I like to follow a lot of the TEDtalks. They are often thought-provoking and frequently challenging.
Yesterday, when I checked, I found that one of my favourite speakers, Sir Ken Robinson , has done another talk for them. He is again champions a radical rethink of our school systems. Although not talking specifically about the Australian system, it is easy to apply his logic here. Watch the video and then answer his challenge: How do we get out of the educational “death valley” we now face? How do we nurture our students, teaching them to value and cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligences.
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.
EverSlide Turns Evernote Notes Into Slideshows | TechCrunch ”EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful tool built by TechCrunch. The service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations, and it is simple to use. Basic at the moment but has a lot of potential if developed further.
The 6 Key Drivers of Student Engagement — THE Journal An interesting discussion piece: The best way to drive student achievement is to meaningfully connect with students and the best way to do that is through technology.”
4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media | Edudemic Discussion on Edudemic. Social media can no longer be ignored by schools. Computers and other forms of technology have filtered into the classroom in all sorts of ways and into the average person’s daily life as well. The ability to understand and use social media to improve school communication via computer has also become very important.
Expanding the Classroom with Mobile Learning | Cornell IT News ”When used effectively, mobile-enabled web sites and applications have the potential to engage learners, reinforce best practice, and change the context of the classroom.” The article discusses how teachers might work out what apps would best suit their classroom needs.
Apps for the writing process | (innovate) educate ”There are many writing apps recommended for the iPad, but most are only good for one or two aspects of the process but not all of them. @becdavies00. has listed a collection of apps that can work together to make the writing process painless for students.”
100 Mobile Tools for TeachersListed Listed in this post (with a basic description) are 100 mobile tools that teachers can use and share resources directly from their mobile phones.
46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Some of the tools that allow you to create infographics. There are many and varied types of Infographics. The offer an interesting way to use visuals ( symbols, shapes, and images) with added relevant character-based data (numbers, words, and brief sentences).They offer teachers a way to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency in their classrooms.
Creating Infographics with your Students A good guide for creating infographics with students. Slides by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano that provide you with some tips on how to use them with your students .
Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions | User Generated Education Learning to compose a good question is a skill students should possess. Those at the Right Question Institute proposed process for students to learn to formulate their own questions. This can be a good start to having students learn to compose questions. The post lists the QFT six key steps.
The Technology Source Archives – Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses ”The “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” originally published in the AAHE Bulletin (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses. The principles are based on 50 years of higher education research (Chickering & Reisser, 1993). A faculty inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Faculty,” 1989) and an institutional inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Institutional,” 1989) based on these principles have helped faculty members and higher-education institutions examine and improve their teaching practices. We, a team of five evaluators from Indiana University’s Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT), recently used these principles to evaluate four online courses in a professional school at a large Midwestern university.”
CILIP | Presentations Here are links to number of interesting presentations from the “E-books in Libraries: A Global Question of Survival?” seminar that took place in London on February 2013. The event was co-sponsored by IFLA MLAS (Management of Library Associations Committee) and CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and featured presentations by experts about the ebook situation in libraries around the world.
10 Ways To Use Technology To Teach Writing There are a many technology tools and methods that are available for teaching writing. The 10 are listed here can make the process easier and more enjoyable for both teachers and students. (more…)
Life of an Educator by Justin Tarte: The importance of literacy… ”The simplest acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering effect personally, socially and politically. Literacy gives people tools with which to improve their livelihoods, participate in community decision-making, gain access to information about health care, and above all, it enables individuals to realize their rights as citizens and human beings. Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about respect, opportunity and development…”
SearchReSearch: Presentation on “What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?” From Dan Russell. Abstract: What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that “literacy” is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being literate as well.
Ebooks & Digital Content | Transforming Libraries To help meet a growing need, the ALA’s Digital Content & Libraries Working Group was formed in Fall 2011 to implement the recommendations and to continue the work of ALA’s Task Force on Equitable Access to Digital Content. Working Group members were selected by the ALA President based on their high level of expertise and range of experience regarding libraries and digital content, and are broadly representative of the various constituencies within the Association and library community. This website is meant to be a resource to support libraries in their transformation from print to digital content.
Free Sound Clips | SoundBible.com SoundBible.com offers free sound clips for download in either wav or mp3 format. They offer free and royalty free sound effects and clips for video editors, movie scores, game designers, and weekend sound warriors.
Teachers and Parents – The new rules of engagement | Generation Next ”What is ‘parent engagement’ and how does it affect our children’s learning and well-being? Research (and evidenced-based results of effective parent engagement in schools) indicates that we need to move away from the ‘ivory tower’ perception of schools and the ‘locked gate’ mentality to embracing family engagement as policy, as education reform. Weiss, Lopez and Rosenberg (2010) assert that ‘family engagement must be a systemic, integrated and sustained approach, not an add-on or a random act.’”
Teen Read Week: Creating a Text-Rich School | Edutopia Ideas from literature addict Heather Wolpert-Gawron.”As a teacher, my mission is to spread this addiction to my own students. But I have a greater, more sinister, goal than that this year. I want to spread it to my entire school. And to do that, I have to allow literature to leak out of my classroom and into my school at large.”
