A legitimately good collection. There are some non-surprises on here, but the list is large enough to find a gem or three. Every major subject area seems to be represented.
Redefining Instruction With Technology: Five Essential Steps
This teacher gets it, and her article perfectly summarizes my feelings on educational technology, why it fails, and why it succeeds.
My favorite was the Bonus #11:
11. Copyright and Citing Sources - students need to understand copyright laws and rules, how to cite a resource, and how to integrate someone else’s work into their’s properly.
Taking the Mystery out of Copyright
Citation Help
A few years ago, any cool kid who could read was suffering from Hogwarts Headache. The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine actually ran a letter from a physician noting the unfortunate side effect of children reading more, and for longer periods, than they ever had in their lives.
Yes, thanks to a couple extremely long (ostensibly children’s) books, an increasing number of parents brought their kids to the doctors with tension headaches. Since it is rare for children to suffer from chronic headaches like that, the doctors were stumped.
Then one pediatrician, Dr. Howard J. Bennett, finally realized that all three of the headache-ridden children he saw in one week were obsessively reading the newly released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book that runs to over a quarter of a million words. Two of his patients refused to stop reading at their current rate, instead opting for a prescription to dull the pain. He noted that, “In all cases, the pain resolved one to two days after the patient had finished the book.”
So far there have been no reported cases of Bella Blackouts or Twilight Torpor.
[Read More: From Text Neck to Hogwarts Headache: 6 Injuries for the Modern Era]
The expectation at our school is that students won’t be creating just beautiful objects; they’ll create beautifully smart and socially impactful ones.
But, the fear of literally making these designs was a bright red flag for our faculty.
Students often traced their inhibitions back to childhood when they first grew conscious of their teacher and peers’ judgment. One student vividly recalled what it was like to have a teacher title his drawing for him to avoid inevitable confusion from grown-ups. His “making trauma” was intensified when he was in fourth grade and one of his paintings mistakenly got put into a first grad art show. He didn’t win.
This condition is even more widespread the higher you go up the corporate ladder. At frog, we often engage our clients in visually creative exercises to tap their knowledge about a domain and strengthen our partnership in the design process. But, in three different collaborative work sessions that I’ve facilitated with clients in the past year, I’ve been told outright at the beginning: “I’m not good at this, so don’t expect much.”
Fascinating read over here. I suggest a click-through.
Depending on whom you ask, Rosetta Stone is either modernizing higher education or jeopardizing the quality of foreign language instruction by offering classes for transferrable college credit.
Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association and a Spanish professor, calls the idea “scandalous.”
David McAlpine, president of the board of directors for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), said teaching a Spanish class completely online threatens educational standards and leaves students floundering behind their peers in traditional courses.
But James Madison University officials say the academic demands in an online class they offer through Rosetta Stone are the same ones that students face in their Harrisonburg, Va., lecture halls. Of course, the people making these statements aren’t Spanish professors – many language professors at the university don’t like the idea, but weren’t in a position to stop it. The university’s foreign language department chair is skeptical, arguing the software is best used as extra practice for students and not a course in itself.
» via Inside Higher Ed
This would make an awesome social studies or history lesson!
It’s a short history of “Frontiers” — territories that he says have challenged humans over the centuries, arranged in roughly chronological order. Drew calls it “Frontiers Through The Ages.”
- Water, 1400
- Land, 1840
- Gold, 1850
- Wire, 1880
- Air, 1900
- Celluloid, 1920
- Plastic, 1950
- Space, 1960
- Silicon, 1980
- Networks, 1990
- Data, 2000
I know, I know, it’s much too American and very arbitrary (Christopher Columbus didn’t exactly “open” the oceans for exploration; Egyptian sailors, Minoans, Phoenicians did that, and much earlier), but still, Drew is playing a game here that’s fun, if you keep at it.
Click through for some more ideas!
An absolutely outstanding resource for K-12 educators. If you’re doing any collaborative digital work with your students, this is a must-read.
As an educator who abolished grading in 2004 and initiated a Grading Moratorium, I have an acute understanding for how grading sabotages learning. Because of this, I have drafted this letter for my daughter’s future teachers.
Dear teacher,
Kayley loves to learn and is very excited to start school this year.
