World-Shaker

Ken Robinson: How to escape education’s death valley

Overblown students’ egos ignore teachers’ expertise

A challenging article. Here’s an excerpt:

“Ditching the teacher-centred, authoritarian pedagogy many mature academics were trained in…seemed like a good idea,” she writes. “Promoting active and engaged students, appealing to student interest and promoting a more community-based and democratic enterprise made sense.”

However, today’s student-led learning environment, which stresses the importance of student voices and experiences, has led to a loss of teachers’ authority within the classroom, she contends.

Teachers report widespread resistance to critical feedback or evaluation, with students asserting that all opinions are equally valid and dismissing their instructor’s in-depth knowledge of a subject, Dr Watters says.

“If we and our pedagogy encourage such high opinions of student work, can we really be surprised when they take us at our word?” she asks.

Clips from “Yuck” - Battle of the Salads

So a 4th grader took a camera to his school for six months straight to record the quality of his school lunch. Then he made a documentary out of it.

(by Maxwell Project)

Minute Hacks: 5 Things You Can Do With A USB Thumb Drive

(by Hack College)

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The ‘Componentized’ School of the Future, Built in 90 Days

Project Frog built a school in a warehouse.

Or at least, part of a school. The “componentized” building company — Frog management dislikes the terms “prefab” and “modular” — put up a life-size model of one classroom, a hall, and a couple other rooms in their warehouse on a San Francisco pier.

It was a trial run for the first school in Frog’s new line, which it calls the “Impact” platform — a quickly erected, easily reproducible, cost-saving approach to schoolhouse construction that will allow schools to include advanced facilities that are unaffordable with current building techniques.

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Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick

“Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. “It’s a gift, you either have it or you don’t. And that it’s most indicative of your intelligence.” This attitude presents an especially sticky problem to educators working to boost girls’ interest and passion for science, technology, engineering and math – STEM subjects. For many boys, believing math is a fixed ability doesn’t hamper achievement — they just assume they have it, Dweck said. But girls don’t seem to possess that same confidence, and in their efforts to achieve perfection, Dweck’s research shows they shy away from subjects where they might fail.

“We have research showing that women who believe math is an acquired set of skills, not a gift you have or don’t have, fare very well,” Dweck said. “Even when they have a period of difficulty and even when they’re in an environment that they say is full of negative stereotyping.” This research suggests parents and educators should rethink what implicit and explicit messages are being sent to young girls about achievement.

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Tetris can help correct lazy eye: researchers

Now researchers at McGill University in Montreal are testing an innovative means of improving visual function in adults with lazy eye — a puzzle video game that forces both eyes to work together to overcome the common condition.

In a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, the researchers compared the use of the online video game Tetris with patching, a treatment in which the “good” eye is covered for a lengthy period of time. The idea is to make the weak eye do all the visual work in the hope of strengthening its acuity.

"A first study of 357 children found that the lower a child’s self-esteem, the more the balance of praise tended to tip toward personal — intuitively, adults seem to want to bolster these children’s self-esteem and do so with encouraging words aimed at personal traits that seem lacking. In fact, kids with low self-esteem got more than twice as much person praise than kids with high self-esteem — 30 percent and 14 percent of total praise, respectively. But then a second study of 313 children found that this personal praise predisposed children with low self-esteem to feel even more ashamed following failure. In kids with high self-esteem? Person praise didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help either."

— Kids With Low Self-Esteem: The Parental Praise Paradox

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Google launches an Inactive Account Manager to help users plan their ‘digital afterlife’

Google has launched a new tool called Inactive Account Manger today, which is designed to help users protect or delete their data in the event that they pass away or can no longer access their account.

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Read 20 Great Books in 2 Minutes, Emoji Style

The one in the picture is 1984 by George Orwell

Ten Things Educators Should Know About Introverted Students →

Spotted on Cool Cat Teacher’s Facebook page. A great read. Here are two:

Introverts have the capability to succeed in a large group setting, but it’s more draining for us

Just because our innate preference is to be alone or in small groups, it does not mean we cannot succeed in larger groups. We absolutely can, it’s just important for you to understand that it requires us to get out of our comfort zone and is energetically draining for us. Of course, it’s important that we learn to get out of our comfort zone in order to succeed in life, so large group activities will play an important role in our educational development.

However, please be mindful that getting out of our comfort zone is stressful and will impact students differently depending on their age. Consider limiting the time dedicated to large-group activities during any one class, and give us a clear role in the group to minimize stress. The more uncertainty you take away (which often comes in large-group activities when there is no clear leader or defined role/objective, or a lack of supervision by the teacher), especially at a younger age, the less stressful it is for us to be out of our comfort zone. If introverted students learn over time that they can be successful in this type of environment, even though it’s not their comfort zone, they will be more confident and adaptable as they move to college and then out into the world.