A Primer on Ebooks for Libraries Just Starting With Downloadable Media – The Digital Shift The Library Journal has been presenting a series of articles, “Exploring Ebook Options”, that take an in-depth look at some of the e-book platforms that are now in the marketplace. Article provides a good summary and explains some of the pros and cons of e-collections; the issues involved with eBooks and downloadable media, and what’s out there right now.
The library with no rules Manila’s Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books.
Authors Who Skype with Classes & Book Clubs (for free!) The site is is maintained by Kate Messner, an author and educator. Listed here are the books for which she offers free Skype chats for schools. She also lists and provides links to other authors who offer free Skype chats. This is a great way for small, rural libraries to connect students with authors.
Who can we trust? The importance of teaching our students to interpret the news. Today news is available at all times and technology brings us an unending stream of updates that don’t have the opportunity to be fact checked or vetted by experienced editors. It is inevitable that errors make occur, misrepresentations and blatant untruths can be easily promulgated and distortions published. This can happen, not just on websites, but also on TV and radio news and current affairs programs. Educators of young people today need to focus heavily on developing critical thinking skills in reading news and other purported fact based writing.
Piktochart- Infographic & Presentation Tool. Piktochart offers 5 free templates, but many more options for paid accounts. There is a variety of pre-created shapes and images on Piktochart; you are able to upload a limited amount of customized images with a free account. t
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Here in Australia there is an ongoing debate about how to improve our education system as a whole. Australia always looks at the PISA findings and in that latest findings we have fallen behind a number of other countries in some key areas.
With two levels of government there is debate both at a Federal level and at the State levels. Over the years I have been involved in education there have been numerous study groups given the task of investigating the Education System with the latest being The Gonski Report. An overview in the Financial Review summarises the main points and some interesting discussion on the Conversation site.
So to begin with what is PISA and what does it do?
The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings have become very important when people look at the education in a particular country. Politicians and the leaders of various countries look at where their own country is ranked and then they often try to ”cherry-pick” the most successful elements to incorporate them into the system in their own country. This does not lead to a well thought-out
The PISA rankings are created from an international set of tests which a statistically valid number of 15-year-old students (from OECD countries) undergo that then allow a comparison between the different educational systems across the world. They measure abilities in reading, maths and science. The tests are taken every three years, beginning in 2000.
The two countries that have been doing well across the board in the PISA results are Singapore and Finland. These systems countries are often quoted by authorities in other OECD countries as benchmarks so what do they do in their schools?
Education in Singapore
Singapore has become one of the top-scoring countries on the PISA tests. Some of the Singapore approach is outlined in the video below.
I recently spent a few days in Singapore school and the teaching and learning strategies in Singapore were very rigorous and intense but there was certainly a very positive energy coming from both teachers and students.
Education in Finland
Finland’s formula for success is very different to Singapore but its approach to education has been very successful for a sustained period of time. In Finland there is an emphasis on early intervention and it is then followed up with sustained individual support for every student. These from the basis to educating the whole child in Finnish schools.
So where are we in Australia? Whilst Australian students’ results were not inherently bad, they are not shown as improving. I agree that we should see the need for improvement as important. Who would not believe that we should always try to improve the learning of our students? What can we do to change our education system to improve student skills? This would then show better results for our students and rate a highly like these two systems outlined above?
Hence the Gonski Report and the recommendations to improve education within Australia. The response to the Gonski Report from the Australian politicians was fairly predictable. The report has been widely regarded as a good plan but too ambitious, too costly. We can do bits of it but not the whole. If we do just some of it, what will be funded? The arguments about who gets the monies they deserve, the private, Catholic/religious or government schools, has been a never-ending one, with each sector claiming it doesn’t have enough and the other sectors should get “less of the pie”. I have always claimed that the education funding pie should be bigger and the different sectors should get together to argue that point of view. That seems to be a major part in the Gonski Report but it is not just about the money but haw you spend it.
The major point that comes across in both the Finnish and Singapore examples is that teachers are highly regarded. They are supported and encouraged in their efforts to continue their own educations.
This week in Victoria the teachers a going on strike. Yes, it is partly about pay, but it is also very much about conditions, professional development and the opportunity to advance in the profession. Teacher should be encouraged by having the time and space to reflect on their own learning as well as the learning of their students. Teachers should be encouraged to work together to improve the learning of our young people as a whole. The Victorian government has offered the teachers in government schools a very different scenario. One that I, and many others, see as being detrimental to a collaborative and harmonious environment. A quality teacher needs, and should be able, to share their learning in a supportive and collaborative environment. What is being put on the table could see more rivalry between teachers as best results for their own classes alone so they can put their case for advancement above others. This means that good practises will not be shared and the reasons for success will be closely guarded. When teachers are well-trained, excited about the learning of their students, have time to reflect on their teaching and learning as well as share their experiences, ideas and worries, their students will reap the benefits. Working in a boy’s school I see just how much the boys respond to positive learning environments. They achieve best when they have a positive learning relationship with their teachers and they feel supported by their fellow students parents and their teachers. Students can identify times when things are not going well and respond accordingly.
So if we want to improve learning in our schools, in what ever state or territory, we need well-qualified and respected teachers who are excited about learning and working with young people, teachers who support and help each other as well as their students. This is not a lot to ask or expect nor would it cost an extravagant amount of money or infrastructure.
Rhondda
