The Learning And Design Principles Of Connected Learning by Terry Heick In 2015, no one should be hurting for compelling ed content. Sites like edutopia, The Tempered Radical, Langwitches, Justin Tarte, Cool Cat Teacher, Grant Wiggins’ blog, and dozens of others offer outstanding reading on a daily basis to help you improve the things that happen in your classroom. (And this list is frustratingly incomplete-they’re just the sites on my radar that I’ve been reading since I entered education.) A bit more "fringe" are sites like TeachThought, Jackie Gerstein’s UserGeneratedEducation, the Connected Learning Alliance and DMLCentral.net, MindShift, and so many more-"fringe" due to their thinking that seems as interested in understanding what’s possible in a modern learning environment as they are what is. Pursuing excellence in the box while demanding to know what’s going on outside that box. You could even call this kind of content less immediately practical when you’re just Googling for a lesson idea for tomorrow, but there’s room for everyone in a digital and infinite world. There are already fantastic sites that offer worksheets and classroom management strategies and assessment policies. We’ll do that from time to time, but near and dear to our mission at TeachThought is to rethink learning in a modern world, however we choose to characterize those modern qualities. Along with the others, CLA is on our short list of thought leaders that help push us to think about how education is changing in a modern world, which is why we’ve shared some of their models in the past, including their iconic Connected Learning model. Recently, we also discovered that they’ve shared the design principles of that model, along with a description of each. These ideas appear below-and of course, check out CLA and DML for further reading. The Learning And Design Principles Of Connected Learning "For more than a century, educators have strived to customize education to the learner. Connected Learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream a reality — connecting academics to interests, learners to inspiring peers and mentors, and educational goals to the higher order skills the new economy rewards. Six principles (below) define it and allow every young person to experience learning that is social, participatory, interest-driven and relevant to the opportunities of our time. 6 Design Principles Of Connected Learning 1. Interest-Powered Interests foster the drive to gain knowledge and expertise. Research has repeatedly shown that when the topic is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes. Connected learning views interests and passions that are developed in a social context as essential elements. 2. Production Centered Connected learning prizes the learning that comes from actively producing, creating, experimenting and designing because it promotes skills and dispositions for lifelong learning and for making meaningful contributions to today’s rapidly changing work and social conditions. 3. Peer-Supported Connected learning thrives in a socially meaningful and knowledge-rich ecology of ongoing participation, self-expression and recognition. In their everyday exchanges with peers and friends, young people fluidly contribute, share and give feedback. Powered with possibilities made available by today’s social media, this peer culture can produce learning that’s engaging and powerful. 4. Shared Purpose Today’s social media and web-based communities provide unprecedented opportunities for caring adults, teachers, parents, learners and their peers to share interests and contribute to a common purpose. The potential of cross-generational learning and connection unfolds when centered on common goals. 5. Academically-Oriented Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth and as an avenue towards economic and political opportunity. When academic studies and institutions draw from and connect to young people’s peer culture, communities and interest-driven pursuits, learners flourish and realize their true potential. 6. Openly-Networked Connected learning environments link learning in school, home and community because learners achieve best when their learning is reinforced and supported in multiple settings. Online platforms can make learning resources abundant, accessible and visible across all learner settings." 6 Design Principles Of Connected Learning The post 6 Design Principles Of Connected Learning appeared first on TeachThought.

Let’s Develop A New Standard For School Security by Jeff Green, PhD Candidate and founder of safedefend.com As a former elementary principal and a father, December 14, 2012 had more than a great impact on me. While I was in my office on that cold and cloudy day, I learned of the Sandy Hook tragedy that took the lives of 20 students and six staff members. Instantly, I, like most parents, thought of my own kids and worried about their safety. I had that luxury. The families of those who lost their lives did not. I thought of the law enforcement officers and EMTs and how their lives would forever be changed by what they saw. The shooting was a tragedy far beyond 26 deaths. I sat in my office as the gray sky turned black analyzing our school safety plan. As a principal of my own school, I looked at our amazing building and started to see it differently. I didn’t see the all of the windows surrounding our cafeteria as a great way to connect to the outside; I saw it as an easy way for someone to shoot into my building. I didn’t see our entry way that forced visitors into the office before accessing the school as a great safety measure; I saw our entry way as a funnel to make our secretaries the first target and slow down or eliminate our ability to inform staff of the crisis through our intercom. I didn’t see our colorful hallways as a bright and open connection to student learning; I saw them as an incredibly easy walk way to access all of our students. For the first time as a father and principal, I felt helpless. I was afraid I couldn’t protect my students. I was left with two choices: do nothing or do something. I chose the latter. I started to research school tragedies. I didn’t just focus on shootings or violent events, I looked at fires, storms, freak accidents - anything I could find. Some things really stood out. Incredibly, there has not been a student death in a school fire since December 1958. Why? Because we changed. We changed the materials schools were constructed from. We required alarms and suppression systems. We required more exits and fire drills. Lives were saved because we changed. Because of student deaths from heart issues, many schools now have AEDs. We now have the ability to perform incredible medical interventions once only available at hospitals from trained doctors. We changed and now we are saving lives. Since Columbine, law enforcement has changed. They changed how they respond to a crisis at a school. They no longer wait for a large team to assemble before going in. In many cases, the first officer on the scene goes in with or without backup. They have changed and lives are being saved. School staff are still trying to figure out how and what to change. They are working to keep our kids safe and not lose sight of the purpose of education. A lot of money is being spent on the perimeter of the building and upgrading camera systems. Useful yes, but not a change that will save lives. Schools need to coordinate with and be allowed to share information and support mental health services in schools and homes. Schools need to treat the issues before a tragedy, not after. We also need to protect our students where they are most vulnerable, in the school itself. You see, Adam Lanza (the teenage shooter at Sandy Hook) was an anomaly. He was not connected to Sandy Hook anymore. That is rare for an active shooter situation. The more likely threat to our children will come from within. Someone who is supposed to be there-someone we let in. That is something new-another factor to adjust for in the ongoing effort to protect our students. After the shooting, I changed. I left my position as principal at the end of my contract, specifically I left to help find a better way to protect students. My own kids have changed. I teach them to look for exits. I give them scenarios like, "If a bad guy comes through that door what would you do?" My kids know to run, to hide or if no other options exist, to fight. Lives have certainly been changed from that tragedy that fell on Dec. 14, 2012, and I had to learn to accept that, at the time, there was little I could’ve done differently. The tragedy changed changed me, and education as a whole. It would be a huge dishonor to those who died if we, as an industry, did not change in response by becoming more serious about how we protect the students in our care. This is a call to not simply respond with new policies, but to create a new standard for school security. Jeff is a former school principal and current Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas, and founder of Safe Defend, a modern protection system for schools.; Let’s Develop A New Standard For School Security; image attribution flickr user kateterhaar The post Let’s Develop A New Standard For School Security appeared first on TeachThought.

Assessment In Medicine: Even The Medical Industry Is Rethinking Assessment by TeachThought Staff via press release When health care providers take patients’ perspectives into consideration, patients are more likely to be actively engaged in their treatment and more satisfied with their care. This is called patient-centered care, and it has been the central focus of the curriculum at the University of Missouri School of Medicine since 2005. Recently, MU researchers have developed a credible tool to assess whether medical students have learned and are applying specific behaviors that characterize patient-centered care. The researchers first worked with real patients to identify a list of specific behaviors that demonstrated physicians were providing patient-centered care. By defining these detailed, specific patient-centered behaviors, the researchers have been able to tailor the educational experience at the MU School of Medicine to help students gain these skills. MU medical students now are assessed on their ability to deliver the care in ways the patients expect; students must perform at a satisfactory level on the patient-centered care exam to graduate from the MU School of Medicine. "The test forces the future physician to go beyond just determining a diagnosis and to focus on behaviors that play an essential role to the effectiveness of the care he or she provides," said Kimberly Hoffman, Ph.D, associate dean for curriculum and assessment, and research associate professor of family and community medicine at MU. Hoffman is the author of a study describing how the assessment tool for patient-centered care was developed at the MU School of Medicine. In the article, Hoffman also outlines a process for having patients validate the assessment. The test of patient-centered care behaviors is given to third-year medical students. The exam is given in the third year because it is then the students are immersed in their clinical rotations. Before the third year of medical school, most of the studies are done in a classroom, lab or simulation-center setting. The test is called the Patient-centered Care - Objective Structured Clinical Exam (PCC-OSCE). "We developed very real, complex scenarios," said Hoffman. "The test uses standardized patients, standardized family members and standardized health providers to simulate real-life situations." The standardized patient (an actor) is trained to take on characteristics of a real patient and portray the roles of patients, family and others. Students are tested on how they interact with standardized patients ranging from adolescents to senior citizens, how to solicit information from the patient, and how to create a management and care plan that reflects the patient’s preferences. "One thing that is pretty striking with our curriculum is how early you get involved in patient care, with an emphasis on patient-centered care," said Woody Smelser, a fourth-year medical student from New Madrid, Missouri, who is president of his medical school class at MU. We get immersed in it early on. A good example is in the second week of medical school, you start to see your first patient in the simulation center. From that moment, the medical students are assessed on things like building rapport, making good eye contact, intently listening to the patients’ concerns, and finding out the real reason for the visit, which may not be what is actually listed on the sheet the doctors are given." "The test takes all the skills you have learned in the first three years of medical school and combines them with elements of patient-centered care," said Smelser. It assesses in many different ways if the medical student is able to make the transition from a student to a practicing physician." From this authentic assessment, researchers learned students were picking up on many key factors in patient-centered care. Most MU medical students had strong, effective communication skills, didn’t use medical jargon, actively listened to the patient, showed empathy and were in charge of the situation when they needed to lead a critical conversation. "We get very detailed feedback, in the form of comments, and even videos, from our simulation-center encounters and through the patient-centered care exam," said Smelser. "When we can actually see things we did and did not do — like crossing our arms, making us appear guarded and not open to the patient — it helps us to overcome some of those behaviors we may not have realized we were using, and it reinforces the good behaviors we did do." "By the time we take the exam in our third year, we are all confident we have the skill set or developed this skill over the course of the last two to three years," said Joshua Geltman, a third-year medical student from St. Louis, who is also president of his medical school class. Patient-centered care is our default, it’s our baseline; that’s the way we have learned how to become a physician. Now it is just the norm, not a separate skill set because it is included in every aspect of what we have learned in medical school." Geltman has not yet taken the patient-centered care exam yet, but says the curriculum has positioned him up for success. "Putting a grade and critique on our ability is a needed task," Geltman said. "It will enable the School of Medicine to produce even better physicians not just in measure of performance but the quality of care they are able to deliver to their patients." Through these tests, School of Medicine faculty members have also been able to identify other opportunities where students can improve. Many of those include examining barriers a patient could face that would cause problems with compliance with the treatment plan and routinely involving family members and other members of the health care team in the patient’s care. Hoffman said the use of the assessment has had another positive outcome - School of Medicine faculty members have begun volunteering to grade the patient-centered care exams. "It is prompting reflection among our faculty on their own medical practices, and how they may continually improve their own patient-centered care behaviors," she said. Hoffman’s research was published in September in Medical Teacher, an international journal of education in the health sciences. Assessment In Medicine: Even The Medical Industry Is Rethinking Assessment; The MU School of Medicine has improved health, education and research in Missouri and beyond for more than 165 years. MU physicians treat patients from every county in the state, and more Missouri physicians received their medical degrees from MU than from any other university. For more information, visit http://medicine.missouri.edu/; image attribtuion flickr user officialusnavypage The post Even The Medical Industry Is Rethinking Assessment appeared first on TeachThought.