Introverts love stories and excel at storytelling

Stories invite us to revel in the world of images and ideas we sincerely love, so give us the chance to do this as much as possible, and allow us the chance to share the stories in our heads with you. Introverted students will be more passionate about getting up in front of class to share a story than to recite historical facts, for example. If history is the topic, let us tell a story about something historical that happened and you’ll discover our ability to relay details and facts becomes much deeper and richer and allows us to shine. Encourage us to see this strength within us as much as possible and to work to hone it.

And Now a Few Notes on Plagiarism →

futurejournalismproject:

Over at Poynter, Roy Peter Clark argues that “serious acts of literary theft have been mixed up with trivial ones. Carelessness has been mislabeled as corruption. Clear norms of personal morality and professional ethics have been confused with standards and practices.”

He’s writing, in part, against the backdrop of what Craig Silverman calls journalism’s Summer of Sin, which, in 2012 saw the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Boston Globe, Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer among many others getting caught for plagiarizing.

Clark though thinks we’re oftentimes too quick to throw the P-word around, and doing so in many instances is like “shooting a fly with a bazooka”:

Too scrupulous an ethic on plagiarism will lead, I fear, to witch hunts. Plagiarism — along with its cousin fabrication — should be policed. The punishments for wrongdoers should be harsh. But the word plagiarism should be confined to clear-cut cases of literary and journalistic fraud.

So here are ten practices Clark believes are not plagiarism. Be sure to read through for his explanations of each:

1. The so-called act of “self-plagiarism” is not plagiarism.
2. So called “patch writing” — as long as it credits sources — is not plagiarism.
3. Inadequate paraphrasing of a credited source is not plagiarism.
4. Use of a clever or apt phrase — up to the level of the sentence — is not plagiarism as long as you thought of it independently, even if you find that others have used it before.
5. Literary allusions — even a mosaic of esoteric ones — are not plagiarism.
6. Boilerplate descriptions of news, history, or background are not plagiarism.
7. Ghost writing is not plagiarism.
8. Writing for genres — such as the legal brief or the sermon — in which there is a long tradition of borrowing without attribution is not plagiarism.
9. Copying from other writers in what are considered collaborative ventures –newsrooms, wire services, press releases, textbook authorship — is not plagiarism.
10. Copying from or borrowing the general ideas and issues that are emerging as part of the zeitgeist is not plagiarism.

Yes, he says, there are ethical boundaries in the above, but they should be seen and treated as such, and not labelled with a Scarlet P.

Roy Peter Clark, Poynter. Why we should stop criminalizing practices that are confused with plagiarism.

And, yes, I structured this to push Clark’s point. — Michael

Definitely a fascinating take. I’m curious to see what educators would think about something like this…

"

In a traditional classroom, when a teacher asks a question, “Who can tell me … ?” usually four or five hands go up. The teacher will call on one student, and perhaps on another few to see if their answers agree with the first, but the teacher will have no way of knowing what is going on in the heads of the other 20 students.

The kinesthetic teacher has a different approach. “Show me … ” Twenty-five students are being asked to respond physically to the question: Show me what comes first, the comma or the closed quotation mark. Show me if this is a series or parallel circuit. Show me an animal that lives in the rainforest; show me how the character feels just before the story’s climax. Immediately, all of the students respond, and their learning is made visible. They have to think about what they are going to do, and literally take a stand. If they want to change their answer, they don’t have to erase anything, they just change their pose. Rather than calling attention to the “mistake,” the focus is on the “re-take,” which lessens the fear of failure that is so prevalent among students today—and teachers can give immediate feedback to students (formative assessment) rather than waiting for a weekly or unit test.

"

— The Power of Movement in Teaching and Learning

"I think we’re all impressed by how stupid humans are,” remarked James Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, who holds degrees in philosophy and linguistics from Stanford. “It reaches almost epic proportions. We’re stupid in dozens and dozens of ways. “But human minds are plug-and-play devices; they’re not meant to be used alone. They’re meant to be used in networks.” Games allow us to do that – they allow us to use what Gee calls “collective intelligence.” Collectively, we’re not so stupid."

— Using games as an educational tool provides opportunities for deeper learning, panelists at Stanford event say

"Google announced … that it has added a feature to its image search tool that will allow users to search for animated GIFs."

—

Google Now Allows You To Search Solely For Animated GIFs

Remember when animated GIFs were eyesores reserved for GeoCities pages? 

(via interestingsnippets)