The purpose of this single-subject case study was to document the experiences of a teacher trainee during a 12-week microteaching process in the Distance English Language Teacher Training program (DELT). The student teacher subject responded to questionnaires, submitted online dialogue journals, and answered open-ended questions before and after the practicum. The Journal of Educators Online

Post-secondary educational institutions use various means to evaluate the teaching performance of faculty members. There are benefits to effective faculty evaluation, including advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning, as well as improving the functionality and innovation of courses, curriculum, departments, and ultimately the broader community (Boyer, 1990; Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997). While there […]

Imagine a workforce made up of highly skilled individuals that have a comprehensive grasp of what is required from them on a daily basis. Not only do they have a great deal of adeptness and expertise, these employees also recognise [...]

"Community feedback and advanced analytics, combined with lesson planning and monitoring tools for teachers make this social learning platform, PRAISE, a step forward in collaborative online learning." continues Phys.Org.Photo: Phys.OrgPhoto: Carles Sierra"Feedback is essential for learning," says Carles Sierra, Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council and coordinator of the PRAISE project. The project aims at filling a gap in online learning by creating a social network for music education with tools for giving and receiving feedback.Using PRAISE's Music Circle platform, music students can upload recordings of their playing and receive detailed feedback from other members of the community. Advanced tools let reviewers place their comments as annotations at exactly the right place in the audio signal representation."Students' peers can say "this crescendo is very nice" or "this passage is very expressive"," explains Professor Sierra. "This timeline of structured comments and this level of granularity have been lacking in online approaches to giving feedback on music."A social network of learnersAs PRAISE is a web-based social media platform, a single comment can spawn multiple comments. These discussion threads help to create a community of people giving and receiving feedback that becomes a social network of learners.Aside from human feedback, PRAISE's sophisticated tools also provide automatic feedback. Students can play a particular piece, for example, and the software will tell the student whether he or she played the right notes at the right time. Moreover, if the student submits a new recording, areas of improvement or retrogression are similarly flagged.A teaching tool with marks generationPRAISE is actually more than just a platform for giving and receiving feedback. Its tools also allow music teachers to create lesson plans and track their students' progress online.In addition, PRAISE tackles a problem faced by many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Since it's physically impossible for a single teacher to mark the thousands or tens of thousands of students who may follow an online offering, many MOOCs rely on peer assessment. This approach is unsatisfactory, however, because students may not give marks in the same way that the teacher would give them.Read more... Source: Phys.Org

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed What is so great about How Music Got Free is that Witt takes us into the minds of the people running the record company’s. (And very deeply into the mind of Doug Morris, the guy who ran Universal Music Group). Perhaps no group of executives have ever been less prepared [...]

"The hallways of Memorial Middle School in Cedar Grove are alive with the sound of music, even during the summer months." according to Joshua Jongsma, Managing Editor | Verona-Cedar Grove Times.Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.netFor the first time, the Cedar Grove Summer Music Academy offered students a chance to hone their instrumental and vocal skills in between school years. The classes run four days a week and began June 22. The program, which ends July 16, goes for either three hours or six and a half, depending on how many fields of music a student participates in, according to course instructor Cassandra Imperatore.In its inaugural run, 32 students joined the Summer Music Academy, Imperatore said. It is offered to students of any skill level entering Grades 5-9. "[The students] have been very involved, they've been really engaged in it," Imperatore told the Times. "They're learning so much." Prior to this summer, Cedar Grove students would not start band lessons until fifth grade. Many other schools start in fourth grade, Imperatore said, so the summer program allows for local students to close the gap. The lessons include vocal, instrumental and orchestra instruction. The teaching goes beyond performances, though. The participants also learn how to compose music and the theory behind it, as taught by Melissa Hill. Music theory studies the "how and why" that makes up songs or instrumental performances, Hill said."It's everything from feeling out the rhythm to writing chords and knowing intervals between notes," Hill said.In addition to Hill and Imperatore, Bob Savino and Megan Siegel also guide the young musicians in the program. The summer lessons equate to about a half-year's worth of studies, Imperatore said. "The stuff they're learning now is material that I didn't learn until I was a junior in high school," she continued. "It's really cool."Read more... Source: NorthJersey.com

How can you get the best results from your corporate learning initiatives? Start by asking how human beings learn best. How you choose to deliver knowledge to an employee makes a difference. Most enterprises simply provide a variety of traditional … The post Why Traditional Workplace Training Falls Short appeared first on Bloomfire.