Learning Theories: 3 Levels Of Information Processing by Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor, Plymouth Institute of Education This is number 5 in my blog series on major learning theories. My plan is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of their theories, and how each can be applied in education. In the last post we examined the work of Jerome Bruner on scaffolding. In this post, we explore the work of Craik and Lockhart on levels of processing. This is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please read the original works. The Theory The history of human memory research has strongly featured differences between types of memory such as Working Memory (previously known as Short Term Memory or STM) and Long Term Memory (LTM). Other explanations of memory have focused on the functions of various types of memory, and such approaches are often referred to as multi-store theories. When Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart researched human memory and recall, they argued that there was no clear difference between what others had identified as seemingly discrete memory stores, but that all memory was a result of the depth to which information was processed in the mind. Instead of referring to different stores of memory, Craik and Lockhart proposed that there are different levels of information processing. They identified at least three levels: 1. Structural level: This is a shallow layer of processing where we only pay attention to the outward appearance of a word (e.g. its morphology). 2. Phonetic level: This is a deeper level of processing where we listen to the sound of the word. 3. Semantic level: This is the deepest level of processing where we consider the meaning of the word. Craik and Lockhart claimed that the deeper the processing, the stronger will be the trace of that memory, and thus recall will take less cognitive effort. This framework for human memory research is considered by many cognitive psychologists to be a stronger explanation than those of the multi-store memory models. Levels of processing theory certainly does seem to explain more about the human memory than the multi-store theories, although the framework has also attracted some criticism. It has also influenced other recently proposed cognitive processing theories including spreading activation theory and neural network theory. How It Can Be Applied To Education Teachers should be aware that children can process information in different ways and at different levels as they transform it into knowledge. Educators should think about how they can encourage students to process content in deeper and more meaningful ways. For example, students process content more deeply if they have to discuss its meaning, or are involved in solving a related problem. Educators should also give students opportunities to present their learning through seminars, or through the creation of artefacts (e.g. blogs, videos, posters) to deepen the semantic processing of their learning, thereby strengthening their memories. This is one reason why participative and active forms of learning are more powerful than direct instruction through didactive methods. Reference Craik, F. I. M. and Lockhart, R. S. (1972) Levels of Processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11 (6), 671-684. [Full text here] This post first appeared on Steve’s personal blog; Graphic by Steve Wheeler; Learning Theories: Three Levels Of Information Processing The post Learning Theories: Three Levels Of Information Processing appeared first on TeachThought.

New Thinking: 18 Extraordinary Questions Education Faces In 2015 by Terry Heick Who knows where education is going, but it’s not impossible to look back over the last 12 months to see some rhythms and discord. 2014 is yesterday, which gives us a chance to reflect on the year that was in order to better see 2015. The following, then, are a collection of entirely subjective observations-well, not entirely subjective I guess. Or not anymore than anyone else. We all see what we choose to see, and interpret it how we will. What we choose to "watch" is as subjective as any takeaway from that observation. But we have to pause the machine long enough to stop and reflect, so here we are. At TeachThought, I see a lot of "data." Scores of daily emails. Press releases. Tweets. "Social engagement." Newsletters. Books, blog posts, headlines, pins, traffic numbers and clicks (more on that part later), conferences, keynotes, RSS feeds, social readers, subreddits, and more. There really is a lot to this edificio called public education. Traditional questions that teachers and administrators face exist, and will for the foreseeable future: How can we "move students" from this performance level to that? How can we get every student to read on grade level? What can we do to improve parental communication? How can we motivate students? How should I manage my classroom? But-fingers crossed-this is the kind of training you get in your school staff meeting, district-mandated PD, and Monday morning emails. I thought then it’d make sense to look at the new kinds of questions education faces-questions that can either underscore or erode the function of a school in a given community. So here is one person’s take (mine). As trends indicate a kind of temporary pattern, we may be able to trace the arc of what was to wonder what might be in 2015 and beyond. 1. What is the relationship between school and social justice? The fact that this can be considered a "trend" is probably more relevant than talking about it as a trend, but education found itself in the line of fire in 2014 regarding, well, itself. Just as profession, race, and income are at the core of "racial issues" (that really aren’t racial issues, but human issues which is why it’s impossible to segment them out that way), education has seen its untouchable image as savior, for some, erode. (See When Class Became More Important Than Race, for example.) Instead of simply calling on schools to provide social justice, it is becoming clearer to the non Paulo Freires of the world that education is also implicit in this cultural malaise. And it’s no longer just about race, or slapping a "socioeconomic" label on things, but rather about seeing relationships and connecting a chaotic spread patter of dots. The purpose of K-12 can’t be "college and career readiness" anymore than the purpose of literacy can be "word and sentence readiness."  How should your classroom speak to or connect with "Ferguson"? It should, right? Should education not inform massive social change? Illuminate it? Contextualize it? Equip us with strategies? Prevent suffering? Promote strong communities? 2. What would maker ed look like in my classroom? What would maker ed look like in my classroom? Judging by traffic, clicks, and social media responses, a lot of you had this question in 2014, and continue to in 2015. And this is beautiful-this trend of educators as enablers and students as makers and classrooms as creative spaces where human beings actually produce something. Maybe most wonderfully, this trend reflects a subtle realization by education that perhaps proficiency of academic content isn’t as cutting edge as it sounds. In merely allowing "making" in classrooms, there is a kind of silent admittance that producing and creating and design are as valuable as listening, reading, and reflecting the priorities set by the teacher. In a maker space, the maker is empowered and everyone else becomes an audience. This is not a small shift. 3. How should we teach with technology? So some teachers are against technology in education. That’s not new. What might be interesting is that this isn’t as Ludditian as it seems. There is real concern by teachers about the money, training, and even effectiveness of education technology in "traditional classrooms." Education technology is neither good nor bad, but rather does or does not function to accomplish a task. (See here.) This doesn’t even get at the consequence of the shoehorning of technology into dated learning models and curriculum forms not designed to accept it. Or maybe it does, and that’s the trend we’ll see moving forward. From the Jenkinson study (above): "(Effective education technology integration) demands an understanding of how to best support student learning in an integrated, holistic way, and how to leverage technology to support this process; which, in turn, demands of us that we develop evaluative tools capable of capturing the learning process that occurs when students interact with technology." 4. Why should we teach with technology?  In other words, tech as a tool versus tech-for-the-sake-of-tech. This isn’t necessarily a 2014-only theme, but it seemed to have a different tone recently-not "hate edtech" but "why edtech?" Ask on twitter and you might get a lot of salty educators who make it their life’s work to stuff as much technology into a classroom as possible, but more and more, teachers want to know why. Some of these questions are get-off-my-lawn pushback, but questions like "How can we best use technology? How does it work? What does it allow, promote, and produce?" are legitimate. 5. What about race? This issue has been around for millenia-the idea of an "elite" education haunts us as a society. Content-based curriculum has a conditioning effect. It assimilates knowledge, language, image-so many strands of how we think of ourselves and the world around us (something Jamelle Bouie hints at here): "[C]ontrary to the implications of the burden of acting white and oppositional peer culture hypotheses—that white students generally have superior standards for academic achievement and are embedded in peer groups that support and encourage academic striving—the experiences described by some of our white [student] informants indicate the presence of a much less achievement-oriented academic culture.In interviews, white students describe ostracism from peers and apprehension from parents who want to avoid the perception of "elitism" that comes with children in gifted programs…. None of this is to deny the reality of racialized ridiculing. It happens—I’ve experienced it—and it’s painful. But it isn’t a feature of black culture. Rather, it arises from a mix of factors, from social status to the composition of the school itself. As the sociologists note in their conclusion, stigmatization for whites and blacks seemed to come from the "perception that the low-status student was attempting to assume the characteristic of the ‘other,’ especially an air of superiority or arrogance." 6. Google or Apple? Ah. More questions regarding iPads, 1:1, and the like. When the iPad rollout in Los Angeles fell on its face, the utility of $30 million in hardware was put into question-and that’s a problem. The popularity of the iPad in education has always been catalyzed by more than a little consumerism, so we might’ve expected some kind of correction. iPads are expensive mobile devices designed to play apps while glorifying Apple’s ecology. That doesn’t make them evil, but the idea that they were plug-n-play designed for classrooms may be naive. We’ll talk more about this soon, but Google-and specifically Google Apps for Education-continue to gain momentum on the ground, in classrooms. In lieu of janky aesthetics and unpolished interfaces, Google’s focus on utility, productivity, and low-cost Chromebooks, in addition to the critical universal sign-in for all Google products, can make management for schools and districts simpler-and schools like simple. 7. Does social media count? More specifically, does tweeting matter? How can a hashtag make a difference? The convergence of tool (the hashtag) and opportunity (increase in the visibility, if not the quantity, of digital and social media-based activism) made 2014 a year of clarity of the function of both hashtags, and social media at large, to both underscore and talk about pressing social issues. #blacklivesmatter, #crimingwhilewhite, #yesallwomen, and dozens of non-ironic, run-on appends aggregated social media chatter to something closer to the permanence such activism deserves. There is an irony here that those on twitter using hashtags-likely on an expensive mobile device-to discuss edgy cultural issues has a preaching-to-the-choir effect-lots of digital noise to, perhaps, little physical action or substantive change. Social media is ready-made for moral and intellectual posturing which often does little to invite common-ground dialogue. That said, social change is a multidimensional thing. Who knows what impact X has on Y. 8. Is coding a critical literacy? Is coding the new writing? Are coders the scribes of our time? How can we support #blackgirlscode? Thinking of coding as making. There is at least an undercurrent of folks who see coding as not just tech-savvy, but a core digital literacy. 9. Why do good teachers quit? "Getting bad teachers out of the classroom" is old, but taking a second to wonder why a good teacher might quit is a fresher take. There is a cost to the push for teachers to innovate their curriculum, assessment practices, use of technology, etc., especially as that push is often at odds with local expectation, and one of the most visible effects is teacher fatigue. Why Good Teachers Quit by Kay Bisaillon saw more than a little traction. There is only so much a teacher can do-education is an ecology. Students aren’t products. 10. How can I best use homework in a modern classroom? Along with letter grades, and "college," homework is an icon for traditional education. Developing alternatives to homework continues to be a popular idea for teachers. The flipped model of teaching is itself a way of reconsidering what students "do" and where they do it, i.e., the work students do at home.  11. What is a "growth mindset," and why do I need one? We’ll have more on this soon, but for now, check out Jackie Gerstein’s thinking. 12. Should we Skype or Google Hangout? It’s no longer about phone calls or emails-there are new(ish) tools that are being adopted by a wider audience. Should we Skype or GHO? While Skype had a headstart, 2014 saw Google Hangouts rise in credibility with its support for larger groups, and its easy transition to both YouTube channels and podcasting. In 2015, the question persists, especially as both platforms are platform-agnostic, and teachers are finding new ways to use Skype.  Others 13. Do you have a podcast? Old media are new again. Podcasting, as a word, feels 2006ish, but it’s actually quite edgy. The podcast has neither died nor exploded, but the quality-and legacy-of podcasting in education certainly seems on the uptick, no? And video as well-YouTubers, for example. My children prefer them to actors and musicians, to the point where social media isn’t merely a launching pad into the mainstream, but is a stream of its own. Blogging, twitterchats, and other heavy-on-the-reading content (books, and to a degree, magazines) are increasingly supplemented with podcasts, video, and other content that’s easy to absorb on mobile devices. There are only so many modalities-text, images, video; mixing and remixing them while adding and twisting social dynamics is all part of the evolution. Other Critical Questions Okay, so many of these are more important than those above, but these are pretty big questions, and I wanted the top 10 or 12 to be a mix of practical and crucial questions. 14. What is the the difference between learning and education? 15. How can I teach with YouTube? What role can video play in my curriculum? 16. Is Genius Hour something I can use in my standards-based classroom? 17. How should we, as an industry, update teacher training and ongoing professional development? 18. What is school? What should it do? What is its purpose?  19. How can we "teach globally" while acting locally? 20. How do we know if we’re doing a "good job"? If this lesson/unit/curriculum/school/idea is working? 21. How do I know if a student understands?  New Thinking: 18 Different Questions Education Faces In 2015 The post New Thinking: 18 Extraordinary Questions Education Faces In 2015 appeared first on TeachThought.

