absolutwillie

Tag: reblog

  • Three-Point Planning, or How to Session Prep Like a Zelda Game

    Three-point planning is a concept that empowers players to shape their own stories by offering them three choices to engage with. Whether exploring…

    Three-Point Planning, or How to Session Prep Like a Zelda Game

  • Protected: Reblog: To learn or not to learn (Afrikaans language post)

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  • 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!

  • Reblog: Why Teachers and Students Should Blog (via edudemic.com)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED TO EDUDEMIC: EDUDEMIC.COM
    BY HANNA SHEKHTER on May 30, 2015

    Blogs have the potential to expand student creativity, not to mention their writing skills. Language Arts and Reading specialists will love that, right? But how do I convince them that their students are thirsty for the knowledge they want to share but not the same way that they themselves obtained it? These kids are 21st century students and are adapting to a digital world that they are eager to learn from.

    Fortunately for teachers, blogs are surprisingly easy to use. They require minimum technical knowledge and are quickly and easily created and maintained. Students will be able to pick up how to use blogging platforms with minimal technical assistance and teachers will enjoy the ease in the initial setup. Unlike many traditional Web sites, blogs are flexible in design and can be changed relatively easily. Best of all, students and teachers will find them convenient and accessible via any computer or mobile device.

    Why Blogging is Great for Students


    1. Blogs Allow for Multi-Faceted Learning

    Educators need to teach important materials in several ways because each one of our students learns differently. What’s more, we also need to provide students with multiple ways to engage with assignments, based on their individual talents. Blogging is one technique for doing so, as it can allow a quieter student, for example, to feel heard online. Those shy and quiet students feel less pressure when they need to “speak” in their blog or when giving peer feedback, as they are discussing the text on their own terms. Additionally, this journaling format works great with read-and-write learners as well as visual learners.


    2. Blogs Promote Literacy and Sharpen Writing Skills

    Blogging gives students an opportunity to become published authors and showcase their writing skills. In addition, blogs give students the ability to improve communication and collaboration through the commenting feature. Peer review and feedback become an invaluable part of the writing process. Students from other parts of the world can also comment and provide a new cultural perspective to our own students’ thoughts and opinions. Students’ writing skills are vastly improved through the blogging process, since they have to work harder to hold the readers’ attention. To do that, every word, phrase, sentence, and even punctuation mark must add something to the posting.


    3. Blogs Are Accessible and Engaging

    With the availability of blog apps, blogging has become very simple and accessible to our students. They can blog from anywhere about anything whenever they are in the mood to reflect. They are not tied down to a desk and feel more free using this writing media. Also, in the age where every person has a camera in their pocket, we have become a society that journals through photography and video. Along with other multimedia artifacts, blogs become more engaging and almost interactive for the readers.

    4. Blogs Can Serve as a Classroom Management Tool

    When used as an in-class assignment, blogs can keep your students on task and focused. The more blogs students post, the more opportunities they have for others to comment on their blog. It’s an exciting feeling for students to see proof of someone reading their published work, taking time to reflect on it, and posting their opinion or question. Creating a classroom blog instead of individual blogs fosters an online community for your students to extend the classroom beyond the 4 walls. The learning continues wherever they go and their thoughts and conversations keep going.Blogging is a great tool to create student portfolios, as it can be used both as a “learning portfolio” and a “showcase portfolio”.


    5 Tips That Will Make Blogging a Breeze


    1. Use a simple blog application

    Look for popular classroom blogging apps that have been tested in classrooms and made simple even for early elementary students. Blogger is a Google app and is completely free. It is easy and simple to use if you have a Google account you can set up your blog in minutes from a computer or mobile device. Edublogs lets you easily create and manage student and teacher blogs, customize designs and include videos, photos and podcasts. Kidblog provides teachers with the tools to help students publish writing safely online. Students exercise digital citizenship within a secure classroom blogging space and teachers can monitor all student activity. Other great options include WordPress, Weebly, and Tumblr (for photoblogs).


    2. Start with a specific writing prompt

    If you’re beginning with a class rather than an individual blog, you’ll be responsible for those initial posts, while the students will respond in comments. As students demonstrate both keenness and responsibility, give them more freedom where they earn the right to write posts on the class blog and/or get their own student blog. You can start with Sentence Starters like “Today was the best day ever…” Image-based prompts that can also be incorporated into daily and/or creative writing activities whether they are pictures you took or random ones from a web site or app. You can also invite students to create prompts for the class and use these prompts whenever possible.


