Online education is growing rapidly. Recently, six new universities have been added to the edX platform. Each new university plans to develop its own set of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Between the big three — edX, Coursera, and Udacity — there are now hundreds of MOOCs from universities all over the world. Advocates are quick to highlight that these MOOCs have already served millions of students, enabling anyone with an Internet connection to receive a world-class education.
tags: authenticedtech
Today, following up on his call to action, the President is announcing major progress toward realizing the ConnectED goal to get high-speed Internet connectivity and educational technology into classrooms, and into the hands of teachers trained on its advantages. The FCC and private sector are taking key steps to answer the President’s call, including through:
tags: authenticedtecheducation
What rules do instructional designers rely on to solve design problems? What insights become patterns for future use?
Know your learners
Determine what it is you want your learners to perform after the instructional experience. What is the criterion for successful performance?
"Sometimes, an interesting project gets started unexpectedly. That’s what happened with SlaveryStories.org, a new, collaborative digital project that launched February 3, just as Black History Month began."
tags: historyauthenticplneducation
"Your smartphone camera is one the ultimate lifehack tools. We’ve already taken a look at four ways you can be making better use of your smartphone camera to turn your smartphone into a makeshift scanner, a memory aid, and more, and today we’re at it again."
tags: authenticplneducation
"Our version of Hirsch. The entire Mission Hill school studies ancient Egypt at the same time (kindergarten through 7th grade) for two to three months, and the next year ancient Greece, followed by ancient China, followed by some particular early South American culture. "
tags: benefitssubjectsubject mattereducationplnauthentic
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
As the 21st century moves forward we begin to see more learners creating and taking control of their PLN. How often do we talk about learning networks with kids in the public education system? Do we help them build their own learning networks beyond the classroom walls?
The more we learn about learning, the further we seem to be getting away from the primary teaching lessons of the past. Lectures, although necessary, are no longer the focus of teaching methodology. Today’s methods seem to be relying on more collaborative and authentic learning. Actually doing and making, as opposed to having descriptions and theories delivered by lectures, is a shift, which is taking place in education today. Critical thinking, always addressed to some extent in learning, is now becoming more prominent in education.
While many undergraduates were preparing to move in for the Spring semester, 100 students contemplated solutions to educational challenges in India and the United States.
This year’s Winter Forum, titled Rethink Education: The Innovation Challenge, featured speeches from two former North Carolina governors—Jim Hunt and Bev Perdue. The three-day forum—hosted by the Center for Child and Family Policy at the Fuqua School of Business—allowed students to work with experts in education to create proposals to eliminate common problems in the field. At its conclusion Tuesday, groups of about eight students presented their solutions and winning teams were announced.What do you think?
tags: educationpblibl
"Ira Socol says:
If your school, and your school day, is not about students collaborating, connecting, and building knowledge and understandings together, why would anyone come?
Serious question. If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an “expert,” they have no reason to come to school. They can do a lot better at home, or at their local coffee shop, or even the public library, where both the coffee and the WiFi connection will be better."
tags: educationiblpbl
"With or without the guidance and support of educators and parents, students across the globe are developing and building their personal learning networks. Knowing how to do so effectively is a key to successful learning independence.
Below you will hear from Courtney Gressman. A young lady in the midst of building a learning network to help open the eyes of educators to students feelings about school and learning. Read on to discover how this has impacted her as well as how both her teacher and mother supported this work.
"
tags: educationpbliblpln
"n the spring, thousands of students across the state will become guinea pigs as they take a new national assessment exam for the first time.
Nearly two-thirds of 647,700 students in grades 3 through 11 will test a portion of the PARCC, or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers exam, that is being rolled out with the new national Common Core education standards which 18 states, including Massachusetts, have adopted."
tags: testexameducationpblibl
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
What is it? This summary of research on Project Based Learning also appears in the BIE book PBL for 21st Century Success. It provides a quick look at key studies showing PBL's positive effects on student academic achievement, mastery of 21st century competences such as problem-solving and critical thinking, addressing the needs of diverse learners and closing achievement gaps, and increasing students' motivation to learn.
"Your textbook is just another tool in your teachers’ kit of ways to engage learners. The problem is that for many of us it becomes a crutch when we first begin our planning. The textbook can be very useful for planning our curriculums and lessons."
Reading is far to often a challenge for learners. Though they may be able to pronounce, identify and understand the words on the page, true literate reading in which learners are able to create meaning and understanding from text is a complex task. Schools are inundated with reading programs the majority of which are designed around traditional paper bound texts or printed sheets.
However, more and more often educators and learners are turning to digital formats for classroom and homework reading. Digital media represents a cost effective and open system that allow learners access to their own interest as well as a wealth of content information. That torrent of information can quickly become an impenetrable labyrinth for learners of any experience level. Finding good and reliable tools and strategies to aid learners is made more difficult when services close down or change pay structures making them unusable.
There are a few reliable strategies that make all of this manageable for both educators and learners. Learners need to develop sound search strategies. Google Power Search is an open course that demonstrates many of the lesser known capabilities of what the Google Search page can do for learning. Specific searches such as Google Scholar bring academic and professional research to younger learners and give them access to content experts.
