are things that we should all be able to do without consulting the search engine of our choice.

Why is it less valid to Google “Major battles in California during the Mexican-American war” than to flip through pages looking for the paragraph that describes the Battle of Monterey or the Battle of Santa Clara? Savvy use of the Internet should allow students to quickly access facts and information and get on to the important questions that tap their higher-order thinking skills....

While I certainly still need to do a lot of thinking about how best to utilize this capability in meaningful ways, I think we all as educators need to be constantly asking ourselves the question, "What can we do now (that is relevant and meaningful for students) that we couldn't do before?"

תוויות: מידענות

Many of you are struggling to help young people navigate this new world of privacy and publicity, but many of you are confused yourself. The worst thing you can do is start a sentence with "back in my day." Back in your day doesn't matter. What does matter is that you care and that you too are trying to figure out how to make sense of an ever-changing environment. Rather than approaching teens and telling them how things should be, why they shouldn't be putting material online, please consider the value of opening up a dialogue. You have a lot to learn from what teens are trying to do; you once had to make sense of public life too. The difference is that they are doing it in the new environment. Take what you know and then actively listen to teens. Through their struggles, you can see what is new and different.

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה, שימוש בבתי ספר

Instead, I wanted to show you how I’d spend the $5,000-$6,000 that a good IWB package — including a board, data projector, set of student responders, mounting kit, and a tablet for the teacher — will cost you. From that point, you can decide whether IWBs for every classroom are worth your investment.

The most motivating lessons that I’ve ever taught give students the opportunity to interact in small groups around content. There’s something about social interactions and communication that results in engaged students and more learning. Yet we continue to invest in tools like Interactive Whiteboards that don’t enable any kind of group work or social interactions.

I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for.

Her book is being promoted as a big break from the past. That is certainly what her subtitle suggests. But you can't judge books by their titles. When I finished hers, I was delighted to see such an erudite analysis of where the education policy debate is right now. She left some blood on the floor, sure, but she also, in vintage Ravitch style, blessed some good ideas from all sides.

Many education reforms have gone badly in the last 20 years, but there never has been a golden age of school improvement. No Child Left Behind had many flaws, but it left us better off than than we were before, with more attention to low-income and learning disabled children, and some gains in lower grades, particularly in math. We bumble along, doing our best, hoping that our next idea will produce big gains but knowing that all we can expect is to be a bit better than before.

If the best that billions of dollars and the establishment of a test-score-obsessive, standardized education system can produce is “more attention” and “some gains” (as measured by those same tests, of course), that is not “better off”.

Narrowing the curriculum studied by almost all students in public schools to little more than reading and math drills is more than a “flaw”.

תוויות: מבחנים, סטנדרטים, NCLB

... precisely the type of population that popular rhetoric assumes to be universally wired and digitally savvy.

Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.

Students with higher level know-how engage in more activities online than those who understand the Web less. Of course, these two factors likely have a reinforcing relationship. More diverse types of uses probably feed back into increased user savvy.

... as things stand, the more privileged stand to benefit from it (האינטרנט) more than those in less advantageous positions raising concerns about possibly increased rather than decreased inequality resulting from the spread of Internet use across the population.

תוויות: פער דיגיטאלי

One-to-one computing programs only as effective as their teachers

In summary, looking across the collection of 1:1 programs and studies presented in this special issue, it is evident that teachers are on the implementation front lines of any 1:1 initiative.

In schools with cognitive tools, teaching, learning, and technology are more than blurred. They are integrated, and they are inseparable. No question arises about getting teachers to “use the computers.” With the practice of teaching and learning so deeply embedded in the rules, design, collaboration, schema, and feedback processes of the school, its capacity to function is only possible using those tools. When a school reaches this point, it is a self-organizing learning enterprise.

תוויות: 1:1, הטמעה, מורים

זוהי רמאות לשמה. ולא בגלל שמישהו התחזה לעודד והציע שירות שלא קיים. מסבירים לנו בהתלהבות שמדובר ב"פרסום גרילה": פרובוקציה, שמסתירה שמדובר בפרסומת. אלא שעל הדרך, המפרסמים בזזו את המיזם האנושי היפה ביותר של זמננו: האינטרנט.

לכל גולש יש חיישנים פנימיים לזיהוי אמת, ובסרט של עודד, הפרסומאים לחצו על כל הכפתורים שיוצרים תחושת אמינות מושלמת. הסרט עוצב כתוכן גולשים לגיטימי. הם לא הבינו שיש משהו קדוש בתוכן כזה.

תוויות: הרהורים, מידענות

תוויות: חיפוש, רכישת מיומנויות