Good Teaching The Top Ten Commandments

Here are the top ten commandments for teaching. I thought they were spot on!

Tags: education
Posted at 07:03PM Oct 31, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

The book verses the scroll

Here is a funny example of evolution for you to consider...

 

Tags: education
Posted at 09:11PM Oct 20, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Is Google making us stupid?

 'Is Google making us stupid?' is an article that highlights the arguments some students have been presenting lately. I too felt in the beginning that my brain was turning into a rewired configuration of mush. But now that I have had some time to get used to it, it has rewired some more and settled into an epiphany of new thinking. Having said that, I haven't had time to read a book for a long period of time so I'm yet to find out if I still have the ability!

As the article went a bit gar gar in transit,  I have linked the URL to the title so you to go to the original article and read in peace.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Illustration by Guy Billout

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?� So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,� HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.� I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

Tags: learnin educa
Posted at 10:12PM Oct 08, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

About Digital Youth

Today I was chatting with a fellow Flinders student and she brought to my attention the trouble parents are finding with their kids cutting and pasting information from the internet to produce brilliant power points etc, but found they had no idea about the subject matter when questioned.. Something we need to think about when working with students and multimedia.

 Inquiry based learning and the Web

Using the Web within an inquiry-based pedagogy begins with asking or framing an essential question. For our purposes, an essential question is defined as a question that requires students to make a decision or plan a course of action. Making decisions and/or planning a course of action are essential adult skills that students need to display at a high level of proficiency. Educators need to focus on such questions; many teachers rely to heavily on "What is.." questions such as "What is cancer." Asking a student to answer such in a research project is licensing the student to move i nformation from point A to point B without concern for integrating discrete information pieces into new knowledge or fresh insights. Effectively, in this day of digital "cutting and pasting," asking a "What is.." question is a license to plagiarize.

A much better question requiring the development of an action plan regarding the cancer topic cited above might be: "What plan can I develop for reducing the chance that I will contract cancer in my lifetime?" In this scenario, a student must research the question to develop a list of strategies; the teacher then may require the student to select the top three strategies from the list and then justify why those were chosen. In this question, active knowledge construction is required.

Teachers my also ask students questions involving decision-making. Such questions as "Should Puerto Rico become the 51st state of the United States?" or "What invention of the 20th Century has had the greatest impact?" require students to engage in critical thinking and build knowledge.

 Youth Digital Ethnography

ABOUT DIGITAL YOUTH

Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Principal Investigators Contact Information:

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito - mito at itofisher dot com
Michael Carter - mcarter at montereyinstitute dot org
Barrie Thorne - bthorne at berkeley dot edu

 

 

Tags: technolog education
Posted at 07:22PM Sep 30, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Classroom 2.0

Here's a great site for all of us that need a little help to familiarise ourselves with, and keep track of all the changes Web 2 has to offer.

Looking for 3rd grade class for Math collaboration project...17 Replies

Hello! I am a tech coordinator for a Minnesota public school. I've recently helped a couple of our 3rd grade math teachers begin a weekly "MathCast" episode, using voicethread.com. It's completely...

 http://www.classroom20.com/

Tags: web 2 podcast technology
Posted at 10:30PM Sep 22, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Victor Borge - Phonetic Punctuation

For all you up and coming primary school teachers, this Victor Borge YouTube is a must have to play on your interactive whiteboards. The children will find it hilarious and they will learn some punctuation skills at the same time. We played it during my practicum and the kids kept asking us to put it on again and again!

Tags: punctuation literacy humour education
Posted at 09:04PM Sep 13, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Bedtime Text Danger (Sunday Mail 7/9/08 p24)

I read this article on Sunday and could relate to it 100% with my own children. I had just finished telling my family how they had become irritable, tired and were on fast forward since we had the wireless router put in. I don't think this applies to just teenagers as I can relate to Dr Teng's symptoms myself!

Bedtime text danger

Sleep deprived teens are at risk of a lifetime of high blood pressure and chronic health problems due to the "technological invasion of the bedroom". Australian researchers have found.          

Leading sleep expert Dr Arthur Teng said text messaging and emailing friends late at night had created a "sleep deprivation epidemic".

His research is supported by an independent study that found teenagers are staying uyp until midnight and beyond to SMS and chat online.

Rather than having bed time, teenagers now have "room time," which is a period of vital social interaction, Neer Korn, of Heartbeat Trends, said "We found that from 10pm to as late as midnight and 1am were the key hours for socialising with their friends". As a result, teenagers were constantly tired. Dr Teng, from the Sydney Children's Hospital, said teenagers needed between nine and ten hours' sleep but were lucky to get six hours. He said the implications were enormous, predisposing them to adult hpertension, heart disease, memory loss and concentration problems.

Tags: technology education
Posted at 05:06PM Sep 07, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

David Weinberger

David W einberger has a new book out which further elaborates on the benefits of Multimedia.

What is the Web for? And why do we care so much? Why has this simple technology sent a lightning bolt through our culture? It goes far beyond the Web's over-hyped economic impact: 500 million of us aren't there because we want a better "shopping experience." The Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are - and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world.

First reactions...

"This is a book to savor. Not to speed read. I am not a techie - but I ardently believe the Web will change everything. David has made me laugh ... and frown ... and pause and think ... and scribble furiously in the margins ... and call friends a continent away for long conversations. That's exactly the right mood for exploring the consequences of the most profound medium of social and political and economic change in hundreds of years."

Tom Peters

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Links

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Tags: books technology
Posted at 08:53PM Sep 05, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Multimedia and learning challenges

I found this article to be useful as we can can connect Multimedia into this framework nicely. Students are interactive and getting lots of different messages from visual, audio and text, instead of just trying to decipher text solely.

 

http://www.ldonline.org/article/5598 

Tags: learning difficulties
Posted at 01:57PM Sep 05, 2008 by Jan Sutton  | 

Digital Native or Digital Immigrant

There is a lot to discover and time is short, interactive lectures, downloading web pages, blue toothing information on to interactive white boards, it's totally mind blowing to me. The imagination is boggled, the possibilities endless... More soon!

Tags: technology
Posted at 07:28PM Aug 29, 2008 by Jan Sutton  |