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Tag: digital

  • Reblog: Five-Minute Film Festival: Inspirational Teachers (via edutopia)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED TO EDUTOPIA: EDUTOPIA.ORG
    BY KEYANA STEVENS on July 17, 2015

    People have so many different reasons to join the education field — what inspired you to become an educator? Perhaps you feel a desire to give back to the community, or you relish the intellectual challenge, or perhaps the simple reward of seeing a student smile every day is your motivation. But I suspect that for many people, an encounter with an inspiring educator might have been the spark that led to this career path. Read on for more video profiles of inspiring teachers across the country and their stories.

    Video Playlist: Inspirational Teachers

    Watch the player below to see the whole playlist, or view it on YouTube.
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLrMqXQ2J_13vcbHVJTImOO2wmWDDVi0md]
    1. Teacher Chris Emdin Finding Ways to Make Math Fun (3:44)
      Dr. Chris Emdin, a science educator and professor at the Columbia Teachers College, started the #HipHopEd movement to help teachers connect science and math education with students’ real-world interests. This video was originally created as an advertisement for Office Depot, but Emdin’s message of “meeting students on their own cultural turf” will resonate with teachers everywhere.
    2. Shelter from the Storm (3:39)
      Ms. Reifler is a teacher in a low-income elementary school in east Los Angeles. She encourages her students to look beyond their circumstances and envision what a “good life” could mean for them. Like any teacher, Ms. Reifler only has one year to spend with her students, but as the video says, “A moment with a good teacher can give a lifetime of hope.”
    3. David Hunter, Zombie-Based Learning (2:34)
      David Hunter noticed how much his students loved books and movies about the zombie apocalypse, and instead of telling them to read something else, he found a way to add the concept into his curriculum. He uses a self-made graphic textbook to teach students about disease outbreaks and survival skills, incorporating state curriculum standards and project-based learning in creative ways.
    4. Meditation 4 Madmen – Kevin “Teach” Baas (4:53)
      If you saw Kevin Baas riding his motorcycle down the street you might not immediately think “educator,” but the shop class teacher’s passion for helping his students succeed is the same as any other’s. (The second half of this video does get a bit advertorial, so when you get to that point, hit pause and check out the website for Kevin’s Kennedy Chopper Class here.)
    5. Ahoy! Meet Nancy Davis, the Pirate Teacher (4:45)
      When Nancy Davis, an elementary school teacher, had to have eye surgery for cancer, she worried that her students might be put off by the eye patch she had to wear — so she turned it into an opportunity for fun instead, and became the Pirate Teacher!
    6. Wright’s Law: A Unique Teacher Imparts Real Life Lessons (11:58)
      Physics teacher Jeffrey Wright is most well-known to his students for his whimsical science experiments and classroom demonstrations. His drive to be a good teacher and mentor to his students comes in spite of — or perhaps because of — surprising personal challenges. Be warned: you might want to save this one for watching in the privacy of your home, as it will make you cry (happy) tears.

    More Resources on Inspiring Teachers

    For more stories about educators that go above and beyond the call of duty, check out these additional articles!

  • Hot Topic: Digital Storytelling

    By now you might have heard of Digital Storytelling and it’s popularity in corporate communication, and also education. While there is a lot of information out there, I found the following example (from TELIC Stories) rather interesting:

    Ian Guest, who completed his MSc in 2011, leads the ICT support team in a school in Sheffield. In this story he talks about how even the smallest of interactions while studying for TELIC can still have significant unanticipated outcomes. Ian explains how his use of social media developed during the course and how it has had an impact on his own professional practice.

    A transcript of Ian’s video is also available.

    Have you come across any interesting examples? Better yet, have you tried it out? Drop us a comment, or share your story on your blog.

    UPDATE: The ESRRC ’15 committee has accepted the proposal to add a Digital Storytelling workshop to this year’s conference proceedings! I’m expecting some really cool and useful work – be sure to be there!