20 Ways To Get A Noisy Classroom’s Attention by Terry Heick Okay, so this isn’t about rethinking teaching and learning in a connected world, but that doesn’t change the fact that for many of you, simply beginning class can be the most challenging thing you do all day. It’s not easy. My go-to for years what to simply start teaching, somewhat quietly, and hope students caught on, but I found that stressed some students who were trying to hear and couldn’t, so I had to come up with different strategies. While muting an entire classroom for 35 minutes at a time so they "listen" isn’t ideal, every teacher needs to quiet a noisy classroom at some point. So recently, when I saw Todd Finley’s post on edutopia offering some fantastic ideas, I had to offer some of the tricks I had learned. And note, much of what works is indeed about your personality. Classroom management isn’t a "strength" for me because I’m always nervous about being a "mean teacher," and tend to use learning models that depend on open-ended learning, student self-direction, and inquiry and project-based learning. That said, students deserve to feel protected in a classroom that is efficient, protected, and under the control of a caring adult, so I have to make adjustments for my teaching style and how it relates to my natural personality. So below are 20 (well, 19) ways to get a noise classroom’s attention. Some may work better than others depending on your grade level, teaching style, personality, or the personality of the class itself-down to who shows up to school that day and who doesn’t. Experiment, and let me know in the comments which strategies you use that I didn’t include. 20 Ways To Get A Noisy Classroom’s Attention 1. Help students understand  No matter the grade level, let students know right away exactly why you need them immediately responsive when you signal for the class to be quiet. Visualize the impact somehow-lost learning, future earnings potential, lowered intelligence each generation, which makes makes it harder on their great-great-great grandchildren, etc. (That’s obviously sarcastic-don’t use that unless you know what you’re doing.) Regardless, help them understand that it’s not about authority, it’s about knowledge. 2. Clap once, clap twice This one is the old standby. After clearly explaining to the students on the first day of school how this will work, stand at the front of the room and say out loud "Clap once if you hear me, clap twice if you hear me," while modeling the clap. 3. Use a timer If you’ve got some easy way to instantly project a time for all to see, set it to 3-5 seconds, and let students know the expectation is that each time that the timer reaches zero, the class should be completely silent. You can also tie this to a reward, offering some sort of bonus time once a week or month, and detracting "time wasted" from that bonus time. 4. Stand in a designated spot And let students know whenever you stand there and raise your hand, a certain finger indicating a requested noise level, etc., that the expectation is that they’re fully quiet within a certain time limit, or even a silent countdown on your fingers. 5. Count backwards from 4 Or count backwards out loud from 4, and experiment with slowing your countdown for certain classes to "adjust" to their characteristics, but without giving them too much flexibility. 6. Thank students that are already quiet individually Thanking each student that is quiet, even with bonus items, etc., is a way to positively reward a desired behavior. 7. Use a notable name Iggy Azalea. Ed Sheeran. Lebron James. Seth Rogen. Use a key word or phrase that grab’s attention-or even have a monthly theme, and whenever students hear a name from that category, they know to be quiet, and reward their performance. 8. Use a stop light This was from Finley’s list on edutopia, and it’s perfect, Green they can talk, yellow they’re becoming quiet, red they’re silent. eBay, Amazon, etc., all carry products like these. Post it where everyone can see it. 9. Use an app Quiet Classroom, or Too Noisy, for example. Experiment and see what works. 10. Have them stand This one may not work for some classes, but many of my classes that had trouble becoming quiet weren’t being defiant-they were just full of energy. Have them stand and stretch, then begin 11. Use proximity Stand near, or even touch select talking students on the shoulder while beginning to speak. (In some schools, classrooms, grade levels, etc., touching any student for any reason ever isn’t okay-obviously if this is the case, don’t.) 12. Record them  This wouldn’t work every day, and would only work if you have signed permission from each student’s family and the principal and….but if it fits, start recording, with some visible evidence of doing so-maybe a screen capture of Skype. Or even a fake red light that implies recording video. Tell them it’s for a project for a video all parents will see at the end of the year (for elementary), a YouTube channel, documentary, etc. You know them better than I do-what would convince them? 13. Get the right ones on your side For more challenging classrooms, especially 8th grade and above, this one is incredibly important. Know who the key "players" are in the classroom, and get them on your side right away. Help them use the leadership skills they have to promote learning in the classroom, and periodically let them know-perhaps away from other students for older kids-how much it helps. 14. Use non-verbal cues  Using non-verbal cues that reflect a behavior system, perhaps one based on positive reinforcement. This can allow you not only to communicate simple messages, i.e., please be quiet, but also more complex messages, such as "The noise level so far has cost us two minutes from our game-based learning lesson on Friday." How? Use GBL for 15 minutes each Friday, and hold up one additional finger every time students lose a minute. Through that routine, they’ll get the picture. 15. Gamify it Give points, take away points, offer badges, let classrooms level up, let them compete against one another, section off groups within a classroom to compete against one another; let their "scores" be rest so those that struggle don’t celebrate being "last" and get worse. 16. Turn the lights off Who knows why, but most students love the lights off. You don’t have to turn them off and on like a madman-just off, and wait. 17. Resist the temptation to get emotional Once students sense you’re upset, the implication is that you’re lacking control, and that has a snowball effect. Even if they aren’t, in fact, doing what you want them to, don’t let them in on that secret. 18. Ignore certain misbehaviors Trying to quiet a noisy classroom is less about discipline, and more about routines. If a student makes a joke that gets the class roaring just as they were quieting down, smile a quick smile, let it go, and move on. 19. Be silly Record audio, Vines, or Hyperlapse videos on Instagram that aggregate their progress and relative success. 20. Scream at them, slam the door until the glass shatters, flip desks, etc. Then you’ll get fired and won’t have to worry about it any longer. 20 Ways To Get A Noisy Classroom’s Attention; 20 Ways to Quiet a Noisy Classroom; adapted image attribution flickr user usdepartmentofeducation The post 20 Ways To Get A Noisy Classroom’s Attention appeared first on TeachThought.

Start Something: 13 Teacher Strategies For Digital Collaboration by TeachThought Staff Teacher collaboration is among the cornerstones of school improvement. When teachers connect-for the right reasons-good things happen. The ability to connect is increased exponentially through technology. Digital collaboration by teachers has an infinite numbers out possible outcomes, from formal teacher improvement, to informal connecting for people that get you. A global teacher’s lounge, if you will. Social media-based professional development is another possible outcome when teachers connect. In contrast to sit-and-get, impersonal training, self-selected and self-directed PD has the potential for just in time, just enough, just for me qualities. The following infographic Mia MacMeekin takes these kinds of ideas and itemizes them, coming up with thirteen strategies for digital collaboration by teachers. She has a few ideas on the graphic, and we’ve added our own below. Let us know in the comments what strategies you find useful for digital collaboration. Start Something: 13 Teacher Strategies For Digital Collaboration 1. Co-author a book, blog post, essay, or conference session. 2. Join an edcamp, twitter chat, or blog community (ahem). 3. Follow mentors, colleagues, and inspiring thought leaders on social media. 4. Email someone and ask for help, or thank them for what they do. 5. Comment on an idea that forces you to consider a new perspective. 6. Start something useful and/or fun, local or global, digital or physical. 7. Step out of your comfort zone. 8. Discuss both critical and practical issues around your classroom. 9. Co-create something you’ve long hoped someone else would-an app, a community, a curriculum. Even a PowerPoint or Prezi that clarifies some often misunderstood academic topic. 10. Ask for help, details, resources, or ideas. 11. Join Me-or us. Meet people, connect groups, create potential in education. 12. Enter into new terms with your local school leadership to push for innovation, resources, and better training. 13. Organize your curriculum, your professional learning network, your RSS feed, or even a local event of your own, even if it’s only 4 or 5 colleagues for a book club at Starbucks. Start Something: 13 Teacher Strategies For Digital Collaboration Start Something: 13 Teacher Strategies For Digital Collaboration; Teacher Collaboration Through Technology The post Start Something: 13 Teacher Strategies For Digital Collaboration appeared first on TeachThought.

The Question Game by Sophie Wrobel, geist.avesophos.de The Question Game: A Playful Way To Teach Critical Thinking Big idea: Teaching kids to ask smart questions on their own A four-year-old asks on average about 400 questions per day, and an adult hardly asks any. Our school system is structured around rewards for regurgitating the right answer, and not asking smart questions - in fact, it discourages asking questions. With the result that as we grow older, we stop asking questions. Yet asking good questions is essential to find and develop solutions, and an important skill in innovation, strategy, and leadership. So why do we stop asking questions - and more importantly, why don’t we train each other, and our future leaders, to ask the right questions starting from early on? In A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, Warren Berger suggests that there are three main questions which help in problem solving: Why questions, What If questions, and How questions. Regardless of the question, the question needs to be phrased openly and positively in order to achieve positive results - a closed or negative question only raises bad feelings against each other. Why questions help to find the root of a problem What If questions open up the floor for creative solutions How questions focus on developing practical solutions So, perhaps, this lesson can be adapted to help trigger young children to start solve problems early too and stop accepting whatever the kindergarten teacher says to be fact? And perhaps, continue to keep up these inquiring and probing abilities later on in life? Learning Goal: A Pattern Of Critical Thinking The Question Game focuses on teaching children a kind of thinking which is particularly useful in creative problem-solving-a focused approach to get from a problem to the most effective solution. It is most effective when combined with regular repetition, which solidifies the thought pattern, and with groups, which encourages contributory exploration of alternative responses and creativity. Thinking strategy is just one of many qualities that are necessary for imparting charisma and leadership skills to the next generation. Many of us would claim that we don’t have the ‚natural gift’ that charismatic leaders like Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi had. However, charisma and leadership are qualities that, to a large extent, can be cultivated and trained. With soft skills becoming more important in today’s job market, cultivating these skills early on can provide children with an additional edge in becoming effective, active citizens in our society. These skills can be broadly grouped into four logical skills and four emotional skills: Logical skills: risk-taking, thinking strategy, creativity, and negotiation. Emotional skills: persuasion, emotional connection, body language, and dealing with vulnerability. Of these eight skills, the Question Game focuses on thinking strategy and creativity, and aims to solidify the critical thinking thought pattern from an early age onwards. Introducing The Question Game Preparation: print out the figure in the illustration, cut it out and glue the tabs together to form a cube. One simple idea is to pick up your favorite illustrated fairy tale book-the kind of book you’d read a two-year-old for bedtime stories. (This also works with most fictional works; the natural ‘break point‘ for questions is at the end of a plot development or paragraph for older audiences.) On each page, roll the cube and answer the question together. I’ll bet you’d be surprised by what turns Little Red Riding Hood can take. And more importantly after a while you and your child will both start asking these questions reflexively. Evaluating Learning Progress My personal experience introducing the game to my two children (aged Pre-K) is a gradual acceptance of the game and associated learning goals: Initial excitement: Rolling the cube puts the child in control and made a fun addition to reading their picture books; they couldn’t wait for their turn to roll the cube. Distress: The questions are hard, especially when they aren’t used to this sort of thinking pattern and are accustomed to the ’teacher knows everything’ thinking pattern. Here, my children often asked if we could read ‚without the cube‘, or ‚I don’t want to roll, but ___ can roll and answer the question.’ Acceptance: As they start to recognize that there isn’t a single correct answer, and they begin to understand what each question is trying to achieve, they begin to enjoy the game and insist that we read ‘with the cube‘. Application: During more abstract conversations, discussions, or observing how the children go about solving day-to-day problems during play. Example: a particular lego construction doesn’t quite work, even though it was‚ built according to instructions‘-and the child goes about investigating what is wrong and fixing it himself. Another example: When they ask me questions and I give them answers that obviously don’t make sense, I get more pointed questions than just ‘why?‘ as a response. Sophie Wrobel is a mother of two and independent information consultant with no pedagogic background. She runs a technology-oriented blog at avesophos.de and a self-improvement blog at geist.avesophos.de; The Question Game: A Playful Way To Teach Critical Thinking; image attribution flickr user usarmycorpofengineers The post The Question Game: A Playful Way To Teach Critical Thinking appeared first on TeachThought.

