Content Items for My Graduate Education Classes. Much of this I write personally for my students to provide needed perspective on the state of Instructional Technology AND Contemporary Education. I'm currently teaching for Touro College (Integrating Technology for School Leaders) and New York Institute of Technology; I've taught for Fordham, Lehigh, and others in the past.
"A district using modular digital content could search for a lesson on amphibians, and find an array of options—from a Magic School Bus video in the media player, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt content on the panels under Lesson Snapshot.
—Courtesy of Safari Montage"
"Educators want more choices in the digital curricula they use in their classrooms, and they want that content accessible in bite-sized chunks more than ever before.
That leaves digital-content providers with a dilemma. Often, they've invested in creating an all-inclusive product with a scope and sequence specifically designed for a certain subject and grade level. But now districts are asking to access only parts of those all-inclusive online packages so they can mix and match with selections from other content providers, material that teachers and students have created, and open educational resources.
The emerging trend is often compared with the ..."
"Survey: 93 Percent of Teachers Believe That Personal Devices Connect Students to Real-World Learning
A recent national survey from University of Phoenix College of Education found that 93 percent of K-12 teachers believe that personal tech devices can link classroom learning to real-world activities, and 89 percent expect they will be used in most classrooms in the next five years. The survey of more than 1,000 K-12 teachers from around the country was conducted online by Harris Poll.
Other responses to the survey included the following:
Seventy-nine percent of K-12 teachers have allowed students to research subjects using the Internet in class.
Sixty-two percent have used games to simulate and supplement learning.
Forty-nine percent have used web-based tools to help students improve writing and comprehension skills.
Thirty-six percent have allowed students to use tools to produce their own video content.
Twenty percent have used have used wikis, blogs or social media to spur student dialogue.
Fifteen percent have connected their students to students in another school, city, state or country.
Eleven percent have used Skype or other technology to bring in experts who otherwise would not have been able to join their classes.
Kathy Cook, Dean of Technology for University of Phoenix College of Education, said, “Today’s teachers are increasingly tech-savvy in both their personal and professional lives and are enthusiastic about using technology to keep students engaged and excited about learning.”
"Inspired By Serial, Teens Create Podcasts As A Final Exam"
"Three students talk into a microphone to record their final exam podcast."
"In the months leading up to the final exam, 10th grade teacher Alexa Schlechter struggled. She’s an English teacher — an educator of stories told through the written word. But instead of focusing solely on classic books read in the 10th grade, she and her students at Norwalk High School in Connecticut were immersed in a teenage story about murder, set in the 1990s, detailed in blog posts, communicated in audio: Serial, the hit podcast from the producers of This American Life.
After spending months listening to Serial and talking about it as a class, a two-hour sit-down final seemed pointless, irrelevant and an inaccurate gauge of all the learning that had taken place throughout the year. But learning as we know it in schools must be assessed. How else would adults know what kids have learned? So Alexa pursued an end-of-year assessment, possibly worthy of MailChimp (Mail Khimp?), in the form of a podcast.
While driving to school one day, thinking about Serial host Sarah Koenig’s frustrating evolution over the course of the series, Schlechter had what she calls an “aha moment.” Her students would draw on the skills they learned while listening to and studying Serial. They would work in groups (imagine Koenig, Dana Chivvis, Julie Snyder, the engineer who came up with their theme song, Ira Glass). Students would create a series of podcasts told from the point of view of a memoirist they’d read earlier in the year, such as Alice Sebold.
“’You’ve lost your mind,’” Schlechter recalls her students saying when she introduced the assignment. But by breaking the project into discrete steps, and emphasizing the particular skills the students needed to demonstrate, Schlechter made the assignment come alive in her classes.Each group would discuss a central idea from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which the classes had recently analyzed, and ponder that theme as if they were the author of the previously-read memoir. Throughout, students were to integrate the priority standards from the Common Core into their work, including analysis, writing, collaboration and logical reasoning.
Already, the students had spent months discussing themes and central ideas in literature; this part of the project would be easy. But the final assignment forced them to consider literary themes from another’s viewpoint and work together to present these findings in a thoughtful podcast. And how to find common ground among memoirists as diverse as Elie Wiesel, Piper Kerman, Michael Vick and Dave Eggers? “Once they found what their memoirs had in common, I helped them figure out how that connected to a central idea in To Kill a Mockingbird, and then it was up to them to develop an idea for a podcast,” she says. “The sky was the limit in terms of creativity,” she adds. Two students from Norwalk High School record their memoir author’s biographical information for their podcast final. (Alexa Schlechter)The podcasts the students created varied widely in style and tone. One group of students named their podcast “The Silent Struggle,” referring to women’s repression in history. Memoir “authors” Al Michaels, Jeannette Walls, Cupcake Brown, Farrah Abraham, and Go Ask Alice diarist Alice Smith discussed their own troubles with drugs and drinking, and interviewed To Kill a Mockingbird character Mayella Ewell about her alcoholic father.
In “The Maycomb Zone: A Twist on the Twilight Zone,” another group analyzed the human tendency to make sense of the unknown by resorting to prejudice and bullying; some of the participants included Drew Brees, Muhammad Ali and Augusten Burroughs.
Other students aimed at humor. In studying the long-term impact of youthful friendships, “memoirists” in one group recounted a funny story from their childhoods, and then discussed revelatory experiences of Mockingbird children Dill, Scout and Jem. Reflecting the creativity the assignment inspired, another collection of 10th graders turned their podcast into a radio call-in show, featuring Nelson Mandela and “Ron Burgundy.” Students discuss ideas for their final presentation. (Alexa Schlechter )As demanding as it was, the assignment involved more than group podcast presentations. To stay on top of daily assignments, every student was required to write a paragraph assessing how she and her group performed that day. Before sharing their podcasts in class, students also needed to come up with a five-minute biographical presentation on their memoir author, using any kind of medium they preferred; some kids recorded raps, while others produced short movies and commercials. And on the last day of class, every pupil had to hand in a two-page reflection paper on the experience.
