Tag: Learning

Making Thinking Visible with Technology at #TNLEAD

Workshop Description

Visible Thinking from Project Zero at Harvard University includes methods for making students’ thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher. Visible Thinking makes extensive use of learning routines that are thinking rich. Thinking Routines are mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life. These routines encourage the development of a culture of thinking and can be used across all grade levels and content areas.

Workshop participants will learn to develop opportunities for students to make their thinking visible with technology. With freely available technologies students can engage in Thinking Routines and provide evidence of their thinking and demonstrate their understanding of course content in multiple ways (images, audio, video, presentations, artwork, and more). When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students’ thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students’ thinking by starting from where they are.

Strategies for designing lessons and practical tips for implementation will be shared.

Introduction

The content of this professional development workshop builds on the research and work of Project Zero at Harvard University. Participants will be introduced to Making Thinking Visible and the use of the Visible Thinking Routines. This is a research-based approach to integrating the development of students’ thinking with content learning across subject areas and grade levels. Before we begin focusing on technology integration, it is important that we have a framework of understanding for these topics as we will build on them later.

  • Making Thinking Visible – Visible Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering students’ intellectual development at the same time
  • Visible Thinking Routines – Thinking routines are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life.

Workshop Resources

You can view the workshop slides by clicking below. The handouts, resources, and in depth information are also available.

Making Thinking Visible with Technology

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hgsepzfol #hgsepzfol

Sounds Good to Me: Learning and Digital Audio #edtech #mlearning

Yesterday I had the opportunity to teach a workshop as part of our IDT Program‘s Teachers and Technology Thursdays (T3) series. I’m sharing the workshop information and resources here in response to inquiries I received last night via Twitter and Facebook. I hope that you find this useful and invite you to share your ideas for integrating audio with teaching and learning.

Workshop Description

Enable students to make their thinking visible through the use of digital audio. Learn how recorded tutorials and messages, storycasts, book trailers, audio chatting and commenting, teacher recorded feedback, and more can enable students to engage with course content inside and outside the classroom and better equip parents to help with homework. Several freely available websites and apps will be demonstrated. Strategies for designing lessons and practical tips for implementation will be shared.

You can view the workshop slides – which include video tutorials, links to examples of student projects, and more – by clicking on the image below.

Learning with Digital Audio

Teaching through “Questioning” Rather Than “Telling” – #hgsepzfol

Event Tag: #pzc2013 #hgsepzfol

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.

 

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Students Think They Are “Lucky” to Have Teacher of the Year [Video]

Hather Fisher“Dogwood Elementary 3rd grade teacher Dr. Heather Fisher was named the 2012-2013 Shelby County Schools Elementary Teacher of the Year. The classroom veteran is a life-long learner whose passion for education rubs off on her students and co-workers” (Source).

I became acquainted with Heather just over a year ago when she was selected as a 2012 Martin Institute Fellow to Project Zero. The impact that experience at Harvard has had on her teaching is evident in the video clip below. In addition to spending time together at the Project Zero Institute last July, Heather was also an active participant in our study group during this past school year. She has been committed to learning more about teaching for understanding and has a desire for her students to thrive. Heather has also taken advantage of opportunities to share her expertise with others through presentations and workshops. There’s no wonder why her students feel “lucky” to be in her class.

Event Tags: #pzc2013 #hgsepzfol

Life Before the Internet: What We Used to Do

Enjoy this stroll down memory lane as we re-visit the ways that we communicated, accessed news, conducted research, and shared photos prior to the Internet and social media.

For educators, the implications are fascinating. Consider how much has changed in the past 20 years.

  • Have our classrooms, curricula, and instructional practices kept up with the changes?
  • Should education worry with keeping up with these changes?
  • What are the implications on teaching and learning if education does/does not strive to react to these changes?
  • What is the future of learning?

