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Leaders Leading iPad Programs I can across this article today from EmergingEdTech and it immediately resonated with me. We have been struggling with this exact situation in schools in our own region. Whenever you talk to teachers, especially those that have some first hand experience of iPad use in the classroom, this is one of the first things they say to you. Real change in schools needs to come from the top. This is a great article where Principal David Mahaley discusses their approach to iPad implementation. Make sure you check out the rest of the EmergingEdTech site for some interesting articles on eLearning and Educational Technology. DFC – DataNet Federation Consortium - CometBird The DataNet Federation Consortium management is organized through six communities of practice (task areas). Each community of practice manages related activities, liaisons with external experts, and has well-defined deliverables. The communities of practice are: Science and Engineering Community of Practice (Lead: William Regli) – This group summarizes feature requests and user requirements across the participating science and engineering domains.
Stealth mentoring I was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place holder. When someone is thinking and learning ‘out loud’, e.g. putting their deeper reflections on line via, say, a blog (er, like this one, recursively), they’re allowing you to look at where and how their thinking is going. When they also are leaving a trail of what they think is interesting (e.g. by pointing to things on Twitter or leaving bookmarks at a social bookmarking site), you can put together what’s interesting to them and what their resulting thoughts are, and start seeing the trajectory of their thinking and learning. In formal learning, we can think of modeling behavior and cognitive annotation, the processes covered in Cognitive Apprenticeship as a development process.
How I use social media for my professional development This has been a common theme to many of the presentations, workshops, webinars and seminars that I have been asked to do over the last few years, but however many times I try to present on this subject I never really feel that I get the message across as clearly and persuasively as I would like. The issue of how we use social media for our own development as teachers and as digitally skilled individuals, is one that I believe is of vital importance though, not just because it can enable us to keep developing as teachers through the content, ideas, resources and above all people it gives us access to, but also because the way use digital media for our own development should guide and influence the way we use it with our students and build their digital literacies and communication skills. So here it is.
The Hierarchy of Professional Development Needs « It’s July and we are learning. A month usually reserved for family trips and “honey-do” lists has brought something different for our district: professional development. The fact that we are doing professional development in July, while unique to us, isn’t a new concept in educational training. However, what makes this professional development different is that rather than having the usual amount of no-shows or malcontents, we are over-capacity with enthusiasm. Social media for schools: a guide to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest • For advice on e-safety in schools, click here The use of social media in education continues to be something of a hot topic with arguments both for and against. So I carried out a small survey of 27 teaching professionals in order to create a baseline of understanding into the use (or not) of social networking in schools, and also any concerns over some of the e-safety risks.
Communities of Practice – A Framework for Learning and Improvement February 4, 2011 at 2:19 am One of the sessions at the 2011 annual meeting of Alliance for Continuing Medical Education that I was supposed to participate in was to report on the work of a “Community of Practice”. The session was canceled because an attempt to get a community established failed to materialize. So what are these things called Communities of Practice (COP)? Take a look at the graphic. It provides a good description of a COP. Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies Professional Development | Feature Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies By Bridget McCrea08/07/12 Discussing digital literacy as a way to locate, understand, organize, evaluate, and create information using digital technology is one thing, but putting the concept into motion in the college classroom isn’t always easy. With new information resources proliferating daily, and some educators reluctant to change their "old ways" of teaching and disseminating information, professional development has become a key consideration for institutions that are looking to leverage digital literacy.
Intro to communities of practice The term “community of practice” is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance.This brief and general introduction examines what communities of practice are and why researchers and practitioners in so many different contexts find them useful as an approach to knowing and learning. What are communities of practice?
Overcoming the Challenges of Social Learning in the Workplace by Shevy Levy & Jim Yupangco Social learning is a concept with significant roots in research and in theory, and it has been the basis of some educational designs for several decades. However, e-Learning design often draws more upon the notion of learning as an individual activity based on content and on delivery by an instructor or an expert. Times are changing, and with the advent of social media, e-Learning designers need to understand social learning and to adopt some best practices to support it. In the emerging view, learning is not just a transmission of “substance” from teachers to learners through a variety of pedagogical strategies. Many professionals now describe learning in terms of communication of ideas between people within a community. Traditionally, educators treated knowledge acquisition as an individual activity focused on content.
adult learning theory - CometBird Situated Learning Theory General Idea of situate learning: If you put a learner in a real world situation (authentic context) and interact with other people then learning occurs. Situated learning usually involves engaging in tasks which parallel real world applications. The goal is to improve learning by motivating students and by providing a rich context for learning. It emphasizes the context and application of knowledge rather than memorizing facts (Heeter, 2005). In 1988, Lave showed that housewives in Irvine, California who could successfully do the mathematics needed for comparison shopping were UNABLE to do the same mathematics when they were placed inside a classroom environment (Wikipedia, 2008a).
Works by title - CometBird Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. "Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice.
Learning design - CometBird Here is a draft of a peper we are writing: Gráinne Conole, Rebecca Galley and Juliette Culver, The Open University, UK Abstract This paper describes a new social networking site, Cloudworks, which has been designed to support the sharing and discussion of learning and teaching ideas and designs.
Situated learning - EduTech Wiki - CometBird This article or section is incomplete and its contents need further attention. Some sections may be missing, some information may be wrong, spelling and grammar may have to be improved etc. Use your judgment! 1 Definitions