למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

תוויות: כישורי המאה ה-21

Want to instantly create better teachers? I know how. One word. Blogging.

I sort of understood the concept but other than simply thinking about what you did in the classroom, I wasn't at all sure what to do with this term.

When I discovered blogs almost five years ago, I soon figured out what that term meant. Since that occasion I have sat down to write close to 1,000 pieces of reflection. While not all would be considered deep, most take me anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to craft. It may not always look like it, these are generally borne out of the times I spent observing, thinking and working in classrooms. The reflective writing has been valuable but definitely the nearly 4,000 comments have been even more of a learning experience. This is the single best professional development experience I've had.

תוויות: בלוגים, מורים

Are they then taught how to use an iPod? Are there iPod tests? Do some kids get a “D” in iPod?

When did iPods become worthy of study?

Great 21st Century educators spend 30 minutes per month at Toys ‘R Us
This has two benefits. 1) You find great toys that may enhance learning; and 2) Educators gain a greater respect for the world in which their students live. Hit the toy store, read the weekend sale circulars and you may find all sorts of cool teaching aids available for a song. Past holiday seasons have led to sub-$50 digital microscopes like the Eyeclops, low-cost video projectors, programmable robots, inexpensive drawing tablet, Hot Wheels cars capable of measuring velocity and more.

תוויות: משחקים

This last, the perpetuity of their work, is important as a default. As a student, I used to save all my returned papers. But students in an online class lose all their work unless they’ve saved it themselves, and that only works for written stuff before there’s any feedback. Or they have to copy and paste everything. So a blog inside a CMS would defeat pretty much everything I’d want students using blogs for!

תוויות: בלוגים

Maybe we can plan to do something with Google Earth after the SOLs.

תוויות: למידה, מבחנים, שיבוש

jobs that have not yet been created, using technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that cannot be foreseen

First, we need to get over the view that our generation is astonishingly unique. Hasn’t every generation faced new technologies to solve problems not foreseen? The present moment arrogance that invades much of school reform thinking is frustrating.

From different quarters, we have heard the suggestion that our colleges must be new-modeled; that they are not adapted to the spirit and wants of the age; that they will soon be deserted unless they are better accommodated to the business character of the nation.

Sound familiar? Have our schools ever been able to meet the needs of the age? I doubt it. More often than not education and learning are sources of dispute, mediators in the culture wars or progenitors of conflict.

An educator needs to know how to use the technology of an era

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, כישורי המאה ה-21

They look, in fact, a lot like American ones—circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard.

The oldest technology in the room is the one that helps her the most with a fundamental human skill—presenting material while staying connected to every student in the room, watching who is getting it and who is not, without having to turn to write on a chalkboard.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, סביבה לימודית

Questions like this are boring. And unanswerable given the tremendous number of variables involved in teaching online and in classrooms.

Is online learning more or less effective than learning in a classroom? Who cares. That question is irrelevant. Society answered the need to use technology through its broad adoption of the web/internet/online medium.

Obviously there are numerous questions that need to be addressed in terms of social/relational impact of technology, how individuals connect and create information with participative tools, and so on.

תוויות: הרהורים

Finally, crap detection takes us back, full circle, to the literacy of attention. When I assign my students to set up an RSS reader or a Twitter account, they panic. They ask how they are supposed to keep up with the overwhelming flood of information. I explain that social media is not a queue; it's a flow. An e-mail inbox is a queue, because we have to deal with each message in one way or another, even if we simply delete them. But no one can catch up on all 5,000 or so unread feeds in their RSS reader; no one can go back through all of the hundreds (or thousands) of tweets that were posted overnight. Using Twitter, one has to ask: "Do I pay attention to this? Do I click through? Do I open a tab and check it out later today? Do I bookmark it because I might be interested in the future?" We have to learn to sample the flow, and doing so involves knowing how to focus our attention.

The whole notion of the public sphere is that we have sufficiently well-educated citizens who are free to access information about workings of the state so that they will be able to govern themselves. Implicit in the notion that ordinary people can shape policies of state is the assumption that they know how to communicate their opinions in concert with other citizens in a productive manner—a literacy of participation.

Today's media enable people to inform, persuade, and influence the beliefs of others and, most important, help them to organize action on all scales. In doing so, people move from the literacy of participation to the literacy of collaboration.

תוויות: כישורי המאה ה-21