Exactly How A Learning Management System Can Improve Your Teaching by Jill Margerison, Ph.D At term’s end, reporting season spells hours of tedium as teachers sift, sort and tally student scores. Typically, months of monitoring produce the ‘bottom-line’ - or a selection of five alphabetical letters - A,B,C,D or E - that measure so-called student progress. But in our data-driven age, are these traditional ‘time-lapse’ methods of reporting ‘measuring up’? With the surge of ‘Big Data’ and uber-connected students, expectations regarding education are changing. Increasingly, like much of the interaction in our society these days, feedback from the teaching fraternity is required to not only be rapid, but also dynamically flexible, ongoing and personalised. Accordingly, the future of teaching involves teachers fulfilling the multiple role of instructor, analyst and facilitator. The future of teaching involves ‘learning analytics’. Whilst ‘learning analytics’ might signal change, it also heralds new opportunities. Working with ‘learning analytics’ can leverage your educational delivery further than just the constraints of the classroom walls and the tight regime of time-tabled school days. ‘Learning analytics’ allows greater connection with up-and-coming i-Gen’s who crave personalised outreach and two-way communication across multiple platforms. Understanding the ‘learning analytics’ helps you play to the strengths of each and every student to encourage improvement, tailor feedback and predict future performance. Learning analytics also offers opportunities to make students accountable for their engagement with the teaching materials. So whereabouts do you find and how do you ‘mine’ this big data to the best academic advantage? How do you use ‘learning analytics’ in your classroom to further empower your teaching in 2015? With each connection to your Learning Management System (LMS), there is login data that records frequency of site engagement, pace of click rates and posting responses on discussion forums. ‘Mining’ the data delivered from these types of digital platforms can be like ‘gold’ in supporting and motivating students to engage, improve and re-consider their interaction with the material. It is via platforms such as an LMS that data to analyse learning performance can be analysed. The following stories come from teachers using their LMS to leverage their delivery. The LMS provides data that helps the teachers customize their teaching and personalise the learning. Monitoring Engagement With Content "It had been a great lesson discussing various aspects of human psychology from our reading of Lord of the Flies. For homework, I asked the students to respond to a discussion forum online. The objective was to encourage students to share critical responses that they had voiced during class time, online in written form. I wanted to develop greater confidence in my students via collaborative writing. Collaborating like this in an online discussion forum meant that students could learn from each other’s writing in the comfort of their own learning space after the class had finished. I explained to them that an email would appear in their inbox with a hyperlink to the discussion forum. It was the usual way that we leveraged discussion once class had finished and the students knew to go to this link and begin posting online. But on this particular day my homework activity had a hitch! The best laid plans to post these extension questions were thwarted by an unscheduled staff meeting, a jam-packed highway of commuting traffic and my own son’s rugby pick up! I didn’t get to my computer until after 7.30 p.m that night. Was I too late to post the homework online for my class of 24, thirteen-year old English students? To my astonishment when I logged into the LMS discussion forums, the homework had been posted. Discussion forums and online discussion via text and photo uploads is second nature to my iGen students and in the absence of my starting thread, they had organised their own discussion about the novel. Student engagement, autonomy and authentic learning at work! The next morning I thanked my class for their initiative. They smiled and thanked me for joining them online to further facilitate their discussion. But you might ask did everyone join in? Were all 24 members of the class keen to chat about the novel online for homework? You probably know that the answer is ‘no’. Not everyone will be swept up in the motivation and desire to join in - that is a reflection of human behaviour. The significant factor, however, is that I was able to monitor those that demonstrated interest in contributing and those that held back. The data in the dashboard of the LMS provided me with digital time-logs. This meant that I could further extend those students that had taken this literary initiative and intervene to support and encourage those who had shied away. It also meant that I could create a positive dialogue around students who had taken ‘academic leadership’ in starting the discussion. These students felt proud of their achievements and motivated to do more." Tapping into this type of data doesn’t replace the traditional classroom teaching and learning experience but rather complements it. Learning analytics help teachers do their job by honing in on specific gaps in student knowledge. The benefit offers opportunity for timely intervention and rapid feedback prior to formal assessment. Importantly, whilst it is still the pedagogy that must drive the learning and teaching, if students are not accessing their LMS to engage with course material and online classroom discussions, lack of data should flag immediate concerns to the teacher/facilitator. Data & Ownership  "I use the LMS to embed key video clips that I ask my students to watch prior to class time. If they have some knowledge of the topic before we meet, we can have a more substantial discussion in class. Essentially, it is a flipped learning approach. When the students arrive in class, I make the dashboard stats of the number of views visible on the whiteboard. We all monitor the viewing progress stats of the video clips together and know who is ‘ready’ for discussion. Sometimes, students who have watched the clips, explain the relevance of the video to the class. This not only puts these students in a teaching position but also provides peer-to-peer coaching opportunities. Accountability, more control and ownership over the learning journey in my class are key reasons that I choose to leverage with the LMS. Students like knowing that their efforts are noticed and recorded accurately." Conclusion Harnessing the data through use of stats makes the process of academic ‘measurement’ more transparent. It helps the students recognise their mistakes and even facilitates communication between peers about grading. The LMS in your school is just another platform that offers opportunity to provide a ‘personalized’ element to schooling. What is your classroom story using data-derived material? Can blending learning analytics into your teaching environment contribute to greater student engagement and academic performance? This is a generation obsessed with connectivity and everything digital. It is also a generation with different expectations regarding knowledge dispersal, communication means and methods of response. As a result, working with learning analytics helps teachers meet these changing needs. Learning analytics spells the future in education; a future which involves stronger collaboration, interactivity and ongoing (even near-real-time) feedback. These processes signify new realities and develop both community and identity for our ‘blooming’ i-GEn-ers. Effective management of Big Data via analytical tools is the ‘bottom-line’ in 21st century teaching and learning. The question for 2015 is how do we ‘measure up’? Exactly How A Learning Management System Can Improve Your Teaching; adapted image attribution flickr user tulanepublicrelations The post Exactly How A Learning Management System Can Improve Your Teaching appeared first on TeachThought.

  Shifting To Visual Teaching by Timothy Gangwer Ed note: This post is a preface to Timothy’s session at the International Conference of Creativity, Thinking & Education, April 18-20, 2015 at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota During a rehearsal of Debussy’s La Mer, Maestro Arturo Toscanini found himself unable to describe to the orchestra the effect he hoped to achieve from a particular passage. After a moment’s thought, he took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it high into the air. The musicians, mesmerized, watched the slow, graceful descent of the silken square. Toscanini smiled with satisfaction as it finally settled on the floor. "There," he said. "Play it like that" (Fadiman, 1985). This vignette is a perfect example of why I’m excited about being a keynote speaker at the upcoming International Conference of Creativity, Thinking & Education, April 18-19, 2015, in Minneapolis, MN. As a global community, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. We are moving from a period in which the language of production and manufacturing dominated our way of seeing the world; now, ideas about information and communication shape our discourse. Could it be that we are actually in the midst of an even deeper change—one in which the pendulum of worldview is swinging from a more masculine and word-based culture to one that is more feminine and image-based? It is hard to ignore that the generation of children now moving through our educational system is by far the most visually stimulated generation that system has ever had to teach. Having grown up with cable television, video games, computer software that educates and entertains, and the Internet, our children are truly visual learners coming of age in an increasingly visually oriented world. Visual Stimulation Notwithstanding individual differences in intelligence and learning style, this generation of children needs to be taught the way they learn best—with visual stimulation accompanied by active learning strategies. As educators, we need to prepare our students for the world in which they will live and work. We must allow this understanding of the visual nature of our students to influence our teaching techniques and the educational technologies we employ. We need to become visual teachers. Whether you are an early childhood teacher or high school chemistry teacher, visual teaching is a template for all your instructional strategies. Since vision develops rapidly in the infant and so governs human sensory occurrence, it soon evolves into the dominant means through which children learn about their world. Our student population is made up of 65 percent visual learners, 30 percent auditory learners, and 5 percent kinesthetic learners (Mind Tools, 1998). Based on the concept that visual images are a language, visual literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and create visual messages. Development in the area of visual literacy has focused on the growth and expansion of educational programs that stimulate students’ abilities to assess and produce a visual language, as well as enhancement of students’ reading and writing skills through the use of visual literacy strategies. Visual Literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication. —(John Debes, cofounder of the International Visual Literacy Association, 1969, 27) Visual literacy in the classroom has become increasingly important as more and more information and entertainment is accessed through technology. Students must maintain the ability to think critically and visually about the images presented to them in today’s society.  Learning Evolves From Concrete to Abstract The Dale Cone of Experience model is based on the concept that learning evolves from the concrete to the abstract; visual symbols are nonverbal representations that precede verbal symbols (Sinatra, 1986). Because pictures or illustrations are analogs of experience and are only one step removed from actual events, these visual representations may be able to capture and communicate the concrete experience in various ways. To address the effective use of visual skills in the pursuit of learning, visual learning theory has evolved into four key elements: full-spectrum visual learning, active and performance-based learning, dynamic translation, and a multidisciplinary approach. Although we should attempt to preserve textual notions of literacy, it would be a breach of our duties as teachers for us to ignore the rhetorical power of visual displays. Visual forms of media, by themselves, and in combination with text and sound, come at our students from all directions, including television and the World Wide Web. The critical media literacy we need to teach must include evaluation of these media, lest our students fail to see, understand, and learn to harness the persuasive power of visual media. —(Michael Day, Chair of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Assembly for Computers in English (Day 1997) Visual Literacy Visual skills can be learned. They are not usually isolated from other sensory skills. Teachers should provide appropriate learning environments and materials to allow students to create their own visual messages. Digital literacies such as computers, audiovisual materials, and multimedia, require different skills. Competency in one literacy does not necessarily transfer to another. Because visual arts can impact student emotions and assist in comprehension, teachers should guide students through the process of learning to recognize and respond to visual and print messages of humor, irony, and metaphor. They may also require guidance to distinguish between factual and fictional visual representations. Students’ learning rates increase when teachers support a variety of learning styles. Studies have shown that processing in reading and math involves both phonological and visual information, thereby increasing reading, writing, and mathematical skills through the use of visual literacy (Stix, 1996). In a study conducted with groups of students enrolled in a mathematics methods course (a required course using pictorial journals for those teaching at the elementary level), the groups reported a better sense of task and a more focused introduction to their visual learning journal. Both groups agreed that their math anxiety decreased and their self-confidence increased as a result of the pictorial journal assignments (Stix). If visual literacy is perceived as a language, then there is a need to know how to communicate using this language, which includes being attentive to visual messages and critically reading or viewing images as the language of the messages. Visual literacy, like language literacy, is culturally specific, although there are certainly universal symbols or visual images that are globally understood. "When words and visual elements are closely entwined, we create something new and we augment our communal intelligence … visual language has the potential for increasing ‘human bandwidth’—the capacity to take in, comprehend, and more efficiently synthesize large amounts of new information" (Horn, 2001). About That Conference I’m doing a workshop at the Conference, "Visual Teaching & Creativity." My participants and I will explore the assessment of creativity (Can creativity actually be assessed?). We’ll sift through the six methods of visual learning, lateral thinking, testing visual perception while enhancing visual discrimination skills, brain-compatible strategies, critical/creative thinking, and the technological influences of the creative energy that attracts everything from engineering and biology, to the fine arts (Never let students know what subject you’re teaching!). I’ll share the components of full-spectrum visual literacy, active and performance-based learning, dynamic translation, and the all-important multi-disciplinary approach to learning-how we learn best. Because my goal is to pair educators and parents with 21st century learners, we’ll also review the seven characteristics of a digitally competent teacher. At the conclusion of the workshop, everyone will leave knowing the twenty steps to cultivate lifelong learning. I hope to see you there! Shifting To Visual Teaching; adapted image attribution wikimediacommons (also here) The post Shifting To Visual Teaching appeared first on TeachThought.

How We Use A Mentoring Model For Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students by Karim Abouelnaga, CEO Practice Makes Perfect I was raised in Long Island City, Queens by immigrant parents who knew very little about the public education system. As a result, I went through some of New York City’s most struggling public schools. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the struggle, nor would I have believed it if you told me. During my freshman year of college, I started researching the achievement gap for a scholarship I was trying to win. Little did I know that the research I was doing in 2011 would be the foundation for Practice Makes Perfect (PMP). When we started thinking about what a comprehensive summer education program should look like, we wanted to find a way to provide students with remedial support with the main driver of the knowledge being an older student. And not just any older student, an older student that is familiar with their neighborhood - either living directly in it or attending school there. That way they could empathize. In most cases, I figured the quality of life is similar for kids living in the same neighborhoods (there are always exceptions). Once we decided it was a good idea, we had to come to terms with the realities. One of the pieces of literature I read on the education level of inner-city students was that there were 8th graders with rising 5th grade reading levels. Through my own personal experience, I also realized there was a drop-off in focus as many of my peers who were higher achieving were swayed down a different path that didn’t involve a focus on academics. Despite the fact that we were going to use higher achieving students in those neighborhoods, we figured we would pair our scholars with 9th graders. In theory, it seemed like a great idea. The mentors shouldn’t struggle with the content. And in practice it worked even better. The scholars saw the mentors as cooler older siblings. They were close enough in age that they could relate to them, but also far enough in age that they would respect them. Similarly for the mentors, they saw the scholars as younger siblings and became invested in their success. And as their teachers, they took the success and setbacks of their scholars personally. Today, we pride our success on the relationships we are building between our students and mentors. We build trust between the students and that translates into academic gains. Our schools are incredibly well positioned to implement near peer mentoring programs throughout the year as our primary and secondary schools are built with a least three years and at most 13 years spanning from the youngest to the oldest students. Why not take advantage of our older students while they are there? About Practice Makes Perfect Practice Makes Perfect is a comprehensive summer education program with a proven "near-peer" model to support students from kindergarten through college matriculation. Our programs pair skills development for younger students with leadership development, career training and college prep for older students. Through a unique multi-relational approach, Practice Makes Perfect strategically matches academically struggling elementary and middle school students with older, higher achieving mentor peers from the same inner-city neighborhoods. Trained college interns and certified teachers supervise the "near-peer" relationship for a five-week, full-day academic experience. Practice Makes Perfect addresses inequities in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods over the summer. Research has found that two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap between lower and higher income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. Students from low-income areas lose between 2.5 to 3.5 months of academic learning each summer, while their affluent peers are making academic gains. How We Use A Mentoring Model For Disadvantaged Students  The post How We Use A Mentoring Model For Disadvantaged Students appeared first on TeachThought.