Rita Sherrow, World Scene Writer summarizes, "Dottie Piet can’t live without learning."Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.netThe former teacher — who also writes songs and poetry, plays multiple musical instruments, does artwork and craft projects, and doesn’t have time in her day for TV — is sharing her wealth of energy and knowledge with others. "If I don’t keep learning like this, I get very bored and depressed," she said in a recent interview. "And, if it (her knowledge) can overflow and help others, that’s great. I’m glad I have people here who like to learn.""Here" is The Broadmoor Retirement Community, 8205 E. 22nd St., and the "people" are fellow residents who are attending a six-month course she is teaching on the history of music.Last week, the subject was music of the ’40s and ’50s and she dressed as Rosie the Riveter to act as emcee. Each month, she writes her own scripts and then leads the 40-plus participants through the history of an era, which includes a sing-along with videos gathered by activities director Sharon Fleming. They are songs that bring back the past, she said."Music is a tool to keep the body happy," said Piet, whose energy and enthusiasm is infectious."I have noticed in my group, they are responding with memories that they have connected to the songs, which means they are going back in their memory banks and pulling out some good, happy stuff. You are adding to your total health when you can think good thoughts."A lifelong teacher, the 76-year-old Piet retired and moved to The Broadmoor from her Broken Arrow home in 2013 after getting to a point, she said, where she had to hire people to do the things that she couldn’t do."I just finally did it and made the big move, and it’s quite a watershed moment," Piet said. "Everybody who comes here, I can see in their eyes that same feeling I had when I came. There’s a big, big adjustment period."But it was not something that slowed her down. Always working on something, she previously spent three months reading up on the latest brain research and decided to pass on what she learned to her fellow residents in a brain workshop.Each week, she spent one hour teaching a different topic about the brain — right brain, the effect of stress on the brain, sleep and the brain — and she used medical videos to explain the material."The thing that came across as the biggest point was that before 1990 they thought that once the brain aged it just went downhill and there was no saving it after that," she said. "But they found out that the brain can actually regenerate. There’s a little place in the brain known as the hippocampus (the part involved in memory development, organization and storage) and you can actually make that grow and regenerate cells through exercises and proper diet."That’s the exciting news. It gives people hope for the future, that we can do something about our health and our brain."She said she handed out summaries of the information to participants and gave them assignments like playing games and puzzles to stimulate brain activity.Read more... Additional resourcesBrain gamesThe brain is like a muscle: Wse it or lose it, researchers say.Researchers at Medical World Search suggest games like the following below can have health benefits for your brain.Braino or Scrammble board games: Word game systems based on the idea of scrambling alphabets in one's brains to form meaningful words to score points in a variety of games. Learn more at bit.ly/brainogame.Pat's Page: Involves memorizing words, then remembering them three minutes later and writing them down. Find it online at bit.ly/patspagebraingame.Game With Kids: All sorts of games involving math, reading and puzzles are available at funbrain.com.Queendom: Interactive games and exercises for the brain. Some charges may apply. Go to queendom.com.Discovery Education: All sorts of brain boosters for adults and children. Check it out at boostbraingames.Source: Tulsa World

Photo: Steve RennieSteve Rennie of Renman Music & Business reports, "Over the course of my career I’ve been asked a million times, "What is the best way to learn the music business?" Answering that question has really become something of a mission for me over the last two and a half years."Photo: hypebot.com Over the course of my career I’ve been asked a million times, "What is the best way to learn the music business?" Answering that question has really become something of a mission for me over the last two and a half years.It inspired me to start a website Renman Music & Business where aspiring artists and professionals could go to learn more about this business. If you haven’t heard about the site yet, check it out and I promise that it’s the best free resource there is to go out and get started. In this post today, I want to discuss the options you have to study and learn the music biz and give you some important points to consider if you’re seriously thinking about studying or getting a degree in the music business. Let’s get started.So how do you learn the music biz? When I started 37 years ago there were no music industry programs to take. There was no internet. There was no Youtube. There was a book called "This Business of Music" and that was it. The rest you had to learn on your own. So the first thing I learned about trying to succeed in the music business is that you need to commit to learning. I realized you have to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can, and by whatever means you can.I also learned that you need to ask questions.  There’s so much to learn about the music biz and as I like put it, "If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and you won’t learn."  The best place to get those answers is from folks who’ve already experienced what you are going through. That brings me to the third key to learning the music business: networking. To get advice from those smarter, more experienced people I learned I had to surround myself with them. Once you start meeting those folks, I found you could find a mentor who took an interest in you and helped fastback your process. You want to fast track your learning in the music business and finding a great, experienced mentor is the best way to do so.Having great mentors in my career made a huge difference because these were people who were much smarter, more experienced, and more successful than me. Almost all the successful folks in this music business were lucky enough to find some mentors along the way who helped fast track their learning. All of those mentors were serial ‘doers’ and that, by far, was the most important lesson I learned.You learn by doing in the music biz.Now that you know a bit of how you learn the music business, let’s talk about the options out there for you. A lot has changed since I grew up in the business and today you have four options to study it:  Study at college Online "music biz experts"   Free online services and blogs  Go out and do it on your own For this post, I’m going to focus on studying the music business at college.  It’s a question that I’m most frequently asked by people who aspire to be in the music business and it’s a decision that comes with a lot of money attached to it.Read more...Source: hypebot.com

Follow on Twitter as @PCNHAmandaLocal libraries were able to purchase several early learning tools for kids recently through a donation from the Bay County Public Library Foundation.Malena Zelaya, 7, learns about the solar system during an interactive computer game on July 7. Three Early Literacy Stations have been set up for children at the Bay County Public Library. Photo: The News HeraldThe foundation provided $22,000 for eight early literacy stations. The stations — touchscreen computers loaded with about 70 educational games and activites — were distributed throughout Northwest Regional Library System branches in Bay and Liberty Counties, with three stations at the Bay County Public Library."It’s got all kinds of neat and educational games for the kids, so this is really a big thing for us to have these new computers for the younger kids to use," said Sandra Pierce, head of youth services at the Bay County Public Library.Pierce said library had not had much time to explore the programs yet since the stations only arrived last week, but already she has found games that are challenging even for adults. "They’re basically for kids between 2 and 8 years old, but even older kids will enjoy them," she said.The stations, including a bilingual Spanish edition, include games designed to help children learn basic math, science, reading and critical thinking skills, but also about history, geography, music and more.Read more... Source: The News Herald