Adding to the students’ challenge, they all needed to be proficient in Google Classroom, Google Forms, Edublogs, and Soundtrap.com, an online site that allows students to record and create their own music..."
Flipped learning empowers educators to engage
students.
It’s a movement that’s proving the value of
student-centered learning, but it’s also a teaching style that requires
professional learning and expertise.
Nearly 80 percent
of those who have purchased Flip Your Classroom, the first
book on the topic, say they were able to implement the strategies they learned
in the book.
As one reader put it, “Flipping allows us,
as teachers, the opportunity to meet each student where they are, identify their
personal learning style and guide them to a better understanding. This book
gives the design, encouragement and answers necessary to complete the
transformation.”
ISTE has educators covered on all
fronts with a series of flipped learning books available now.
Flipped Learning for Science
Instruction
Learn how to apply the popular and proven flipped classroom model to
teaching science, both in the classroom and in the lab, with this new book from
flipped classroom experts Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams.
Choose this workbook if you’ve considered flipped
learning but wondered if the model can work for you. Get hands on and delve into
key elements of flipped learning, such as finding and creating videos, designing
a flipped lesson, preparing for change and working with
administrators.
Move to the next level in flipped learning with this installment
covering what happens post-flip. You’ll learn how to advance your flipped
classroom to a place that is truly student centered, giving you the ability to
engage with students at the individual level.
This is the book that started it all. Learn what the flipped
classroom is, why it works and how to start your flip. You’ll also learn about
the flipped classroom mastery model that gives students even more opportunities
for personalized education.
Open Educational Resources: What K-12 Officials Need to Know
After years of spending heavily on commercial textbooks and digital content, some districts are now attempting to break out into the "open"—the realm of open educational resources, that is. Over the past few weeks, I've written a batch of stories about efforts to use and share open educational materials, which are basically defined as free resources created on a license that allows users to share, revise, and repurpose them as they see fit.
The stories have probed the issue from a number of angles, including the rise of large-scale open educational projects aimed at bringing the resources to potentially...
"Report: 6 of 10 Millennials Have 'Low' Technology Skills
Digital natives aren't as tech-savvy as they think they are — at least, not according to their bosses. American millennials (those between the ages of 16 and 34) may be the first generation that grew up with computers and Internet access, but all that time spent glued to a small screen hasn't translated to technology competence. While they spend an average of 35 hours every week on digital media, nearly six out of 10 millennials can't do basic tasks such as sorting, searching for and emailing data from a spreadsheet.
Those are the findings of a research project that analyzed data from an assessment of adult competencies that tests cognitive and workplace skills. Change the Equation, a consortium of business and education organizations, hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to analyze raw data from the 2012 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a household study conducted by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
AIR specifically examined results of "Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments" for 5,000 test-takers in the United States, aged 16 to 64. Those questions assess how well the person can use digital technology, communications tools and networks to get and analyze information, communicate with others and "perform practical tasks."
Based on how well a person did in that portion of the PIACC, he or she was given a score between zero and 500, which was used to define what level of technical proficiency he or she possessed: below level 1, level 1, level 2 and level 3. Those who score below level 2, as an example, couldn't solve a multi-step problem that required more than one computer application. Then the various levels were used to understand characteristics of the test-takers in each category, such as average earnings. Fifty-eight percent of millennials fell into those lower levels.
The results of the analysis, shared in the four-page report, "Does Not Compute: The High Cost of Low Technology Skills in the U.S. — and What We Can Do About It," found that although 91 percent of millennials consider a lack of computer skills irrelevant to their job prospects, employers think otherwise, A survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, found that only 37 percent consider recent college graduates well prepared to stay on top of new technologies.
That gap could impair millennial earning power. As the report noted, a person ranked at the lowest skill level earns nearly 40 percent less on average ($2,920 per month) than a person at the highest level ($6,622), even when other characteristics that affect earnings, such as race, gender or skills in math and literacy, are held constant.
"Our findings go against the assumption that America's first generation of 'digital natives' are tech savvy," said Change the Equation CEO Linda Rosen. "If we continue to leave young people to their own devices — quite literally — their low skills will become a dead weight on individual opportunity and American productivity...."
Good piece from EdTech Magazine... It's always useful to figure out what's down the road...
"Report: Is it Game Over for Gamification?
"A preview of the upcoming K–12 NMC Horizon report gives classroom gamification the axe."
"Gamification has been around for several years. According to Merriam-Webster, the term's first known use was in 2010. But it's still being flagged by some spell-checkers as a typo.
Gamification — or incorporating elements of games into learning to drive engagement — has thrived in other industries like business. But NMC CEO Larry Johnson said it hasn't quite taken hold in the classroom.
In a presentation Friday about the upcoming report, Johnson explained why the concept didn't make the cut in this year’s report.
"We don't see it making the mainstream," he says. "For most people, it's just too hard to integrate and there are no tools to make it easier."
The NMC Horizon Report gathers input from experts across a wide range of industries, including educators, futurists, information technologists and the news media. They’re each tasked with ranking high-tech trends in education and how lasting their impact will be.
Some of the fundamental concepts of gamifying learning may yet live on. Digital badges are one of the latest Horizon report's growing trends, slated for mainstream adoption within four to five years.
The full K–12 Horizon report will be published online June 29, during ISTE 2015.
A handful of key takeaways from the upcoming report were made public during CoSN 2015 in March, including predictions for when trending tech is expected to reach mainstream status. The full report will contain detailed breakdowns of each trend and how they are impacting K–12 classrooms.