Are Schools Prepared For Great Teachers? by Terry Heick In On The Road, Jack Kerouac describes the "purity" of movement-the juxtaposition of a singular here, and a plural everywhere that create a kind of serenity. This is a purity, and most notably an enthusiasm, that we can learn from as educators. After decades of disagreement and perceived waywardness in education, recent efforts in school improvement have focused less on movement and more on standardization (a sibling of industrialization, but not necessarily a twin). Among the tactics at use here is a "guaranteed and viable curriculum, which has been recognized not just as crucial to progress, but the most crucial, with Robert Marzano calling it "the first factor, having the most impact on student achievement" among all other improvement strategies in his oft-quoted What Works in Schools. Richard DuFour, Mike Schmoker, and other professional development leaders consistently call on schools to start with this idea as a bedrock for further efforts. What is the definition of a guaranteed and viable curriculum? Marzano explains. "There is a significant amount of research that providing students with access to a guaranteed and viable curriculum has a significant, positive impact on student achievement. Guaranteed means that all students will be taught the same skills and concepts regardless of the teacher to whom they have been assigned. Viable means that the curriculum can be taught in the amount of time a teacher has to teach. If a district is to provide students with a guaranteed and viable curriculum, it is perfectly reasonable that it establish parameters for common pacing." Among other ideas, the words same, skills, concepts, taught, common, and pacing stand out to give us a sketch of what’s at work here. If our effort is to improve the school and the learning within it, it makes sense for teachers to pool their collective wisdom and might to make it happen. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. But in the process, we might be losing the purity of brilliance. Of what makes great teachers great. Scale As Proof Of Quality One of the hallmarks of success is the pervasiveness and virality of an idea. In any profession, people strive to create an idea that stands out from the rest, in hopes that it eventually becomes adopted by the crowd, the idea disappearing again into anonymity. This ironic pattern of expression is one of the great burdens of identity, and it’s no less egregious or sarcastic in schools, where we create mission statements promising to teach students to think for themselves—to create, design, and collaborate—in awkward pursuit of the mastery of admittedly academic content. Stand out while fitting in. Be the best, but take everyone with you. If we consider greatness—as cliché an idea as it seems—in terms of events and ideas, we can see part of the problem. Kerouac’s On The Road, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Dali’s surrealism, Martin Luther King Jr’s strength, Merton’s reflections, Flannery O’Connor’s sense of place, Ghandi’s wisdom, Muhammad Ali’s defiance, and other uber-human expressions were all jarring. They fractured accepted thinking. They humiliated their relative cultural circumstance in a way that didn’t just stand out or "shakes things up," but made it seem impossible to return to previous thinking patterns. There’s a conflict with greatness in education. It makes a mess. When Teachers Disrupt In On The Road, Kerouac writes"…we were all getting ready for the purity of the road…the purity of moving and getting somewhere…" Anywhere’s better than here. There is a gleam to change; movement manufactures possibility. But the change can overwhelm the destination. Just as a great teaching tool, literacy strategy, curriculum framework, etc., is one often characterized by its ability to distinguish itself, be replicated, and last, the same goes for great teachers. Why? Schools are fueled by scale, transparency, and sustainability. All on board to make sense of this good idea, and then smear it all over the walls of the school. A great idea can’t be great without the ability to scale, to be seen through, and to endure for everyone in every circumstance. This is a factor of standardization. When we ask for great teachers, then, it’s not clear if we all mean the same thing when we use the term. What’s a great teacher? If nothing else, by definition a great teacher is going to be exceptional. Different. If everyone is extraordinary, no one’s extraordinary. A great teacher navigates the boundaries of policy, content, and the sensitivity of people to get the clearest view of students. The most important gift a teacher has is the ability to see children for who they are, who they can be, and the relationship between the two. They have the unique ability to see students and content and thought and ideas and then nothing else—a blindness to irrelevance that lets the rest of the world melt away. They see your literacy plan, and your assessment policy, and your hashtag, and your app—but they see it within a macro context that it doesn’t matter—and can’t survive-without. This means that they might not "buy-in" to the new district initiatives. They may question the $500,000 iPad "rollout." They might resist the testing if all of the data is just going to sit there without substantively altering future curriculum and instruction. They may not be the stars of the PLC. And unless they have enough charisma to pull it all off, it’s all going to cost them their "team-player" reputation. (Not fitting in is the first step to industrial obsolescence.) This isn’t to suggest that a great teacher necessarily has to be a disruptive teacher. Nor that questioning the status quo makes you some sort of pedagogical martyr. You can check every box and smile every smile and integrate every bit of the district’s push and still be great. Some schools are designed to foster spectacular teaching and learning. Here, great teachers probably don’t seem the least bit disruptive. Instead, they energize its hallways. But serving two masters is draining; so many strong teachers try for as long as they can to make it work, but ultimately, it just isn’t sustainable for too many of them. So they have to make a choice they shouldn’t have to make-students or policy. There is an inertia and strength and unpredictability to great teaching—a kind of informed and spectacular waywardness that may not waddle in the direction you point it. They fracture thinking and practice-not out of spite, but because they’re busy being great. Teaching great means teaching differently--and that’s not easy. They often defy what you’re looking for because the standardization of education has you look for factors of standardization. A fit. A Common Language For Greatness When you say "great teacher," you may be thinking "change lives," "reach students," and "teach thinking," but you may really mean "efficient actuator of district policy and non-negotiables, able to unpack standards and collect consistent data in order to inform precise and differentiated instruction of academic content in order to move students to proficiency." And that’s okay, as long as you and the teacher and parents and students are all clear in that definition. As they are, the same schools that seek guaranteed and viable and common and same as catalysts for excellence may not be ready for great teachers. Great teaching is disruptive teaching, and this is an uncomfortable idea schools aren’t always designed to allow for. What might a school designed for great teaching look like? How can they attract, produce, and protect great teaching that helps the school, as a cultural institution, reach its goals? How might that school’s curriculum, instruction, assessment, collaboration, professional development, and other drivers of "disruptive greatness" be designed and integrated? How can we honor the purity of pure pedagogy and knowledge-making as a process and endlessly human act? The most human of acts? Which of our standardizations promote innovation and greatness, and which destroy them? Are Schools Prepared For Great Teachers?; image attribution flickr user susanfernandez The post Are Schools Prepared For Great Teachers? appeared first on TeachThought.

Duolingo For Schools Is Now A Thing by TeachThought Staff From a press release Big Idea: Duolingo Builds On Popularity of World-Beating App, Launches Platform for Schools In 2015, #edtech can go in either direction-mobile to platform, or platform to mobile. Or mobile can be the platform, because really, what is a platform anymore? Learning technology that initially finds a niche in the informal-learn.ist, for example-can seek to become an academic product. Or non-academic technology, like YouTube, can itself be reimagined via an API-like approach, which gives us Brainfeed. And then there are apps like Sandbox, which become Sandbox EDU. Interesting trend. So it’s not surprising that Duolingo, a blisteringly popular (and informal, non-academic, just because you want to) language learning app for Android and iOS, announced today the launch a platform for schools. It may seem like just another fun mobile app, but there are already more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than in the entire US public school system. Now, in response to thousands of letters from language teachers and education ministries from governments around the world, Duolingo is announcing the launch of a platform aimed at enhancing learning in formal educational settings: Duolingo for Schools. Developers explain that the "launch of Duolingo for Schools means educators will finally have a dashboard to track student progress on the popular Duolingo app in a consolidated manner." "The platform can identify patterns in the way individuals learn and react accordingly to reinforce areas of difficulty. Duolingo’s technological companion for the classroom will help teachers understand each student’s learning needs at a level of detail previously impossible. For example, if a student hesitates before responding to certain questions, this indicates a lack of confidence and the need for more exercises of its kind. Additionally, incorrectly answered questions may all have an underlying commonality: some students may struggle with listening exercises, while others may have difficulties with verbs no matter the topic. "The goal is to provide a personalized learning experience that gives each student and instructor immediate feedback in the classroom. This can free up teachers’ time to concentrate on difficult concepts, answer questions, and assist students falling behind," said Luis von Ahn, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and co­founder of Duolingo. Some language teachers like Said Kassem Hamideh are already restructuring their entire curriculum to synch with Duolingo’s data­driven program. "The gamification really works with the kids and opens up an opportunity for them to reinforce what is taught during instructional time. I am the only foreign language teacher at a school of 750 students. We have been using Duolingo this year, and I’m seeing really novel results," said the Spanish High School teacher at Washington High School of IT in Milwaukee. "Students see Duolingo as a fun activity, so assigning it in class is viewed as a reward for hard work," said Veronique Balou­Kovalenko, a middle school language teacher in Connecticut. TeachThought’s Take The trend here is more interesting than the tool. We use Duolingo with students ourselves (along with Lingua.ly, Vocabulario, and others), but the movement from an open niche (mobile, informal language learning) to one more closed (formal academic environments) is an interesting one. Developing a tool that’s successful in both domains isn’t simple. The burden is now on Duolingo to iterate what is now platform (as opposed to simply an app) to fit the needs of teachers and schools on both desktop and mobile devices. Duolingo For Schools Is Now A Thing The post Duolingo For Schools Is Now A Thing appeared first on TeachThought.

Too Much Sitting? Five Movement Strategies That Get Kids Thinking by Kenny McKee Each day more research confirms the link between movement and learning. Brain researcher David Sousa claims that physical activity increases the amount of oxygen in our blood, and this oxygen is related to enhanced learning and memory. A recent Washington Post article suggests that many student behaviors we associate with ADHD may stem from an overall lack of physical movement  - both in and out of school. In addition, a phenomenally popular blog post by Alexis Wiggins recently touched upon how much sitting students actually do every day, and how all that sitting affects energy levels and learning. However, many secondary teachers struggle to integrate movement into the classroom. I know that as a former English teacher, movement found its way into many of my "special" lessons, but it was often a missing ingredient of daily instruction. For example, when students created commercials, searched for books in the library, or carried out debates, movement was inevitable. However, when the main focus of a lesson was reading and writing (as many are in the English classroom), movement was minimal. I’ve included some strategies that teachers of any content area can use to integrate movement into lessons.  When you have a lesson that looks "sedentary," integrating one of these strategies will surely increase students’ learning and engagement. 1. Gallery Walks/Chalk Talks In some lessons, students may need to analyze multiple texts. Why not post those texts on the walls, and have students rotate through them in small groups? I have used this strategy with students analyzing primary and secondary documents for DBQ’s (document-based questions) in history classes. One colleague has students analyze magazine ads for rhetorical techniques in her English class. Gallery walks can also feature student-created texts, even digital ones. A colleague who teaches earth science once had student groups create informational Animoto videos on different geographic formations. She then had students participate in a digital gallery walk where they watched the student-created videos on laptops, and took notes on each geographic formation. Chalk Talks are gallery walks where students are asked to respond to texts. For example, quotes could be posted, and student could post their reactions to them. In a math class, students could solve a problem on chart paper, and explain their process. Other students could then use Post-Its to write comments or critiques of their solution and process. 2. White Board Meetings White Board Meetings are a strategy I have seen two science teachers use often.  Essentially, students will investigate a situation (often using a data set). Students will then make sense of the problem in a group. They will display their findings on a mini-whiteboard. Usually, students are required to show information in graphs, pictures, mathematics, and writing.  Once students post their information on whiteboards, they present their findings.  Students can then receive feedback and answer questions about their information. 3. North Pole-South Pole/Continuum This strategy is great for formative assessment or assessing background knowledge. Essentially, one side of the room represents one idea, and the other side of the room represents an opposing idea. For example, I used the strategy while teaching in a statistics class recently. My "North Pole" was "I feel extremely confident in how well I can comprehend and remember information in the statistics textbook." My "South Pole" was "I feel NO confidence in how well I can comprehend and remember information in the statistics textbook." Students were asked to align themselves with how they felt. If they had a more moderate response, they positioned themselves more closely to the center of the room, showing a continuum of student confidence. Their responses affected how I presented an array of note-taking strategies and which students I worked with more closely during the lesson. 4. Musical Mingle This strategy works along the same lines as Musical Chairs, but you simply ask students to stand. I often develop a series of questions that I want to ask students before the lesson begins (to assess background knowledge) or after the lesson (to assess learning). I ask all of the students to stand. When I play the music, they will meander around. When the music stops, I announce a question and they will discuss responses with a person close to them. Once students have had the opportunity to talk, we then repeat the process. One caveat to this strategy is limiting your questions. Generally, any more than three or four questions results in diminished focus.  Once the activity is completed, students to share some of their discussion points with the whole class. Most students feel confident sharing in the whole class because they have had an opportunity to clarify their thinking with a partner earlier. 5.  Stations Most educators view stations as a staple of the elementary school classroom, but they are also extremely effective in middle and high schools. Stations can be utilized for differentiation. For example, based upon students’ current writing trends, a teacher could place students at station based upon areas they need to practice. Activities can be on paper, or they can be embedded digitally using QR Codes. Other stations may be rotational, such as short writing prompts, differing math problems, selected poems to analyze, or different activities for new vocabulary or concepts. Kenneth McKee is a high school literacy coach for Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, NC. His interests include teacher leadership, disciplinary literacies, and partnership approaches to instructional coaching. He is a 2014 ASCD Emerging Leader. Connect with him on his blog (kennycmckee.com) or on Twitter (@kennycmckee); image attribution flickr user flickeringbrad; Too Much Sitting? 5 Movement Strategies That Get Students Thinking The post Too Much Sitting? Five Movement Strategies That Get Students Thinking appeared first on TeachThought.

