Category — Teaching

When it comes to today’s kids and their use of technology, a new report sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee reveals some very interesting results. The biggest shock to many will be one that is actually quite obvious to those who work in education.

[From Student Shortcomings - Anything but Masters of Technology - OpenEducation.net ]

—–

open education has a nice revealing report about student’s skills with technology.

as an online teacher, most of my students are fairly adept. they have to be to choose this way of learning, but… all students have some problems with technology as this report suggests. those problems are not the ‘plug it in and play’ variety, they are the epistemological and judgmental variety. Our students need higher order skills. However, unlike many people. I won’t say those higher order skills are related to the use computers. It is merely that they lack those skills in that arena also.

“teaching with technology” seems to be a conceptual misconstruction that highlights the two issues of technology in classes that are pretty moot when technology is used right. the first is the teacher, the second is the role of technology. to be with, means to be not ‘of’, so teaching with technology will always be bringing it in, but keeping it outside of the practices. I think the proper frame is “learning through technology”. Learning focuses on the learners in the classroom as they are coming to be, the place of technology as being something that we learn through, something that we holistically embrace as part of the learning process transforms it to something that is closer to the everyday lives of our students.

we should give up on “teaching with technology” and move to “learning through technology”.

‘Middle School Syndrome’ Undergoes a Reversal – New York Times:
“There are superintendents who want to avoid teaching to the test,” Dr. Lodovico said. “I say, we’re going to provide the kind of instruction that the state standards want us to provide. If that is teaching to the tests, so be it.”

—-

and this is why the students might be able to take a test, but not be considered learned, or otherwise educated. teaching to the test is to teach failure in everything other than the test.

Home | Tutorials Garden | Photoshop, PHP, Flash, CSS, XHTML, Javascript Tutorials:
Tutorials Garden is an ultimate place for tutorials on world’s most using tools and software. Users can find free tutorials and articles and authors can get targeted visitors for their website by submitting tutorials on Tutorials Garden.

—-

yep…

Why Moodle Instead of Blackboard?:
why I thought Moodle was better than Blackboard
—–

some insights into why moodle might work in elementary…. and other schools, better than blackboard.

Chaos in the Classroom:
It won’t always be called chaos in the classroom. It will soon be known as interactive, hands-on, collaborative, personalized learning with choice. Just not soon enough.
—–

the question though… is whether it will be called ‘good’… by whom, and for whom. I’d generally think that this is good in general… it fosters collaboration, discovery and creativity, which is the backbone of the economy much more than sitting still in a chair, working on your own project, which seems much more inclined to train people to be office workers at best and assembly line workers minimally.

Program offers teachers summer jobs at IT companies – Jacksonville Business Journal::
A local organization has created a program to place high school and community college teachers in summer internships in a high demand field, with the hopes those teachers will bring first-hand experience back to the classroom.

—-
this is smart.

Wiki Project Shut Down:
is part of the reason why I was tremendously disappointed to read today that his students have lost contact with a group of students across the country when a parent from the out of state class complained. As I said when I left a comment on Ben’s blog, I was disappointed, but not totally surprised. I knew someone was going to get criticized for hooking their students up with others somewhere for some reason.

—-

it is truly sad when a parent’s fear… ruins the lives and learning of current and future students.

Serendipity strikes again:
A brilliant wee story of serendipity to get you started this morning from one of my favourite eduBuzz blogs at Pencaitland Primary School. A few weeks ago the kids had been blogging about the diving experiment they had been up to in class and this got picked up by a real life diver (and clearly part-time blog-reader). She came in to the school with her diving kit and showed the kids what it was like for real. It’s all been captured in the blog and the brill Bubbleshare photostory below. I’m sure for the kids and teachers that alone is enough motivation to keep blogging about their classroom exploits for the next term, and it’s great to see that the guidelines and positive policy we put together with the help of everyone in the Authority have helped open our classrooms’ walls.

——

To me, this is how blogs should benefit communities and schools, by bringing people together with similar interests and ideas, to explore and discover the relations amongst people and their interests, both in society and nature.

Projects in Digital Archives – Jeremy Hunsinger’s Homepage:
Projects in Digital Archives

—–
here is my new projects in digital archives course, it is significantly re-envisioned to meet more of the students technical questions. It moved away from its basis in archival theory and more into practice based technical learning.