Thinking, Learning, and Laughing

Useful report, particularly the recommendation for more collaboration between educators.

Collaboration should be coveted in schools

It looks very helpful and practical. We cannot be expert in all things digital.

Need to look into this... I love it when people take the strain off by finding sites for me.

Thanks for the great list of tools. Symbaloo itself is a great one for using with students. I try to use a small set at a time with children.

Thank you for sharing

Kind of a superset of Kolb!

Thanks for the translation!

Get your laugh on today--it is contagious! 

several great images

Facinating! The comments on this piece also are interesting.

Hmmmmm.......

I have been using text to speech almost exclusively for reading articles on the web, newspapers, and courese reading for a course in Leadership I am taking at Case Western Reserve University. I love the e-readers ( Read and Write Gold; Kindle, and Audio books)  because I can jack up the speed and read with my ears as fast as non dyslexics who are fluent readers read with their eyes. We need to understand the 'cost' of eye reading to dyslexic students even when they "graduate" from OG or Wilson: the burden of phonological processing is too high in terms of fatigue. If we don't make the technology more available and acceptable in schools we will deny intelligent students with print challenges the opportunity to study in college, graduate or professional schools. 

I still read paper books.  Right now I am reading  A light in August by Faulkner. It is on my night stand and it is a wonderful if slow experience for me. For some, print will never 'fall away' and allow for effortless decoding and pholonological recoding.--Lou  

Excerpt:

"Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision..."

Right, this is a topic I've been thinking and working with a lot lately. The authors discuss this as a tool for secondary school (mostly), but the principles apply equally to adult learners and collaboration, learning communities and communities of practice.

The reference list is also a valuable resource. More to add to my reading list...

Robin Good's insight:

Paul Mihailidis, has an interesting essay on "Exploring Curation as a Core Competency in Digital an Media Literacy Education" in which he offers "a prospective attempt to build curation into the media literacy conversation..." by analyzing the analyzing effective curation practices, and six highly relevant teaching points for using a news curation tool like Storify in the classroom.

His essay "seeks to encourage instructors, particularly on secondary and tertiary education levels, to bridge the gap between informal learning outside of the classroom with formal learning to create a more dynamic place for students to advance critical inquiry, dialogue, and engagement through new forms of content creation, curation, and dissemination."

He writes: "Through student-driven, creation-driven, collective and integrated teaching approaches to curation, the framework aims to build towards savvy media consumption and production, critical evaluation and analysis, and participation in local, national and global dialog.

The framework also addresses the ability to see diversity and civic voice as core competencies in the curation process.

As students learn to build cohesive stories and ideas from a wide variety of sources, they can learn about the diverse types of content that inform a story, and the avenues they have-through social media tools and platforms-to be part of the discussion."

Curation can be an extremely effective approach to develop critical thinking skills and practices, as it forces students to evaluate, vet, verify and decide what really matters.

"When students develop a credible list of professional and personal sources around an issue and/or event, they must acknowledge how much subjective weight they place on a tweet, a blog, or a Facebook post and in relative comparison to an advocacy group, cable television operation, or news service. Arguing for the credibility of a myriad of voices online forces students to build valuable justifications for what they choose to believe, and why."

Informative. Examples-rich. Educationally useful. 8/10

Full essay: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2013-02/html

I am very excited to find this work to share with my teachers. I continue to get pushback as I try to encourage them to allow time for students to curate.  The fact of the matter is that true curation takes time, but the skills gained by students cannot be ignored, and research and critical analysis are found throughout the Common Core Standards. Curation is also a pathway to personalized learning as students pursue their own areas of interest through the art of curation.

21st century education expects collaboration not just among students but also amongst teachers to improve learning outcomes.

Great for ETE class!

love it. a great list for our teachers/lecturers and learning designers to think through

Ένα ωραίο άρθρο για τη λειτουργία του νου.

interesting article that i myself can relate to in the classroom.  I have my kids doing occasional exercise in my year 8 Mathematics class and the benefits of how the classes respond after a brief exercise break is fasinating.  Alas I have not done this as much with my older students...i need to break out of this model for my senior students!

A valuable insight! Careful not to misuse it!