Our Pedagogical Imperative: Making All Learners Feel Competent by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education I happened to be in Paris the day of the terror attack, and it was a bit unnerving since I was at the American School. Our meeting abruptly ended as heightened security went into immediate effect, and I took the train back to Paris. I seem to be bad luck: I was in DC during 9-11 (At NSF, no less), and I was in NYC during the first attack on the world trade center in the early 90s. So, I have had a lot of opportunity to ponder terror, our responses to it - and links to education generally (and UbD specifically). "Ubd? Really, Grant? Isn’t that a bit of a stretch?" No. Because we are talking about understanding and a lack of understanding - in this case, with very high stakes. It is crucial that we learn to understand - not like or respect, but understand! - why young men become alienated from civilized life broadly and school specifically, and resort to murder in the name of their understanding. In the language of the 6 facets, we have to have the courage and the intellectual integrity to empathize and have perspective. Interestingly, when times get tough, as they are now, empathy is viewed as a sell-out, as dangerous, as providing respect and legitimacy to the Other, to the Enemy. But that is fearful thoughtlessness. Our only hope in facing this crisis is to better understand why people think and act as they do - whether we like or detest what they do. No good comes from dismissing them as ‘evil’ and ending all thought in our moral smugness. It is not a stretch, I believe, to see our most alienated young people in school as similar in psychological state to these radicalized Islamic fighters. We have seen this play out in kids becoming gang members; we have seen it play out in school shootings by students. No good ever came from boys becoming increasingly marginalized and made to feel like outsiders and incompetents. That’s the pool from which Al Qaeda most successfully draws and it is the pool from which our lone wolf student shooters come. It is also, more mundanely, why boys drop out psychically from their work and just go through the motions. What role, then, do we as educators have to play in this crisis? A very important one, I think. It is imperative that we aggressively fight bullying and all ‘softer’ forms of marginalization of students. But as importantly, it is imperative that we find countless ways-as part of curriculum-to make all learners feel competent and a part of something worthwhile. A 7th grade girl, when interviewed by teachers as part of our summer institutes, said the most amazing thing when asked how she felt about ‘typical’ teaching. "The more the teacher talks, the more I feel alone and useless." Pedagogy, as everyone from Dewey to Freire has noted, has a moral dimension, whether we like it or not. What we feel comfortable with is irrelevant; "What does the student need to prosper?" is the only question that matters. My mentor John Goodlad, who died recently, noted repeatedly in "A Place Called School" what the authors of "How People Learn" noted 20 years later: motivation to learn and to participate in learning is greatly increased when you are made to feel a part of something and made to feel more competent at something. That’s why I believe so strongly in athletics, Socratic Seminar, Band, PBL, putting on plays, etc. as a central not peripheral part of learning. That is our moral mission as educators, because the alternative is more than sad. It is dangerous, harmful to both our broad ideals and to individual students who may not fit our picture of ‘good’ students. I tell this story often: A student of mine, was a pain in the rear: biting, sassy, headstrong. I was advisor to the paper; he was editor. He got me in trouble a few times with his journalism. But I felt honor-bound to help him be a better editor and learner even as he made it difficult for all of us. Fast forward: Chris Hedges wins the Pulitzer prize in journalism for his work in Bosnia. I gather he is still cranky and challenging. So be it. Let’s keep trying to understand our misfits, our loners, our pains in the ass, even in the face of these difficult times in and out of school. We just may save some souls and prevent some tragedies. PS: A relevant piece via the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/world/europe/raising-questions-within-islam-after-france-shooting.html This article was excerpted from a post that first appeared on Grant’s personal blog; Grant can be found on twitter here; Our Pedagogical Imperative: Making All Learners Feel Competent; image attribution flickr user skokienorthshoresculpturepark The post Our Pedagogical Imperative: Making All Learners Feel Competent appeared first on TeachThought.

My Journey Teaching Through Passion-Based Learning by Nigel Coutts, thelearnersway.net Ed note: This is the first part of a two-post mini-series (can you call two posts a mini-series?) The second part of this post will be published tomorrow morning, and will focus on the design cycle of genius hour and passion-based learning. For the past eight years students in Year Six at Redlands have participated in a Personal Passion Project during Term Four. It is a way to finish their time in Junior School with a project that connects their passion with all they have learned about managing inquiry/design based projects to that point. Over the years it has proven to be a highlight of the year and has produced amazing results. With a change to the Australian & NSW syllabus we have had to revise our approach to the Personal Passion Project and so now is the perfect time to reflect on the past and identify the lessons learned. First, a little history. In 2007 Redlands was in the final stages of an experiment with Middle Schooling. Years Six, Seven and Eight were involved and the key difference between the middle school and a traditional primary school was that students spent most of their day in one of two classes; Humanities and Sciences. Teachers worked in pairs with one taking the two classes for Humanities and the other taking these same classes for Sciences. Each teacher had one of these classes as their ‘Homeroom’ class with a pastoral focus. This model worked well as the team of two teachers knew the students in their classes well and was able to share insights and perspectives about the students that might have been missed by one teacher working alone. My 2007 homeroom class contained the year group’s top cluster of students, at this time we partially streamed classes. These students were naturally high achievers with some unique personalities and quirky interests. By the time Term Four arrived I needed to offer them an alternative to the homework they were used to, something that would challenge their abilities and motivate them to show what they were capable of. My idea was to offer the option of a ‘Personal Passion Project’ as a homework task. I had expected only a few to take up the offer, in the end the whole class did and the degree of enthusiasm was such that I needed to find time within the timetable to allow the students to work on and share their developing projects. The idea of a ‘Personal Passion Project’ was not unique in 2007 but was less common than it is now. Ideas like ‘Google’s 20% Time’ were not well known in Education nor was the term ‘Genius Hour’ commonly used. How to best structure and support a Personal Passion Project was not something I had given much thought to as I really did not think many students would take the option. The result was that the class and I sort of fell into the project and learned as we went along. A key to the success at this point was the collaboration that took place between the students. Without prompting from me they were encouraging and supporting each other through the projects. This collaboration ensured that deadlines were met and that individuals never felt overwhelmed by the scale of what they had taken on. The results of this first year showed the potential of the concept. I had students designing and making horse blankets, creating dance costumes, exploring architecture, writing books of poetry, investigating aerodynamics and writing short stories. What impressed me most was the depth of understanding the students were able to demonstrate at the end of the projects. The students had solved real problems, applied the design cycle and managed their time effectively; they demonstrated all of the skills I hoped my students might have developed after seven years of formal education. At the end of this year I had the opportunity to chat with a Year Six teacher from a nearby school. I heard of how difficult the students had become in the last weeks of the year. As I taught two Year Six classes I could relate to this experience but only for the class not involved in the Personal Passion Project. For the class that had been involved the experience was very different. While one class was moving into holiday mode the other class was at their most engaged. Late in the final week of term we spent a morning sharing our projects and discussing the process. I asked the class ‘should I do this next year?’ and the resounding response was ‘yes’. The general feeling was that this was the best thing they had done at school. The signs were positive and when I shared my experiences from this pilot programme with my colleagues in 2008 they were keen to give it a go. This time all of year six would take on a Personal Passion Project during Term Four. This would require some additional planning and as this was now a core piece of our teaching would require more detailed programming. This was also our first year back in Junior School with a traditional one teacher per class model. This first year was a great success in many ways but there were also lots of lessons to be learned in a short period of time. Fortunately thanks to a skilled group of teachers and enthusiastic students we were able to solve most of the little problems that came along. What The Students Have Done The Personal Passion Projects have produced an enormous variety of projects, too many to list. There are those that recur each year and others that are truly unique. It is the projects that fall furthest from what one expects of a Year Six student or are least likely to be covered in a traditional syllabus that stand out. Projects like these: In 2012 two projects stood out; one as it was the sort of project that at first I thought was going to be too difficult, the other because it was quite unexpected. The first student decided he wanted to build a laser CNC engraving machine from old printers. What impressed me from the outset was that he knew exactly how he would make it work and what difficulties he would encounter along the way including how he would control the movement of his laser in two axis and how he would program it. In the end it worked almost as expected and if not for some last minute issues with the laser being fried by excessive voltage, would have been perfect. The second was a project to explore low cost emergency housing for cold climate situations. This became a highly scientific investigation of the insulation properties of a range of recycled materials. In 2014 a student in my class decided he would make a guide to creating an ‘Internet Start Up’ company. His final product was exceptionally well produced and based on detailed research into the strategies that would allow a company to grow rapidly and adapt to unseen or changing circumstances. His work impressed me but more importantly it impressed the many parents with a business background who could fully understand the quality of his recommendations. Some projects have proven popular such as making a skateboard or surfboard. The most recent adaptation of this has been a student using 3D software to design his surfboard and then investigating options to have this 3D printed. There have also been a number of outstanding efforts at recycling furniture or creating new fashions from pre-loved clothes. Greatest success has come where the students have had a clear vision for their designs. For some students the Personal Passion Project has been their first taste of real success at school. While we tend to steer students away from projects that involve a more technical ‘make’ aspect due to the limitations of working in a junior school; however, we have made exceptions to this rule. One boy who was passionate about surfing set to the task of making a surfboard using traditional methods of foam and fiberglass. Working with a member of our Senior School Design and Technology department he was able to do this. This was a student who had struggled to produce quality work in the classroom but on this project set and achieved the highest standards for quality. He learned that by taking a risk and giving attention to every detail he could achieve success and we all learned that the right project and the right environment will allow students to achieve great things. There are also notable examples of where students have taken on more traditional projects but produced results beyond expectation. In 2007 one girl decided to write a piece of music and record this using software. For a school with a strong music program this is not so out of the ordinary but this girl had little interest in computers before this project and needed to teach herself ‘Sibelius’, a highly technical piece of professional software. The result was amazing, was produced to the highest of technical standards and in its simple beauty hides the complexity of thinking behind it. Other Examples Of Passion-Based Learning Another is an exploration of ‘Conceptual Art’. The finished artwork demonstrated high levels of creativity and a keen understanding of the genre. What was most surprising here was that the student selected a project outside of his comfort zone while he could have used his exceptional talent for writing and ensured himself a successful and less challenging end of year. The final piece incorporated video, audio, sculpture, re-cycled materials and performance art in a way that described the artists journey towards maturity. Read his history of Conceptual Art There have been a number of books written through the Personal Passion Project but two stand out as examples of the surprising talents this can reveal. One was a book of poems written and illustrated by a student in 2007. This students attention to detail and desire for perfection bordered on obsession but in this project she used these personality quirks to great effect and produced a refined product of simple beauty and emotional depth. The other standout book was produced last year by a young author who wrote her first novel ‘Aftermath’. She used her writing to develop a compelling story that draws her readers into a dystopian world that seems all too real. Read or Download ‘Aftermath’ The Personal Passion Project has been enhanced for many students through ongoing reference to the Design Cycle and many students are able to fluidly move from one phase of this cycle to another as appropriate to their investigation. We introduce this cycle in Term One but the Personal Passion Project is the first time where students are applying this with complete independence. We display this cycle in our classrooms and have a copy on the website that accompanies the project. Redlands Year Six Ed note: The second part of this post will be published tomorrow morning, and will focus on the design cycle of genius hour and passion-based learning; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks; My Journey Teaching Through Passion-Based Learning The post My Journey Teaching Through Passion-Based Learning appeared first on TeachThought.