    *Educational Students’ Regional Research Conference

  • [Teaching] On the future of digital learning(?)

    During March of 2013, PBS LearningMedia conducted a survey of American teachers (PreK-12) to ascertain how practicing educators are using, and expect to use digital media and technology for teaching and learning. Their findings are illustrated in the infographic below:
    from: pbslearningmedia.org

    Of the 1,544 participants:
    • 93% say that technology is motivating and useful for students;
    • 88% believe educational technology reinforces and expands concepts;
    • 79% believe educational technology is helpful in responding to a variety of learning styles;
    • 81% have access to personal computers or laptops in the classroom and 63% use them daily;
    • 58% have interactive whiteboards (SMART Boards);
    • 52% have tablets or electronic readers;
    • To supplement technology in their classrooms, at least several times a month, educators use
      • images (91%),
      • videos (90%),
      • online lesson plans (68%),
      • games/interactives (66%);
    • 63% wish the had access to more content to use with their new technology;
    • 71% wish they had a special department whose sole job is to help support them with technology;
    • 86% want more training on the technologies they use in the classroom;
    • 65% say they will spend more time learning about and implementing technology;
    • 58% say that 5-7 years from [now], they will still be using traditional textbooks, but with digital media and technology supporting learning;
    • 52% say their roles will include more technology support.
    • Most educators think the next 5-7 years will show in increase in the use of
      • tablets or electronic readers (78%),
      • mobile devices (71%), and
      • personal computers (69%).
    *Value of Educational Technology
    *Use of Technology and Media
    *Needs for Success
    *Future of Digital Learning
    Where would you position yourself?

          • Reblog: Learning is Not a Mechanism (via HybridPedagogy.com)

            ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE Hybrid Pedagogy Digital Journal: hybridpedagogy.com