Because the case against grades has a wealth of anecdotal evidence and scientific research, I am requesting that Kayley’s assessments and evaluations only include formative comments. This means that Kayley’s learning would never be reduced to a symbol (such as a number or letter). This includes individual assignments, quizzes, tests and her report card.
As a family that plays an active role in Kayley’s learning, the best feedback we can receive about Kayley’s learning is to see her learning. No reductionist data is required.
If you are interested in learning more about the case against grades, I would be happy to provide you with these resources, and if your school’s assessment and reporting policies make this request problematic, I would like the opportunity to discuss this further. Feel free to e-mail me at joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com
I look forward to working with you to support Kayley’s natural intrinsic desire to go on learning.
Sincerely,
Joe Bower
Interesting. Thoughts?
A little dry, but you’re bound to find something interesting here (and it’s all free!).
With user frustration over endlessly changing end user licensing agreements and privacy policies from the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple among others, Skipity, a startup search/discovery engine, spells everything out quite clearly.
Among their 10-point privacy policy:
1. We are the company that cares about your privacy. Specifically, while most other companies are concerned with protecting your privacy, we care about profiteering and violating it when expedient or useful.
2. You may think of using any of our programs or services as the privacy equivalent of living in a webcam fitted glass house under the unblinking eye of Big Brother: you have no privacy with us. If we can use any of your details to legally make a profit, we probably will.
5. If the opportunity arises to sell or otherwise use this or any information, data or meta data about you or your world, we will jump at that opportunity like a pitbull on a fresh steak.
9. Cookies: We like chocolate chip cookies. You agree to furnish any employee or associate of our company with fresh chocolate chip cookies upon request. That’s the price of using our programs and or services (in addition to any other price we come up with).
Always good to know where you stand before using an application or service, no?
H/T: Forbes.
Outstanding.
Adam Truitt (aka @moutainteacher) recently contacted me with an epublication that I think will be handy for school administrators. 21st Century Walkthrough is a ten page guide to using Google Docs Forms and an iPhone or iPod Touch to record and analyze school or classroom walkthrough data. The guide provides directions with screen images for setting up a form, setting up your iPhone, and analyzing the data collected.
Great free resource over here!
Deborah S. DeCiantis, Ph.D., associate professor of English, North Greenville University
A great read if you’ve got a few minutes. Here’s an excerpt:
At the end of the first course I taught solo, I asked students for their frank opinions of what was working and what could work better. I didn’t want to wait for anonymous evaluations, which don’t afford dialogue or collaboration. The first pushback was a strong request for more project-based collaboration, shared earlier in the semester. From the beginning, I had asked students to use the tools we were studying and using — social bookmarking, forum discussions, blog posts and comment threads, collaboratively edited wiki documents — to organize team projects of four to six students. The first year I tried this, we discovered that four students work better than six for a semester-long project — division of labor, intra-group communication, assessment, and the nature of the final presentation rapidly grow more complex with more than four collaborators. When teams presented their projects at the end of the term, we were all so astounded that one student astutely asked (to general acclamation): “Why can’t we show each other this kind of collaboration earlier than the last class meeting?” We had learned that learning to collaborate ought to be collaborative — the teams should interact with the other students in the class as co-responsible learners during the collaboration process, not just as an audience for the final product.
Well I think that title sums it up pretty well.
I’m in the same category as the Gibbs.
Updated earlier today!
The mysterious SocProf, who writes The Global Sociology Blog, offered a nice review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett‘s book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Wilkinson and Pickett offer transnational research showing how, exactly, income inequality is related to bad outcomes on average. In other words, as SocProf puts it, ”…egalitarianism is not a bleeding heart’s wet dream but rather the only rational course of action in terms of public policy.” The 11 graphs, available at the Equality Trust website, speak for themselves.
Societies with more income inequality have:
- Higher infant death rates
- Higher rates of mental illness
- Higher incidence of drug use
- Higher school drop out rates
- Imprison a larger proportion of their population
- Higher rate of obesity
- Individuals are less likely to be in a different social class than their parents
- Trust others less
- Higher rates of homicide
- Give less in foreign aid
- Worse child well-being
If you’re in the USA guess where your numbers skew…
This this this this this this this this THIS.
THIS.
Want to know the biggest indicator of academic success? It’s not a test score. It’s THIS.