    3. Create a rubric

    Providing detailed explanations of an assignment using a rubric can help students in both completing tasks and thinking about their performance. Be sure to include expectations for the first post as well as for commenting on another student’s post.


    4. Know your audience

    The audience makes the work matter to students as they have an opportunity to showcase their writing and respond to real feedback. Initially, the teacher and classroom peers are the major audience that provide the feedback. However, you may want to consider sharing the blog details with parents through the school website and newsletters to grow the audience to family members and other parents. This can have unexpected practical use. For instance, if a student is writing a piece on the topic of technology and one of the parents in the classroom is an engineer, that student may be eager to produce quality work to get real feedback — and they may find themselves a great interview source, too.


    5. Make content concise

    Tight, concise, easy-to-read pieces are ideal for most online readers. Long, complex, convoluted ones are just confusing. Very often, the longer a piece is, the less the writer holds a reader’s interest — all the more so on small screens. As such, your students would do well to get right to the point — a skill they’ll find valuable as they continue up the academic ladder.


    Takeaways


    Educators know that students write better when they have a real audience. But with blogging any student can write for the world to see. Students have an authentic audience for their writing and that has an impact on the quality of their posts and comments. Encouraging students to blog about all sorts of topics helps them see connections among subjects and different aspects of their life and realize that writing is a worthwhile skill in any field.

    Want to learn more? Visit Hanna’s blog here.

    Edudemic editor’s note: This is an update to Hanna Shekter’s original post on this subject, which first ran on January 5th, 2013. A lot has changed since then, so we invited Hanna back to update her wonderful tips.

  • 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?

  • Reblog: 10 Traits and Techniques of a Highly Effective Teacher (via teacherswithapps.com)

    ORIGINALLY posted on the TWA blog: teacherswithapps.com

    BY JAYNE CLARE ·  · BLOG, TEACHER TOOLS · ADD COMMENT (TWA site)
    10 Traits and Techniques of a Highly Effective Teacher – Being a great teacher is about making connections directly with each and every student.
    I can still remember having a great teacher in 5th grade, who asked us to diagram the inner workings of a flower and label the parts, instead of just looking at a picture in an outdated textbook and expecting us to understand it. I learned early on what really stayed with me or turned me on were project-based activities. Teaching has always been a creative outlet for me and I carry that through in my approach to instruction. Technology has and will continue to be a primary motivation for children and therefore it is one of the most effective tools in today’s educational landscape. Great teachers have many commonalities and they live forever in the minds of former students. Traits such as creativity, a sense of awe, compassion and caring are just a few of the merits that contribute to a great teacher. Being a great teacher has little to do with curriculum, test scores, or the criteria for neat handwriting. Being a great teacher is about student driven learning, letting go of the lecturing and simply putting the student in the driver’s seat. Students learn best by experiencing learning that is physical, emotional, intellectual and of interest to them personally. Remember, being a great teacher is about making connections directly with each and every student.
    1. The most effective teachers expect infinite accomplishments from their students, and they don’t accept anything but the best. In education, high expectations can shape a students’ career. Teachers that believe each and every student can go above and beyond give the children the confidence to make it happen.

    2. The greatest teachers think way outside that box, they are creative, imaginative, and don’t let the four walls of a classroom get in the way of their student’s learning experiences.

    3. The finest teachers seek ways to give their students a real world application for knowledge, taking learning to the next level. They utilize all of the learning modalities and understand that sitting may not be conducive to many learning scenarios.

    4. The master teacher practices modeling to teach, and uses positive reinforcement to inspire students to feel as though they can reach for the stars. That teacher is always available to all students.

    5. The best teachers are flexible and understanding, they wear a multitude of different hats in any given day and understand that teachable moments need to be seized and acted upon. Lesson plans are just a road map.

    6. The great teachers are life long learners, they are curious, confident, and are always evolving and growing. They are not afraid of change; they embrace it.

    7. The most effective teachers seize the new and redefine the old. They confidently move into the future especially with anything to do with STEM.

    8. The greatest teachers know how to admit their own mistakes and create a lesson right there on the spot. These teachers help their students learn from their own mistakes and teach children to laugh at themselves.

    9. Top teachers admit it when they don’t know the answer, they facilitate and motivate learners to use critical thinking skills to search for answers and go beyond the fill in the blank mentality.

    10. The best teachers create an atmosphere that promotes learning by making an inviting learning environment. The classroom is not over stimulating but does have color and an aura of life to it. There are always exciting on-going projects.