Blog » It’s Not About the Tools. It’s About the Skills Many times, I see eyes glazing over, when I excitedly speak with parents or administrators about blogging, skyping or podcasting with students. Many of them, unfamiliar with the tools, will immediately feel uncomfortable. Some will automatically and immediately steer the conversation back to what they know: What about learning the basics, like reading, writing, math and science? I usually try to explain and emphasize, that these skills are precisely what are being taught. We are not podcasting in order to teach Audacity nor Garageband. Parents and administrators, unfamiliar with the tools, also seem worried that “important” academic time is being lost and wasted! In an attempt to explain that there is so much more involved when using technology tools, I blogged a few months ago, We Podcasted Today So, did you learn anything? Take a look at the visuals below: Podcasting Skill Video Conferencing Skills Blogging Skills Wiki Skills Digital Storytelling Disclaimer: Podcasting Skills
Eric Mazur on new interactive teaching techniques In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Mazur tried the test on his own students. Some soul-searching followed. Serendipity provided the breakthrough he needed. “Here’s what happened,” he continues. “It’s not easy.
The seven secrets behind great teaching - Features - TES Connect Teaching skills: ways to help improve teacher’s effectiveness Comment:3.5 average rating | Comments (46)Last Updated:7 March, 2014Section:Features What makes the good stand out from the rest? Stephen Covey’s business self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has sold more than 15 million copies. The book lists seven principles that, if adopted as habits, can help people become truly effective at what they do. The TES magazine teamed up with business psychologists Crelos to analyse the personalities, motivations and behaviour of 15 award-winning teachers to uncover the seven habits that make them successful in the classroom. How the research worked We chose our research group to represent a cross-section of the teaching population - from teaching assistants, primary and secondary teachers to heads, who were assessed through a series of tests and interviews. 1. For one headteacher, building confidence is part of her personal and professional ethos. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
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.
The Ultimate STEM Guide for Kids: 239 Cool Sites 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.
Defined STEM Critical Steps Toward Modernizing Graduate STEM Education | Issues in Science and Technology By Alan I. Leshner, Layne Scherer Maintaining US leadership in graduate STEM education will require a focus on a wider range of skills beyond those needed for academic research. The US system for graduate education in science and engineering is widely regarded as the best—or at least among the best—in the world, as evidenced in part by the many thousands of students from other countries who come to the United States each year for their graduate training. Why has there been so much inertia in the system, and what needs to be done and by whom to help make the graduate STEM education system move forward? Central to making any pervasive change in STEM graduate education will be significant attitudinal, behavioral, and cultural changes throughout the system. An ideal graduate program What would an ideal graduate education look like, and what actions need to be taken to begin to approach that ideal? Local control makes systemic change difficult Academic incentives are critical Change is under way
How Do You Teach Students to Love STEM? | Powtoon Blog Read Time: 5 minutes In recent years, STEM has been gaining traction, not only in the classroom, but EVERYWHERE that curious, young minds dwell. Ironically though, such a popular term comes rife with misunderstanding. If you ask any teacher or instructor what STEM means, you’ll often hear answers that reflect “the importance of science in EDU,” rather than the nature of STEM itself. Students, on the other hand, offer the literal meaning of the term (an acronym expanded), “S is for science, T is for technology, E is for engineering, and M is for math.” Neither response was good enough for Trina. Say Hello to Trina Coleman! Trina is a doctor of theoretical nuclear physics, founder of Coleman Comprehensive Solutions (a partnership that maximizes educational resources), host of Beyond the Classroom (an HBCUI radio broadcast) — and implementor of the Academic Blue Blood STEM Camp. Tackling the Meaning of STEM Trina’s Plan From Plan to Reality: STEM Camp at the Y.H. What does STEM mean? Howdy!