The Genius Hour Design Cycle: A Process For Planning by Nigel Coutts, thelearnersway.net Ed note: Part 1 of this 2-part series can be seen here; note that some of the language has been slightly revised from the original post by Nigel. He uses the term passion projects, which is very close to Genius Hour and Passion-Based Learning. The differences across the three terms are often a matter of individual use and interpretation, a point we wanted to help clarify by using the three terms interchangeably even though they may not be exactly the same-passion projects needn’t use a Genius Hour format, nor does passion-based learning necessarily need to take the form of projects. In that way, the above model can be used for any of the three, but it felt most precise as a model for teachers to use to design Genius Hour projects. So, here we are. You can (and should!) read more from Nigel at thelearnersway.net. In an ongoing effort towards polishing the edges, over the years we have continued to refine the processes we apply to the Personal Passion Project. We have gained insights into the sorts of projects that work well and which will cause difficulties. We have added a degree of structure while maintaining the required degree of freedom necessary for a personalised project. The results of this learning are presented (in the model above and the text) below. 1. Be prepared to be amazed The quality of the students projects will go beyond what you expect. This is particularly important when a student comes to you with a grand idea that seems too hard or overly complex. If the student has the right level of passion for the project and an idea for how they will get started they will more than likely complete the project and complete it well. 2. Don’t let your fears get in the way The students are almost certainly going to select topics that you have no knowledge of and don’t have the skills to support. At this point it could be easy to let your fears and insecurities get in the way. The best way to move forward is to listen to the student; do they know what they are doing? do they know which questions they need to answer? what problems they need to solve? If the answers to all of this are positive, start looking for an expert to help when times get tough. 3. Some students need a push in the right direction Some students will come up with projects that are too simple with answers that could be easily Googled. We introduced the students to ‘High Order Thinking Skills’ and built these into the planning forms students complete. Projects need to include elements of synthesis, evaluation and creativity with the minimum requirement adjusted for individuals. We provide students with a list of verbs appropriate for the top levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and help them use these in framing their topics. 4. Some students design a project that has nothing to do with their passion A student might have a passion for surfing and decide they are going to write a book about the history of the sport. The problem is they have designed a project where they will need to be a historian, a researcher, a writer and you know they don’t enjoy doing any of this. Maybe with the right topic they will gain a wider interest in these things but most likely they will quickly dream of days at the beach. 5. Some projects are just not possible It can be hard to say no to a project but some are just not feasible. A classic example is the student who wants to design a better tennis racquet by selecting the right mix of shape and materials. The problem is that the modern tennis racquet uses high tech composites and even with million dollar R&D budgets the differences between one design and the next is hard to prove. 6. Time and Scale Some projects will clearly take longer than you have available, others are simply too large in scale or will rely on the involvement of too many people. Setting manageable goals and working to an achievable timeframe is important. At the same time you need to ensure that the concerns over time constraints are genuine. Creating a detailed timeline with estimates of how long each phase will take is beneficial on many levels at this stage. For the students the conversations around how long the project will take can include some rewarding reflection on how they approach tasks and can assist in their development of an understanding of their learning style. Some students need time to talk about their project and unpack ideas socially, others need quiet time to think through the steps, some just dive in and fix mistakes and redirect their plans as they go. 7. Too many changes One of the challenges for some students has been the ever changing project. They select one topic, discover they don’t like it or encounter a problem they can’t easily solve and change to another topic. A week later and the process repeats. Setting a definite deadline after which there can be no changes is important. In the end the students work out that they have to make their ideas work. 8. Just enough planning Over the years we refined the level of planning the students were required to do before commencing on their projects in earnest. The initial version required great detail and length processes for developing focus questions and setting targets. For some students and some projects it worked well but for others it got in the way. Eventually we got to a point where the planning had just enough detail, so we know the students have an understanding of their project and that we can support them along the way. View our simplified planning template 9. Relying on experts and building a team Many of the projects students have explored over the years fall outside of the expertise of their teachers. I have no idea how to sew for example and have been of equally little help to students who are basing their projects around dance or music. Across the school we have found amazing partners with the skills we needed and in most cases they are keen to spend time with a student who they share a passion with. Building a team of support around the project is key to its ultimate success. Being mindful of the workload within this team is also important. We have had some colleagues so keen to help that they become overloaded and although they never complained we had to be careful in managing the demands on their time. 10. Collaboration & Self Organized Learning Because this is a Personal Passion Project we have not included team projects. Nevertheless collaboration between students is an important part of many projects. Where possible foster the opportunities for collaboration while allowing each student to maintain control of their project. The power of collaboration will lift the quality of the projects as students share ideas and encourage each other to go beyond expectations. Collaboration will also solve some of the problems with projects outside the teacher’s comfort zone. This year I had a group of students focused on game development and their ultimate success was a direct result of the community of like-minded learners they created around their projects. This is a perfect demonstration of students adopting a self-organized learning environment as they connect with their passions. 11. The invisible safety net For the Personal Passion Project finding the right levels of scaffolding, teacher input and guidance is one of the challenges. We want the students to feel that they are working independently while maintaining an appropriate level of support. In many ways we are wanting to provide an invisible safety net that allows the students to take risks independently while having the support they require. 12. Documenting the process and ensuring time for reflection Giving time to active reflection on the process has been important. Students need to be able to take a step back and assess what they have achieved and what remains to be accomplished. Sharing these ideas with peers is most beneficial and allows you to train the students in reflecting on their learning and in giving feedback to their peers. The act of reflecting on the process has also benefitted many students when it is time to share their projects with the world as their audience is as interested in the process as they are in the product. This is particularly true for projects where the process is not obvious or is underestimated by the audience. A good example is game design projects in which the finished product does not reveal the level of knowledge and effort that was required. 13. Real Audiences For all learning adding a real audience for the students is critical, too much of what students do is produced for an audience of one. For the Personal Passion Project presenting to an audience in the end of term ‘Gallery Walk’ has been critical in ensuring the success of the projects. The students gain a real sense of achievement from this day and the feedback is always genuinely positive. For 2015 we are planning to move to a ‘Genius Hour’ model with students engaging in a scaffolded programme of project management skill development throughout Semester One that leads into planning for and completing a Personal Passion Project across Semester Two. The difference will be that the learning experience will be distributed across the year, one hour per week. We hope that this fits with the demands of the new syllabus from a time perspective while retaining the best parts of the present model. Certainly at the end of the year we will reflect and share what has been learned. The post The Genius Hour Design Cycle: A Process For Planning appeared first on TeachThought.

Mac Hack: How To Use Your iPad As A Second Screen Without WiFi by TeachThought Staff Looking for some extra screen size out of your MacBook or Mac computer? If you have all three of the following, you may find some use in Duet Display. 1. An iOS mobile device (iPad or iPhone) 2. An OSX laptop or computer (MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or iMac) 3. The need (or perceived need if you have the habit of buying things because they’re interesting rather than because you’re going to actually use them) for a second screen We just paid $14.99 for use here, and so far are intrigued with its lag-free speed. What is it? Duet Display is an app developed by ex-Apple display engineers, which is a pretty compelling attempt to establish credibility to set this app apart from the other second screen apps that aren’t fast enough, reliable enough, or are otherwise too janky to use. The big idea here is to use your mobile (or more mobile) device to give yourself an extra visual slot for your work. Or your students’ work. And unlike Apple TV or other methods of displaying this content and that screen, this one doesn’t depend on WiFi, but rather your Lightning connection instead. In their own words, the app developers explain below. What’s the big deal? "Duet is the first high performance solution to use your iPad as a second display for your Mac. Unlike other second display apps, duet’s display has zero lag." Who made it? "Duet (was) created by a team of ex-Apple display engineers. Our area of expertise is specifically doing what duet promises. We build a very high quality product and stress ease of use and reliability." How does it work? "We accomplish this by turning your iPad into a second display using the USB to 30 Pin or Lightning connection. It is far more stable than Wi-Fi, especially for people on the go. You don’t have to worry about your 802.11n network, your router settings, whether you’re on a VPN, or if you’re downloading or uploading too much data to use your display. Duet just works." Okay, so I download the Mac app and iOS app. What hardware does it work with? Mac Hack: How To Use Your iPad As A Second Screen Without WiFi The post How To Use Your iPad As A Second Screen Without WiFi appeared first on TeachThought.

Are You A Whole Teacher? A Self-Assessment To Understand by TeachThought Staff Whole Child Learning is a thing; Whole Teaching should be a thing too, no? Here at TeachThought, Jackie Gerstein’s usergeneratededucation is at the top of our reading list, in large part for her thinking about the human side of formal education. Much of our content-that is, the content here at TeachThought, and that on her site-overlaps because of our shared perspective on teaching and learning: self-directed learning, the role of play in learning, the idea of citizenship, student-centered learning (and student-centered teaching), and more. (The fact that we have to push ourselves to think of the "human side" could be part of our problem; teaching and learning are among the most human of processes-a natural response to our environment and curiosity.) We’ve also long been interested in the work of Costa and Kallick with the Habits of Mind (See What Are The Habits Of Mind? and 16 Strategies For Integrating The Habits Of Mind) as wonderful supplements to an academic curriculum. More and more, they’re richness has us wondering if they’re not more important than the "content" itself. These ideas have pushed us to consider what it is that students really need to know in a modern world, which we’re going to have spend some time this year thinking about. And it is in that whole Habits of Mind/new knowledge demands context comes Jackie’s "Twelve 21st Century Skills & Attributes: Educator Self-Assessment." Jackie has framed this concept (modern teaching) through 12 characteristics, and again through teacher self-assessment questions for each characteristic. The end result is a shift from academia to people to can supplement standards-based teaching and learning, or replace it altogether if we want to get all progressive and avant garde about it. You can read more here-in fact, follow her on twitter, and add her blog to your favorite RSS reader. Are You A Whole Teacher? A Self-Assessment To Understand Oral & Written Communication 1. Do you provide learners with opportunities to speak and write using their own unique and genuine voices? 2. Do you help learners create focus, energy, passion around the oral and written communication they want to make? Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving 3. Do you promote and reinforce doing things that haven’t been done before, where you and your learners have to rethink or think anew? 4. Do you ask learners to generate and ask their own unique essential questions? Collaboration Across Networks 5. Do you facilitate global communication and collaboration with your learners? 6. Do you give learners opportunities to collaborate face-to-face and virtually? 7. Do you assist your learners in developing their own personal learning networks? Curiosity & Imagination 8. Do you promote, encourage, and reinforce inquisitiveness? 9. Do you encourage your learners to add their own "personal touches" to their learning experiences? Initiative & Entrepreneurialism 10. Do you assist in learners becoming involved in meaningful work? 11. Do you provide opportunities for learners to take risks? Take their own initiative to do things? Agility & Adaptability 12. Do you accept change as normal and natural? And assist your learners in doing the same? 13. Are you and your learners flexible? 14. Do you and your learners use a variety of tools to solve new problems? Hope & Optimism 15. Do you model, teach, reinforce positive self talk? A ‘Can Do’ attitude? 16. Do you assist learners in enhancing their personal agency thinking? 17. Do you expose learners to stories that portray how others have succeeded or overcome adversity? Self-Regulation 18. Do you model and assist learners in developing and understanding their own metacognitive processes? 19. Do you help learners develop their own ability to self-motivate? 20. Do you assist learners in reflecting on and evaluating their learning experiences? Empathy & Global Stewardship 21. Do you provide learners with opportunities for perspective taking? 22. Do you assist all learners in understanding the interdependence of all living things? 23. Do you create opportunities for learners to put empathy into action; engage in pro-social behavior intended to benefit others? Resilience 24. Do you help learners see failures as opportunities for growth? 25. Do you encourage and reinforce learners’ own intimate resiliency? 26. Do you insure that each and every learner knows "You Matter"? Grit 27. Do you give learners opportunities to work on long-term, complex projects? 28. Do you assist learners in identifying and acknowledging the rewards of persevering through tough times? Vision for the Future  29. Do you give learners the time, resources, and opportunity to identify and pursue their dreams? 30. Do you assist learners in developing the steps needed to achieve their dreams? Whole Teaching; Are You A Whole Teacher? A Self-Assessment To Understand The post Are You A Whole Teacher? A Self-Assessment To Understand appeared first on TeachThought.

Windows 10 Will Be Free; Should Teachers Care? by Terry Heick "We want people to love Windows on a daily basis." Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella made their intentions clear at the Windows 10 Live Event January 21st, 2015 in Remond, Washington. Windows needs to be everywhere. And it is. Sort of. With the pending release of Windows 10 (sometime this fall-for a new operating system by Microsoft, that’s pretty soon), they took the stage to explain to an increasingly mobile world why they still mattered. We all grew up on Microsoft products (with some Macintosh thrown in). Office continues to be the standard by which productivity suites are measured. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and other de facto 1990s products are available everywhere today-on Macs, PC, iPads, iPhones, Androids. Windows Phones, while not popular, have strong hardware and a surprisingly good operating system. Their purchase of Nokia gave them mobile bandwidth they hoped would allow them to compete with Apple. Xbox is neck-and-neck with Sony in the world of video games. Whether battling Google for patents, Sony for video game supremacy, or Apple for everything else, Microsoft is everywhere. Only they remain almost entirely invisible in a world no longer obsessed with productivity-the same world that left BlackBerry behind. Platform-thinking, mobility, and the thoughtfulness of interfaces have replaced drivers, office suites, and even cost as prime mover factors. While people talk about apps and the cloud, the keystone is ecology. And everyone wants you using theirs. For teachers and schools and classrooms and students, while Apple has always occupied a niche, Microsoft has dominated marketshare. According to edweek and the International Data Corporation, In the third quarter of 2014 "shipment of devices loaded with Microsoft’s Windows dropped to a 51 percent market share this year from a 63 percent market share in 2013." Chromebooks are replacing Microsoft laptops because Google Drive is replacing Microsoft Word. And there goes Microsoft’s long-held trump card. If you want mobile learning, you buy an iPad or Android. If you want streamlined document sharing and access, you use Google Drive and Google Apps for Education. What compelling reason is there to use Microsoft? Google is a Swiss army knife. Apple is hip and forward-thinking. Right now, education is aching for innovation, and have turned to technology to make it happen. And they’re not getting a compelling response from Microsoft. The post Should Teachers Still Care About Windows? appeared first on TeachThought.