Event Tags: FOL2013, hgsepzfol

Before the Internet

Screenshot Source: We Did Amazing Things Before The Internet

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Expanding Learning with Technology

This inspiration video was produced by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Child Blowing-Up Balloon“This is about us. And and our students. And how we’re learning together. And also, it’s about the power of technology…Our job [as educators] is to expand horizons, to open doors, to blow minds. We achieve this by working together, by reaching out, by computing and counting and crafting, by being creative, by meeting our challenges head on and never shirking from a fight. It’s what we do everyday. We help students light the spark that expands that portion of the universe for which they are responsible  — their own minds. We build on what’s already there. We collaborate. We listen. We learn. We teach our students to listen for themselves, so that they can become the teachers and we the students. And we use technology as one tool in our toolbox to help us communicate, to help us work together. This technology isn’t an add-on…[It] is often the fastest, most immediate, and most effective way that we can speak to our students in a way they’ll hear us, in a way that sparks their imaginations, in a way that helps flip the learning process…” (Source).

Image Source: Parenting How

“Friends” Producer Helps Blind Filmmakers Find Vision

(See Part 2)

Blind Filmmakers Have Vision

“If you think that the ability to see is the first requirement for being able to make a movie, then you haven’t been to Kevin Bright‘s film-making class at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston…Bright was the executive producer of the wildly successful show “Friends.” Now, he teaches students how to make films – even though many of them are completely blind. The videos they made show that while the students don’t have sight, they do have vision, and they provide a rare window into the world of the blind” (Source).

Technology continues to empower those that are “differently-abled.” While there are specially developed technologies that provide much needed assistance, beneficial uses of more commonly available tools continue to emerge. I frequently hear first and second-hand accounts about individuals’ lives being positively impacted by the opportunity to work, communicate, and move about in more efficient ways with the help of technology. The state of innovation marches forward and it is important that educators are aware of these kinds of technological contributions. They may lead to new opportunities for our students.

You can view one of the resulting student films, Seeing through the Lens, here.

Screenshot Source: NBC’s Rock Center

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Design Thinking: A Practical Application

Design Thinking

Here is an interesting contribution to education’s ongoing conversation about design thinking. “Architect Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of Wikihouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere” (Source).

“We’re moving into this future where the factory is everywhere. And, increasingly,
that means the design team is everyone. That really is an industrial revolution.”
–Alastair Parvin

Hat Tip: Trever Acy

Image Source: rogerlmartin.com

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13 Yr. Old CEO of Innovative Educational Gaming Company

Elementeo(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?

  1. How many content areas/topics/objectives/skills would this kind of activity include? I’ve noticed 1) math, business and economics, 2) science/chemistry, 3) art and graphic design, 4) language arts, 5) perhaps copyright and patents, 6) ……???
  2. If this was a class project, do you think that the teacher could have ever imagined that this would be the result?
  3. Elementeo is seeking to put the fun back into learning. Has education taken the fun out of learning? It seems that these students think so. What does that tell those of us that are teachers?
  4. If this is not a class project and Anshul and his friends did this of their own initiative then perhaps we, as teachers, should reconsider what it is that we have our students doing. I suggest that a traditional lesson/unit on entrepreneurship would likely not teach students nearly as much about the world of business (and the other aforementioned content areas) as this activity likely did.
  5. While students weren’t necessarily playing games but rather developing games, this could be an example of effectively bringing gaming into the classroom and integrating it with the curriculum.
  6. Let’s begin to consider all the elements of effective teaching and learning (according to today’s research) that might possibly be identified in a class project like this. Such an activity might include 1) problem solving, 2) discovery learning, 3) legitimate peripheral participation and/or authentic/situated/contextual teaching and learning, 4) communities of practice, 5) collaboration, 6) project management (for those instructional designers among us), 7) ……???

I think this could be a rich discussion. Please, please chime in.

3D Printing Pen that Lets you Draw Sculptures off the Page

3Doodler02“It’s a pen that can draw in the air! 3Doodler is the 3D printing pen you can hold in your hand. Lift your imagination off the page!” (Source)

“Forget those pesky 3D printers that require software and the knowledge of 3D modeling and behold the 3Doodler, the world’s first pen that draws in three dimensions in real time. Imagine holding a pen and waving it through the air, only the line your pen creates stays frozen, suspended and permanent in 3D space” (Source).

Learn more about 3Doodler.

Hat tip to one of my co-authors, Sharon Smaldino, for bringing this to my attention.

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