            BY Jesse Stommel · 
            “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.” ~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
            Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather, digital pedagogy demands that we think critically about our tools, demands that we reflect actively upon our own practice. So, digital pedagogy means not just drinking the Kool-Aid, but putting the Kool-Aid under a microscope. When I lead workshops for teachers interested in developing digital skills, I say right up front that I have little interest in teaching teachers or learners how to use the technologies they’ll use in classrooms for the next three years. I am much more interested in working with teachers and learners to develop the literacies that will help them use and evaluate the educational tools they’ll be using in ten or twenty years. Often, this means knowing when and how to put tools down, as much as it means knowing when and how to take them up.
            Talk of teaching with technology is not altogether (or even close to nearly) new. In 1915, John Dewey wrote in Schools of To-Morrow: “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.” The development and dissemination of educational technology has always had political, as well as practical, ramifications.
            The large-format blackboard was first used in the U.S. in 1801. The vacuum tube-based computer was introduced in 1946. In the 1960s, Seymour Papert began teaching the Logo programming language to children. The first Learning Management System, PLATO (Program Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960. At the invent of each, there was fear, resistance, and the thoughtless slobber of over-enthusiasm. After the introduction of the Radio Lecture in the 1930s, Lloyd Allen Cook warned, “This mechanizes education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom.” This sentence is not all that different from the ones we’ve read about the Massive Open Online Course over the last three years, or about online learning over the last twenty five years. In the 19th Century, Emily Dickinson hinted at the mechanizing of education in her poem, “From all the Jails the Boys and Girls,” where she equates schools with jails but ultimately determines, “That Prison doesn’t keep.”
            Let’s take a specific (and increasingly ubiquitous tool) by way of example. When I first taught online, I encountered the horror that is the gradebook inside most learning management systems, which reduces students (often color coding them) into mere rows in a spreadsheet. Over the last 15 years, I’ve watched this tool proliferate into all the institutions where I’ve worked. Even teachers that don’t use the learning management system for its other decidedly more pleasurable uses have made its gradebook more and more central to the learning experience for students. On its surface, the LMS gradebook does not seem all that fundamentally different from an analog gradebook, which also reduces students to mere rows in a spreadsheet. But most learning management systems now offer (or threaten) to automate a process which is, in fact, deeply idiosyncratic. They make grading more efficient, as though efficiency is something we ought to celebrate in teaching and learning.
            It seems easier to far too many teachers to imagine that students do work the way machines do — that they can be scored according to objective metrics and neatly compared to one another. Schools, and the systems we’ve invented to support them, condition us to believe that there are always others (objective experts or even algorithms) who can know better than us the value of our own work. I’m struck by the number of institutions that for all intents and purposes equate teaching with grading — that assume our job as teachers is to merely separate the wheat from the chaff. And I find myself truly confused when anyone suggests to me that there is a way for us to do this kind of work objectively. For me, teaching and learning have always been (and will always be) deeply subjective.
            bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress about her experience in graduate school, “nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures of defiance aimed at masking inferiority or substandard work” (5). One of the problems with learning management system gradebooks, often mapped to rubrics and outcomes (which have run equally rampant of late), is that they assume students (and their experiences) are interchangeable. And they assume the same of teachers. The problem is that lesson plans and assignments can’t be expected to work exactly the same with every set of students, with every teacher, or on every given day. Both teachers and learners must approach the classroom from a place of flexibility, willing to see the encounters, exchanges, interactions, and relationships that develop in a classroom as dynamic. Grades, and the (very bizarre) notion of their systematized objectivity, stand as an immediate affront to this kind of classroom.
            I recently worked with a student that admitted to stopping doing the work for the current week, because she was distracted by — “lost within,” to use her words — a subject from a previous week. My response was simple and encouraging, “sounds good, stay lost.” There would have been no column sufficient for representing this exchange in a gradebook, and this kind of exchange has been the rule more than the exception in my work as a teacher. The text in question, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is about exactly what the student described to me, going on a quest and getting lost. This is, for me, what learning looks like — not finishing assignments, not following directions, not dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s. It’s a process of discovery that has no outcome fixed in advance. This kind of learning is about sitting (sometimes uncomfortably) with our not knowing. Grading inside a learning management system too often obscures, does not reveal, this process.
            I used these systems for years, struggling to find ways to subvert their worst intentions, until I ultimately determined to simply say, “I would prefer not to.”
            If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of digital pedagogy, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. And, by “listen,” I decidedly do not mean “surveil.” The former implies an invitation to open dialogue, whereas the latter implies a hierarchical relationship through which learners are made into mere data points. My call, then, is for more emphasis on the tools that help us fully and genuinely inhabit digital environments, tools like ears, eyes, or fingers. My call is to stop attempting to distinguish so incessantly between online and on-ground learning, between the virtual and the face-to-face, between digital pedagogy and chalkboard pedagogy. Good digital pedagogy is just good pedagogy.
            bell hooks writes, in Teaching to Transgress, “The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring” (7). So, I want to end this post with several questions: what kinds of tools can we find, build, or imagine that help make the work of learning “fun,” as hooks advocates? Can we imagine assessment mechanisms even that encourage discovery, ones not designed for assessing learning but designed forlearning through assessment? When do we decide that a tool isn’t working, and how can we work together to set it down en masse?

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          • [Teaching] Starting a Journey of Digital Pedagogy

            “education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world”      — Paulo Freire

            Experimenting with education, live, is one of the scariest, most exciting and crazily exhilarating rides I’ve thrown myself into. Incredibly scary when you consider that I’ve taken just under 200 teaching students into the deep end with me. Wildly exciting when you realise that we are running where others fear to tread – and doing so while looking everywhere at once. Add to that the insane exhilaration of flipping your university classroom for the first time, and you’ve got one heck of a rush.

            This blog forms part of the class experiment. I hope that it will become one of the main supporting structures of our multimodal class…-room space. The collaborative hub of it all, if you will.

            One way to find out!
             Let’s go!