Connected educator

This is just the beginning of the Joel Klein, Rupert Murdoch bid to take over the edu-world. Do the teachers in Guilford really want their “exclusive software designed for teaching and learning” in their practice? Do they feel so disempowered to think and act and work and learn with kids on their own that they’re ok with the district buying it for them? Is this what it’s come to?

Questions are critical, and how to manage and navigate a good question requires practice. “Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter,” say authors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in their book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions.

The hardest part about using design thinking in class is getting the question right and staying in the question. Educators regularly notice how challenging it is for students to stay in the question.  Student conversation can veer off track and the students can lose focus. It takes discipline for students to learn how to dig deep with focus on a design question.

The secret seems to lie in giving students a voice, letting them take ownership and asking them to learn skills that help them perform a “just in time” not a “just in case” authentic task.

The chapter on motivation is especially interesting. Marie and Silje relate their motivation in school to the ever important question: WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS?  The two young authors conclude that it is not just about finding ONE answer to that questions. HOW many answers one can come up with is  directly related to the degree of motivation you will experience.

The educators say this method is working for them because they’ve decided to make their classrooms mastery based, whereby “a student gets to the end of some learning unit and must pass whatever kind of assessment you have before he can move on,” Sams said — very much like competency-based learning. “There is no place for them to hide. They had to converse with me and tell me when they were ready to be assessed on something,” Sams said. When he taught in a more traditional way, Sams admitted there were students he hardly knew.

This book offers a unique insight into what students and teachers need to know in the 21stcentury classroom," says Michaelsen. "I'm extremely proud of what my English learners have accomplished and shared in this remarkable example of project learning."

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. ButRosen’s study, published in the May issue ofComputers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitaskingwhile learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.

So now I'm quite certain 21st-century learning is good teaching -- teaching that allows students to be autonomous, is authentic and allows students to take action. It will involve new technologies just as much as we use the old analogue ones, such as pencils and glue (which I still love to use.)

Learning and teaching in this century are not about preparing kids for a technological future, but simply about teaching kids how to think deeply about concepts and then apply this new knowledge, something we have been doing since the dawn of education.

Perhaps the ancient Greeks need some royalties from contemporary edu-preneurs.

My first thought when I saw VideoNotes was that it would be a great tool for students to use to take notes, ask questions, and answer questions while watching "flipped" instruction videos. You could assign a video for homework and have your students ask and or answer questions using VideoNotes. Have students share their notes with you so that you can see their questions which in turn can influence how you structure your next lesson plan.

“Some people worry that young children should not be online because they cannot be safe. Instead, I worry that young children who are isolated from social technologies will not learn HOW to be safe online. In our increasingly connected world, it is important for even five and six year olds to begin to learn what is appropriate when using technology to connect.”

TED Talks Education will present one hour of electric, emotional and thought-provoking television. The speaker program is curated by TED curator Chris Anderson, in the interest of teachers, educational administrators, parents, and students.

Due to the observations of the past few years, I have decided to create a visual that discusses the correlation of the school mindset on technology innovation in learning, and the alignment it has with administrator support, professional development, and the corresponding hardware/infrastructure within the school/classroom.  Although what I have created is not an exact science, you will often see the overall belief of the school community align with many of these practices

After eight years of teaching in a technology driven high school and after attending workshops, seminars and conferences worldwide, I thought it was bout time I challenged both my astudents and myself.

I wanted to see if it was possible to find a project that could engage every student in my 11th grade class of English learners and see if we all could work together as a team. Most of all, I wanted to see if they could produce an end product that would be authentic and involve collaboration with educators and students globally.

Students write global guide on connected learning 
A team of high-school students in Norway, who are English-language learners, has written a guide for teachers and students on how to shift from a traditional classroom environment to one in which learning is student-driven and focused largely on connectedness, their teacher Ann Michaelsen writes in this blog post. To create the interactive e-book, students consulted with peers and educators around the world through videoconferencing and a classroom professional learning network, and wrote about topics such as motivation and pedagogy, Michaelsen writes. Powerful Learning Practice/Voices from the Learning Revolution blog(5/21)

8. Model and promote risk taking.

We often talk about “promoting risk taking”, but do leaders model it?  People will not feel comfortable unless we openly share the things that we are trying to do to get better.  Every time I write a blog post, I am taking the risk of looking stupid or saying something that someone would take offensive, yet I focus on clarifying my thoughts openly since I want our community to do the same.  How can I ask it if I do not model it?

 But through this process, I’ve come to realize that there are three things that really crucial to the success of a teacher, any teacher, regardless of experience:  classroom management, pedagogy & content knowledge. And because I moved so far outside of what I knew, I had none of these anymore.

Additionally,  I knew my content well. I’d been teaching it for years.  Because of these two things, I was able to play with my pedagogy a lot. We could experiment with PBL & inquiry, problem based learning & student teaching.  We could succeed & fail because I had strength in the other two pillars.