Where does 21st Century teaching begin? [Guest Blog]
The 21st Century Teaching Project Findings (Part 2) Seann Dikkers 3/1/12 This post is part of an ongoing series abridged from the 21st Century Teaching Project (21CTP) – a study of expert professional development trajectories and digital age practice. Let’s assume that the goal of teacher training and professional development (PD) is to prepare teachers with powerful models, tools, and pedagogies that will inform expert practice over a career. If so, the 21CTP is designed to help us as a community, 1) hear from 39 award winning teachers, and 2) ask relevant questions about how to study and design teacher training and PD in the coming years. When over half of these teachers say they completely changed their practice mid-career, I’m particularly interested in what, who, and how those trajectories started. 21CTP Theme 2: Narrated Beginnings A beginning narrative explains ‘what started it all?’ Immediately, ‘best practice’ studies are designed to give indications for expanded inquiry. So what?
The Peer Instruction Method
Peer Instruction Problems:Introduction to the Method Making Your Lecture More Interactive The Peer Instruction technique is a method created by Eric Mazur to help make lectures more interactive and to get students intellectually engaged with what is going on. In this method, The instructor presents students with a qualitative (usually multiple choice) question that is carefully constructed to engage student difficulties with fundamental concepts. This method, besides having the advantage of engaging the student and making the lecture more interesting to the student, has the tremendous importance of giving the instructor significant feedback about where the class is and what it knows. For more information, see Peer Instruction, Eric Mazur (Prentice Hall) Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, Edward F. Ways of Collecting Student Responses You can collect student responses in a variety of ways. Electronic Remote Answering Devices (RADs) are now conveniently and cheaply available.
A Digital Humanities Manifesto » A Digital Humanities Manifesto
[The content of the manifesto represents the view of the authors and does not claim to represent the views of UCLA, the UCLA Humanities, Division, and the Digital Humanities at UCLA.] Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated. Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core. The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Process is the new god; not product.
Kickboard: A Data Dashboard for Teachers
I chose "data" as one of the most important ed-tech trends of 2011, and it's one that continues to gain steam this year as well. But as it does so -- as education becomes increasingly "data-driven" -- there are numerous challenges and repercussions, many of which have a lot more to do with education politics than with education performance. (The release of the Teacher Data Reports in New York City is one recent example.) Part of the problem with the push to become more data-driven (and there are many problems and, I'd argue too, many benefits) is that this seems to be yet another initiative that is done to teachers and students, rather than done by or done for them. That's where Kickboard hopes to step in, making it easier for teachers to collect and analyze data from their classes -- both academic and behavioral data, in real-time not just at the end of a class period or school day. For its part, Kickboard is currently in beta in more than 70 schools.
The Ultimate STEM Guide for Kids: 239 Cool Sites
this very short warning
RSS is for skimming, not for keeping up with. It's a flow, not a queue. It's not an email inbox or to-do list. It's about attention. We only have so much of it. A journalist needs to have streams of reliable and fresh information about the journalist's beat and other relevant subjects. The web is the tsunami.Blogs, if you find the right ones, provide more manageable streams of information -- knowing how to find and assess blogs is a learnable skill, abetted by tools like Technorati and other blog-trackers.RSS is the filter.The sampling, however, is not automated. Getting sucked into RSS or feeling obligated to keep up with all the unread feeds that accumulate, is a common hazard -- I have to police myself, lest I spend all day following links. So part of finding, filtering, storing, and using the right information entails learning tools like Technorati, RSS, social bookmarking. This is definitely related to the mindfulness-about-laptops-in-class issue.
Opting Out
Just wanted to share that next week while thousands of New Jersey school children will be subjected to the annual ASK standardized tests, my 12-year old son Tucker will not be among them. We made a formal request to opt out, which is our legal right in NJ, and he’ll be staying home during the testing periods. (The absences are excused, btw.) Wendy and I came to this decision after seriously considering the potential effects for the school and after some serious conversations with Tuck. Obviously, he didn’t mind the staying home part, but he did have concerns about what others might say or think. Below is a letter that we’re sending to the local paper and to nj.com. Interested in your thoughts, as always. To the Editor:After much thought, we have decided to keep our son home during the 7th Grade NJ ASK standardized assessments that are being given in his school next week.
Helping Students Write Better Lab Reports
One of the messages of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that writing skills can be developed in any course and that often the best place to start is with current assignments that involve writing. That’s where chemists Gragson and Hagen started. They were disappointed in the quality of student writing in their “journal-style” lab reports. They undertook a major redesign of the lab report assignment, guided by three principles they believed would improve the quality of those reports. For the first experiment, each student wrote an abstract and a materials and methods section according to the formal journal-style lab report protocols. To help students understand the writing demands of this kind of lab report, the authors prepared an Integrated Writing Guide that included a sample lab report. The review and revision process used the Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) model, which includes writing, calibration, peer review, self-assessment, and then revision. Reference: Gragson, D.
The "Dirty Work of Education"
No question, one of the most talked about, Tweeted about, blogged and written about ideas in the past year has been the “flipped classroom,” the idea that we can use technology to deliver the “lecture” as the homework and then use class time, ideally, to bring the concepts to life in meaningful, real world ways. And it’s been interesting to watch the “debate” around the merits. 2011 ed tech media darling Sal Khan and his Khan Academy supporters would tell you it’s a transformative, new way of thinking about the classroom fueled by technology. Detractors argue it’s old wine in new bottles, that a lecture is a lecture regardless of form, and that at best the opportunity is to help kids who need remediation or extra help. In case you’re not up to speed on what Knewton is doing, here’s the brief from their website: Knewton’s award-winning Adaptive Learning Platform™ uses proprietary algorithms to deliver a personalized learning path for each student, each day. The bottom line?
Defined STEM