100 Words: Teaching As Hammering With Paintbrushes by Terry Heick Okay, so quick 100 words on teaching and creativity. Schools are made of classrooms, classrooms of students. Students are people, and people seek to solve problems important to them. Schools, then, are think-tanks-gathering places for resources and information in order to creatively solve problems. Without students at the center of the learning experience, learning is passive, which mutes creativity-or at least fails to necessitate it. Students demonstrate extraordinary resourcefulness when scarcity meets need. In failing to allow students to solve problems, we reduce learning to its crudest form-institutional compliance. We force naturally creative students into decidedly non-creative roles. Lesson? Don’t hammer with a paintbrush. Image attribution flickr user bengrey The post Teaching As Hammering With Paintbrushes appeared first on TeachThought.

Editing Robert Burns For The 21st Century by Dr. Pauline Mackay, Lecturer in Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow Here at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies, we are undertaking a major project to edit Robert Burns’s works for the 21st Century. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Professor Gerard Carruthers (General Editor), the project team is working to produce the multi-volume New Oxford Edition of The Works of Robert Burns; has established an innovative website, including social networking, with the wider global Burns community; has commissioned, recorded and uploaded new performances of Burns’s songs to support the OUP edition; and has hosted a number of events including conferences, performances, key-note lectures, symposia and exhibitions. A project on this scale has never been undertaken in Burns studies. By making use of 21st century digital resources, and by adopting 21st century editorial practices, we are better placed than ever before to offer a fully (and extensively) annotated scholarly edition of the bard’s works that considers the fullest possible ranges of manuscripts, printed books and many other sources for his poetry, song, prose and correspondence. The first volume of the new Oxford edition, Robert Burns: Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose (edited by Professor Nigel Leask), represents a milestone in Burns scholarship. Although most of the items have been published before, they’ve never been gathered together in one volume with introductory material, complete textual resourcing and full annotations, all considered with the context of Burns’s life and historical age. The ‘Ayrshire’ Commonplace Book (1793-5), the ‘Edinburgh Journal’ (1787-90), and the ‘Glenriddell Manuscripts’ (1792-4) are transcribed from original manuscripts, and offer a fascinating insight into Burns’s creative process, as well as containing unique drafts of many of his most important works. The Tour Journals see Burns narrate his travels in the Borders and Highlands at the height of his fame in 1787, and reflecting on Scottish culture and society at a time of intense historical change. The project team are also plotting the routes of Burns’s tours on contemporary maps with assistance from the National Library of Scotland Maps Department and, from January 2015, visitors to the project website will be able to read what the bard said about different places that he visited on his journey, and to enjoy some accompanying images as part of this new digital resource. The volume also collects Burns’s miscellaneous prose writings, ranging from the prefaces to the Kilmarnock and Edinburgh editions of his Poems, through the poet’s blueprint for a circulating, subscription library in Dumfriesshire, to his correspondence in the newspapers touching on matters of contemporary political and social import. The second volume of the new edition, edited by Professor Murray Pittock, will be The Scots Musical Museum: a collection first gathered by James Johnson (c.1750 - 1811) and one of the canonical texts in the formation of what we now think of as the Scottish song tradition. This particular set of songs is also important in the question: what is the Burns canon? Until the 1960s, Burns was credited with the authorship of an increasing number of songs in the Museum, until almost 40% of its 600 songs were attributed to him. At the same time, it has long been recognized that many of the questions surrounding the status of Burns’s authorship are in reality unresolved. What Is The Robert Burns Canon? Now for the first time, a full annotated research edition of the Museum’s 600 songs will both examine the background and development to Burns and Johnson’s collection, and also, through an archaeology of known eighteenth-century variants, seek to establish which songs were by Burns, which were partly by him, and which he edited and/or collected. The result could change the Burns canon forever. Following songs for Johnson, the third part of the OUP edition will be edited by Dr Kirsteen McCue who will focus exclusively on Burns’s songs for his second song editor George Thomson (1757-1851), considering these within the context of Thomson’s big and opulent collections of ‘National Airs’. The close working relationship between Burns and Thomson only lasted from 1792 until the poet’s untimely death four years later. However, manuscripts and relics of Burns’s collaboration with Thomson are the main source of information we have about the bard’s song-writing methods and his opinions of what makes a good song or, indeed, a bad song. Furthermore, Burns was committed to Thomson’s collection and even left Thomson the copyright of many of his songs. In addition to commissioning songs by Burns and many of his contemporaries, Thomson asked contemporary European composers like Beethoven and Haydn to ‘set’ or ‘arrange’ the melodies for these songs for piano and voice along with parts for violin and cello. And so, Thomson may be credited with initiating the remarkable combinations of Burns and Haydn and Burns and Beethoven, enhancing the poet’s profile internationally. The Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century website aims to be a valuable complimentary resource where interested parties can read blogs about the team’s research activities, enjoy several online exhibitions (for example, about ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Burns’s most internationally famous song), and download the many freely available new recordings of Burns’s songs. As we edit Robert Burns for the 21st century, our textual editing, musicological and digital activities must necessarily go hand in hand. We hope that you will enjoy and make use of the end result! Visit the project website to access resources and freely available recordings: http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/, and follow us on twitter. Image attribution wikimediacommons; Editing Robert Burns For The 21st Century The post Editing Robert Burns For The 21st Century appeared first on TeachThought.

The Flow Theory In The Classroom: A Primer by Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor, Plymouth Institute of Education This is number 6 in my blog series on major learning theories. My plan is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of their theories, and how each can be applied in education. In the last post we examined the work of Craik and Lockhart on Levels of Processing theory. In this post, we explore the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on Flow Theory. This is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please refer to the original work of the theorist. There is an interesting news report on the BBC News website this morning. It is a piece claiming that children who use technology at home are finding that they are not able to concentrate in school. They are not able to focus, claims the report, because ‘they’re spending so much time on digital games or social media.’ Yeah right. It’s easy to blame lack of concentration on technology, but what about the quality of the lessons they are attending? The onus is on teachers to make lessons more interesting, and that is what they are trained to do. Part of the solution might be to incorporate these digital games and social media into some of the lessons. Just how can we engage students more effectively? Here’s Flow Theory: The Flow Theory You know that moment when you are in the zone, on the ball, completely focused? You become so absorbed by what you are doing that your forget what the time is, you forget to eat, you miss sleep. That’s essentially what flow is. According to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, being in the flow is the ultimate in focused intrinsic motivation. In simplistic terms, being in the flow is where students find themselves in that narrow channel between disinterest and fear. There is a fine balance between the challenge of the task, and the skills the learner has at their disposal. Maintaining this balance avoids disillusionment if your skills don’t measure up to the challenge, or boredom if the task is too simple and easy to achieve. Applying The Flow Theory In The Classroom Learners who are immersed in their studies tend to be single-mindedly motivated to explore their topic. Getting them to the place where they fall so in love with learning that little else matters is another matter entirely. One of the ways teachers can help students to focus more on their studies is to make learning so irresistible that there is seems to be no other option. Games and gamification may offer students the fine equilibrium between boredom and anxiety, as will other forms of immersive learning such as role play, simulation and problem solving. As long as the learning resource is designed to have the appropriate levels of challenge built into it, students will be interested. The graphic illustrates this clearly. P2 and P3 are positions that should be traversed quickly if students are to remain in the flow. (See also our post on Why We Play Video Games.) To be successful, challenge-based learning requires achievable goals that require some incremental development of skills beyond the average, and where the challenge rises commensurately to match those skills (student progresses from P1 to P4). If the subject matter is made interesting and enjoyable enough, teachers won’t have to work too hard to encourage students to actively engage. They will do so naturally, because they will want to rise to the challenge, and succeed because they see no other possible outcome. Reference Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990) Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. London: Harper and Row. Previous posts in this series: Anderson ACT-R Cognitive Architecture Argyris Double Loop Learning Bandura Social Learning Theory Bruner Scaffolding Theory Craik and Lockhart Levels of Processing This post first appeared on Steve’s personal blog; image attribution the man himself (Steve Wheeler); The Flow Theory In The Classroom: A Primer The post The Flow Theory In The Classroom: A Primer appeared first on TeachThought.

An EdTech Primer: Technology Use, Benefits, And Online Safety Tips by Amy Williams Today, many parents can pinpoint one significant difference between their child’s education and our own-technology. Granted, we overhear complaints about Common Core or standardized tests, but the major difference is the influx of technology in education-the internet, computers, apps, and social media. The chalkboards and film projectors, which were the height of technological advancement back in our day, are now obsolete and tucked away in the storage room collecting dust. Different Kinds Of Technology Usage In The Classroom Today’s classrooms are now decked out with Smartboards, computer labs, Ipads, student laptops, Powerschool, electronic textbooks, and more. In fact, many teachers are typically the first group to commonly implement and understand technology in "almost all areas of personal use". Here is a quick list of 12 popular apps and programs teachers use with students. Google Documents (Android, iOS) Twitter (Android, iOS) Grapher (Android) iTunes and iTunesU Dropbox (Android, iOS) eReader Programs (Such as Kindle on Android, or iBooks on iOS) Classroom Response Systems, or "clickers" (see various models and apps) Testing Programs (Accelerated Reader, Lexile, Accelerated Math, etc.) Nearpod (Android, iOS) Netflix (Android, iOS) YouTube (universal) Google (universal) Educational Benefits Recent data reveals that "78% of K-12 teachers and administrators believe technology has positively impacted the classroom and the productivity of students. Roughly 65% of educators surveyed also believe that students are more productive today than they were three years ago due to the increased reliance on technology in the classroom". Listed below are just a few of the benefits offered by technology: Technology can hold a child’s interest and encourage the mastering of skills through games and practice exercises that can adapt to their learning levels. Students are able to locate information and details for almost any topic without a trip to a library or days of research. Teachers are able to engage students and offer diverse platforms for to develop new concepts and show understanding. Technology allows richer details and experiences through multimedia. Social Media allows learning connections to form beyond the classroom. Students can create videos, web pages, blogs, e-projects and more for class projects. Technology allows you to publish and give real purpose to assignments. Risks Associated With Online Activity In the fast paced world and ever changing technology, it is important for educators to stay current and utilize technology that our students will encounter in life. This quest to utilize relevant technology in the classroom can raise some safety concerns. Student safety is probably to most common concern with technology use. Over 90% of "technology coordinators, school administrators, and teachers support teaching cyber ethics, safety, and security in schools". However, only 35% of teachers admit that their school districts implement and require teaching this concepts in the curriculum. The real-time data collected from tests, "clickers", and student feedback is valuable and has a place in the classroom. However, teachers need to realize that simply having a computer in the classroom to merely take tests on is also a pitfall of technology. Teachers need to strive to extend beyond the norm and encourage real growth and research. Due to the continuing development of the adolescent brain, teens are not always able to make responsible choices when granted the freedom offered by new technologies. However, educational technology can enrich the learning process in ways that once were impossible in a classroom. 9 Classroom Technology Safety Tips For Students & Teachers Online safety is a very important factor to consider when using educational technology in the classroom. Teachers are no longer able to dazzle students with Speak’N Spells or a floppy disk of The Oregon Trail. Here are a few tips to utilize to safely use technology in your classroom: 1. Stretch yourself to the edges of the SAMR model. Think SAMR model, or the stages of edtech disruption. 2. Make sure students & parents understand goals, tools, and uses of edtech. 3. Thinking of technology as a tool, not a destination. 4. Maintain filters and firewalls. 5. Watch for fake profiles online. Include lessons about cyberbullying, predators, & identity. 6. On or off: Make sure students are intentionally visibile or anonymous online. 7. Use strong passwords. (And "password" isn’t strong.) 8. Create safe environment where students feel comfortable talking to you about learning, threats, challenges, embarassment, or other edtech effects. 9. Understand COPPA-compliance; keep private data private. 10. Provide strategies for dealing with the extraordinary, incredible, shady, unknown, old, new, and emerging corners of the digital world. Moving Forward Worksheets and notes still have value in a classroom, but the unlimited learning potential technology can provide is in our grasp. It is important to know what the types of Internet usage are available and to possess an understanding of the potential gains or risks associated with these technologies. Higher level thinking skills and concepts are able to be developed with a few simple clicks of a button or a swipe of a finger. Thankfully, learning will never be obsolete. As Albert Einstein said, "The day you stop learning is the day you stop living." 9 Classroom Technology Safety Tips For Students & Teachers; An EdTech Primer: Technology Use, Benefits, And Online Safety Tips The post An EdTech Primer: Technology Use, Benefits, And Online Safety Tips appeared first on TeachThought.