This video speaks for itself.
I offer my sincere thanks to the many, many teachers that dedicate their lives to the well-being of their students.
Hat Tip to Robert Allen Moody
(Repost from 06/11/2007)
Event Tags: FOL2013, hgsepzfol
Anshul Samar is the CEO of Elementeo, a startup company seeking to combine fun and learning. This article provides an overview of the company’s goals, video of Anshul’s CEO speech, and a description of the company’s first game which teaches chemistry through a role-playing board game.
This is interesting to me on many different levels. Watching the video of Anshul’s CEO speech gives me the impression that this may have actually been a class project. Regardless, couldn’t a student activity like this be the jumping-off point for effectively integrating technology with teaching and learning?
I think this could be a rich discussion. Please, please chime in.
I’m teaching a special topics seminar in the spring for graduate students (3 hours graduate credit). The topic will be Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Technologies. While we’ll consider common trends and issues and survey many of the popular tools and services related to Web 2.0, the heart of the course will be learning to effectively integrate Web 2.0 technologies and principles with teaching and learning. The focus will be on K-12 education but accommodations can be made for individuals from other fields (healthcare, corporate, military, higher education, etc.).
I’m very excited about this class. I taught the course in Summers 2008 and 2009 and we learned a lot and had a blast! You can view the ebook (authored by the graduate students) and other course materials that emerged from these sections to get an idea of what this class will be like.
In keeping with the principles of Web 2.0 I encourage the participation of everyone with an interest or expertise in this topic. You may contribute to the discussion and fun by using the following tag/keyword: idt7078. Be on the lookout for ways (Ustream, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Hangouts, etc.) to informally participate with us.
You can learn more about registration at the University of Memphis website.
“DIY is a club for kids to earn Skills. DIY Makers share their work with the community and get patches for the Skills they earn. Each Skill consists of a set of Challenges that help them learn techniques to get the hang of it. Once a Maker completes a Challenge, they add photos and video to their Portfolio to show what they did.
Makers are curious about the world and strive to learn all kinds of practical knowledge and share it. They seek adventure in the outdoors, participate in communities, use technology to innovate, and have the confidence to try new things” (Source).
Take a look at DIY.org and consider the positive impact it can make in your family, classroom, club, civic group, etc.
“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy,
and we should treat it with the same status.”
–Sir Ken Robinson
“This month, the U.S. Department of Education kicked off Connected Educator Month, with engaging keynotes, panel discussions, book chats, and more. During this month, educators in the U.S. and globally will have opportunities to connect themselves and their communities, online and in-person, to support their professional practice. The timing couldn’t be better, as most teachers are preparing to hit the ground running as they gear up for back-to-school!
While the idea of being or becoming a connected educator is important, as a new teacher, this may seem completely overwhelming” (Source). Edutopia has compiled tips and resources to help you begin your journey.
I’d be glad to connect with you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Diigo Bookmarks, Diigo Groups, and more.
Gary Rubinstein suggests 10 actions teachers should consider avoiding. He teaches math at Stuyvesant High School in New York City and is the author of Beyond Survival. While many in education recommend stating rules and guidelines positively, Gary argues that “it’s a lot more efficient to learn a few mistakes that you should avoid than to learn all the things you should do right. When I compare my awful first year with my very successful second year, the main difference was not so much what I did as what I didn’t do. Here are 10 rookie teacher mistakes I wish I’d avoided.”
I recommend that you look over Gary’s list of 10 tips, not because I completely agree with everything in the article (because I don’t), as a means for kicking-off an important conversation about effective practice – something educators should do on an ongoing basis (reflective practitioner).
The Don’ts and Don’ts of Teaching
Gary Rubinstein
I’m a big fan of goal setting. It can provide a road map for the short or long-term and can be an effective motivational strategy. I have set a few professional development goals for this summer and have challenged a few of my friends/colleagues to do the same thing. In 2008 I realized that I could set this up as a blog meme and hopefully encourage some of my online friends to achieve a few items from their To Do Lists as well. There are a myriad of ways to approach this, but I’ve opted to take the short-term, easy-to-assess approach, but I’ll leave wiggle room for you to customize it to meet your needs. The official information is below.
