Monthly Archives: October 2011
Learning Civics through Digital Engagement: An Oxymoron? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Left far behind in the wake of No Child Left Behind has been the teaching of Civics. Once a ninth grade fixture in social studies since World War I–yes, a century ago in a surge of enthusiastic curricular change, educational progressives in the U.S. established Civics to prepare students to be responsible citizens. By the 1950s, U.S. students took Civics, Problems of American Democracy, and U.S. Government in high school. Since then, these courses have shrunk considerably.
Annie Murphy Paul on How Tinkering Makes You Smarter | TIME Ideas | TIME.com
Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality.
via Annie Murphy Paul on How Tinkering Makes You Smarter | TIME Ideas | TIME.com.
Jeff Jarvis on Why We Dont Need to Protect Children From The Internet | TIME Ideas | TIME.com
The Federal Trade Commission is recommending updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act COPPA, which sounds timely, wise, and worthy. But it is doing so blind to the impact and unintended consequences of its regulation.COPPA requires that sites serving children under the age 13 must give parents notice and get consent if they collect and use personally identifiable information — which is broadly defined — about a child. Under the proposed changes, parents may no longer use email to grant consent but must jump through hoops — printing, signing, and scanning or faxing forms or holding videoconferences with the site’s employees.The unintended consequences of COPPA are many, but the most obvious is that children have learned to lie about their age. On the Internet, everyone is 14.
via Jeff Jarvis on Why We Dont Need to Protect Children From The Internet | TIME Ideas | TIME.com.
Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children, Study Finds – NYTimes.com
Jaden Lender, 3, sings along softly with the “Five Little Monkeys” app on the family iPad, and waggles his index finger along with the monkey doctor at the warning, “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” He likes crushing the ants in “Ant Smasher,” and improving his swing in the golf app. But he is no app addict: when the one featuring Grover from Sesame Street does not work right, Jaden says, “Come on, iPad!’” — then wanders happily off to play with his train set.
via Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.
Graph Words: A Free Visual Thesaurus of the English Language – information aesthetics
One of the very first examples of visualization that succeeds in merging beauty with function is Visual Thesaurus, a subscription-based online thesaurus and dictionary that shows the relationships between words through a beautiful interactive map.The idea behind Graph Words [graphwords.com] is quite similar, though the service can be used completely free of charge.
via Graph Words: A Free Visual Thesaurus of the English Language – information aesthetics.
Districts are still fearful of teachers communicating with students using Facebook | Dangerously Irrelevant
I just heard from the superintendent of yet another school district thats struggling with whether to allow its teachers to connect with students using Facebook. Heres my reply to her:Speaking as someone who has a law degree, attorneys like IT staff are inherently conservative. The bottom line is that Facebook is just another mechanism to communicate, like the phone and written mail in fact, Facebook is arguably more public than either of those other two. Do you have policies prohibiting teachers from using those to connect with students and parents?
A Case for Using Social Media with Learning | MindShift
We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.What starts out as social networking is evolving into social production. We’ve witnessed how self-organizing groups, leveraging social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, have launched revolutions throughout the Arab world and created the most important reference work in the English language in less than 10 years.In spite of all the potential to innovate surrounding blogs, forums, wikis and social networks, there are legions of detractors. And no institution is more skeptical about the benefits of social media than education. But there are also few institutions that have more to gain from social media.
via A Case for Using Social Media with Learning | MindShift.
#Change11 What sort of changes are required in our education system?
This week’s topic and presentation on Managing Technology by Tony Bates sounds interesting to me.
Slides of Managing Technology to Transform Teaching by Tony Bates.
Recording of the Managing Technology To Transform Teaching Blackboard
Jenny responded with her post in Is our education system in crisis? Others who have responded to Tony’s topic included:
The Use of Educational Video Games in Knowledge Retention | 1 to 1 Schools
The following post was prepared by Elaine Hirsch, and it provides a quick overview of some of the research around gaming.Elaine Hirsch is a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and video games. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead. She can be reached at elainehi86@gmail.com.Research has shown that educationally modified, computer-based video games have the potential to increase players’ basic knowledge retention. This directly contradicts the prevalent assumption that video games are merely a distraction from “proper learning.” Moreover, these findings suggest games can be used as powerful tools to advance learning from online PhD programs to kindergarten classrooms.
via The Use of Educational Video Games in Knowledge Retention | 1 to 1 Schools.