Good search techniques can bring learners to the information that they need, but once there new digital literacies begin to effect a learners ability to deal with that information. Learners are quickly confronted with not only the text but multiple images, videos, colored links and advertisements specifically designed to draw there attention and pleading them for a mouse click. As learners hyper-navigate their way from one link to another they begin to use up valuable class and study time clicking and scanning without making good judgments about the accuracy and value of the content of the sites that they are visiting. Collecting and curating information amid all the distractions is vital to developing good digital reading techniques. Educators promote quite distraction free environments and good note taking or reading journals for learners while the read printed texts. Those same strategies are also important to digital reading.
Before Readability
Apps that limit images and advertising, such as Readability and Evernote Clearly help to limit the online distractions. These services strip away all of the distraction through a browser app leaving the text free of most images and ads. The links that remain can be managed through the right mouse click "open in a new tab" option that lets the reader open the link that they want to follow without breaking the learner's reading flow. By encouraging learners to read one page at a time, they can continue to use their print reading strategies to full effect.
After Readability
Many educators encourage learners to read print media with a highlighter or pencil so that they can mark up documents in order to increase comprehension. When reading from a screen a physical writing utensil will not mark a digital document. The simplest solution to this is a notebook in which students hand write questions, thoughts and content notes. These physical notes make it difficult for learners to keep track of links, images and make video impossible to record except by written description.
Bookmarking, markup, and notebook software digitizes this important digital reading process. When reading online it is vital that learners become good curators of information. Organizing resources for learning so that they may return to them for later is an important strategy for digital reading and learning. There are several good digital notebook services online including Evernote and Springpad each with web clipping tools that allow learners to tag and collect information directly from websites to a personal notebook. Sringpad has an additional social aspect that learners find useful in which they can send invitations for whole notebooks or individual notes to other learners or they can make them public and can create online discussions around content ideas, issues, or problems. Both services are user friendly enough to grow with the learner. Regardless of educational level anyone can benefit from learning and developing digital reading strategies.
The simple truth of reading online is that there is too much information for anyone to take in all at once. Learners must learn to read in a multidemensional format that allows them to navigate deeply into the text at the touch of a button. Young learners must read with a skeptical mind and to dig for detail, never assuming that the first link from a search engine is the best or most effective answer to their person content questions. They must learn to collect and curate information and to process it into their own creation while giving credit to those sources that made their work possible. As learning become more social in the 21st century digital notebooks and collection of information will become the new currency of the digital realm. Are we readying learners to profit from this?
Recently Jeff Howard tweeted a link to Sophia Mavridi's wonderful article "We need pedagogy, not just cool tools." which reminded me how easy it is to get so enamored with some new tech toy that I forget about the reasons why am using it. Every piece of physical technology or digital tool that comes into my class has to fit into the intricate puzzle that is an 8th grade inquiry based social science class. Strangely, when learners are working well within the system that they and I have hammered out they know how to reshape the pieces just enough to make just about anything fit.
Take into account the number of new tools developed each month and attempting to learn them all as a class would be impossible. The more tools that are presented to learners the fewer they master as a group, however that can lead to a diverse cohort of cooperative skills that create a system of collaboration and team work that is more akin to many modern business models. Wait, stop. That might actually be a good thing. Digital tools come, get altered, stale like bread, become redundant, go out of fashion, get bought by that company I hate, raise their prices, and or disappear all together, sometimes in the course of a year.
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye. (Michelangelo)
These issues have created two models for technology integration in the Authentic Classroom which are often put to work simultaneously. The Design First method asks learners to research, think, ideate, and create through a modeling process before that get any where near the computer. Ideas are drawn shared discussed and edited on paper or dry erase surfaces well before learners sit down at a computer to build there digital version. Setting down with the model in hand makes digital work much more efficient. The Tech Spec (technology specialty) method asks each learner to develop a finite tool kit of simple, yet creative, research input and product output tools that help them learn and demonstrate that learning. All of our learners have Google Drive accounts which provide them with basic word process, database and presentation capabilities. In addition to the basic tools each learner is encouraged to develop skill in others that best fit the project or product that he or she is making. When a learner expresses interest in a new tool he or she is asked to experiment with it and to find tutorials and examples from others to ensure that is will meet their needs. Then the learner must produce two or more projects with the tool before they can add another.
Digital tools are treated like any other tools that a creative person uses. The process is similar to the maker movement in engineering and electronics. It is that type of Making that we are working towards. Silvia Martinez and Gary Stager have created a fantastic look into modern engineering based Making in the classroom, but even that very science centered format transforms easily over to social science when learners are actively investigation history, anthropology, physiology and economics in order to build cultural and social reconstructions from historic evidence. Using technology to develop the research and to analyse information creates time for deeper though construction, Adding the technology to the end production enables them to "make" there Ideas visible to the world.
Ultimately, the real test of any technological tool rests in four questions. Does it enable better research and thinking? Does it enable my design idea to become real? Is it usable, reliable, and if possible free? Can I share it with others for collaboration and presentation?