Image Source: http://dcrasyep09.files.wordpress.com
Directions
Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2012 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.
Guidelines
NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.
My Goals
I Tag…
America’s future teachers are invited to participate in the “Speak Up 2012 Survey for America’s Future Teachers” to share your ideas about teaching.
Speak Up, a national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow®, gives individuals the opportunity to share their viewpoints about key issues in K-12 education.
Any college student, who is participating in a degree or credential program that will prepare them for a career as a K-12 teacher, is eligible to take the survey, regardless of prior student teaching experience.
Speak Up for America’s Future Teachers is facilitated through online surveys and will be aggregated at the national and institution level. All of the data is 100% confidential and no specific institutional findings will be shared with anyone outside of the participating college or university.
Participate in “Speak Up 2012 Survey for America’s Future Teachers” and share your ideas about teaching.
Harvard’s Project Zero: Part 2
One of the principles that is of major emphasis at Project Zero is teaching for understanding. The following video is loosely connected with this idea. I intend to go into greater depth about teaching for understanding in upcoming posts in this series.
“You can forget facts,
but you can not forget understanding.”
— Eric Mazur, Harvard University
“How can you engage your students and be sure they are learning the conceptual foundations of a lecture course? In From Questions to Concepts, Harvard University Professor Eric Mazur introduces Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time teaching — two innovative techniques for lectures that use in-class discussion and immediate feedback to improve student learning. Using these techniques in his innovative undergraduate physics course, Mazur demonstrates how lectures and active learning can be successfully combined” (Source).
NOTE: This video is also available as part of another DVD, Interactive Teaching, which contains advice on using peer instruction and just-in-time teaching to promote better learning.
For more videos on teaching, visit the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University.
The Floating University is a new educational media venture that creates and distributes online multimedia curricula, rich in text, video, animation and graphics, that feature today’s biggest thinkers, practitioners and leading scholars.
Their video lectures “are paired with related texts to introduce complex multidisciplinary subjects in an entertaining and engaging way. Whether you’re a life long learner or a current university student, [their] goal is to take you on a journey of discovery into myriad disciplines — to let you explore unfamiliar territory in a new light — and to pose questions that will encourage critical thinking and robust debate.
For schools, they “aim to invert the traditional lecture model of learning to focus valuable classroom time on interaction, exchange, and discussion, rather than on the passive consumption of live, in-person lectures” (Source).
The Floating University launched last fall with an online course offered at Harvard, Yale and Bard and delivered the key takeaways of an entire undergraduate education. Learn more in this short video.
Disrupting Education: There Are No Boundaries to Knowledge Anymore
This clip/commercial has really gotten in my head. I keep thinking about the juxtaposition of traditional education, innovation, reform, media and technology that this represents. I see this as a sort of a microcosm of what so many of us are talking about and involved in education. In this clip we see a disruptive innovation, online and/or hybrid learning, and some would argue that the classroom has been flipped. I see connections between this delivery platform and the notion that some have that failing schools would improve if they had access to the best teachers. In higher education reports indicate that more and more students are preferring the perceived flexibility of online courses and institutions are strategically planning how they intend to respond.
I’m also really curious to see how interactive and engaging the courses are and how effective they are at promoting creativity and critical thinking. These terms are used frequently on the site and in this video. I also noticed on the website that everything is optimized for use on the iPad which could open the door for interesting opportunities related to engagement. However, I often see teachers, schools, and institutions make similar claims under the pervasive but misguided notion that the very act of using technology makes instruction more effective and more engaging while automatically promoting higher levels of thinking. That just isn’t accurate. Given the reputations of the universities and lecturers involved as well as the feature-rich and content-rich Floating University and Big Think websites I’m going to speculate that they are doing at least a respectable job, and perhaps even better, in these areas. I would enjoy the opportunity to view and experience the Floating University’s courses for myself. The idea of “robust debate” in an online class sounds like fun to me!
Change is in the air. I wonder how all of this will play out over the next few years and subsequent decades. We’ll we resolve these matters or will they have to be solved by the next generation(s) of educators? Perhaps you’ll share your reactions to the the Floating University and to some of the thoughts I have shared.
