My grandson is beginning to walk. He takes about ten steps and then falls down. He crawls over to the nearest table/chair and gets up again. He does not get discouraged about failing to walk many steps. He walks some more and falls down again.

How do we help our students to not get discouraged about their failures?  Do we use the “fail forward” mentality that a failure is simply an indication that we tried something that did not work and now we can try something that can work?  A mistake is an opportunity to learn. When students see their answers and work  as work in progress, they are more willing to take chances and move forward. When we do not criticize them but help them to see how to improve, we encourage them to see failures as stepping stones as opposed to stop signs.

How do you show your students  that learning from  mistakes is a sign of growth?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

I find that if I ask students to revise their work based on my formative feedback, some of them do make the changes  and others do not.  However, if the students have to create a Change sheet, they do make the changes.  In the Change sheet, they list the original learning problem, tell what they did to improve, and include an example from their most recent work.  As I look at their revisions, I first look at the original rubric, then their Change sheet, then put their previous work and their revised work side by side. I look for the changes in their revision. I look to see if they have changed all of the items for each formative feedback. For example, if I asked a student to improve his/her topic sentences, I look to see if all the original poorly done topic sentences have changed. If students have made the revisions for the three major areas of feedback and, therefore, reached the level of proficiency or above proficiency, they receive a new higher grade.

How do you help your students to improve?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

In my Oral presentations (speech) class, I’m grading their final speeches on how much they have improved from when they originally gave the speech. They have to show me their original speech, the rubric in which I indicated their strengths and gaps, and a sheet which explains how they are overcoming their gaps. Their final (two speeches that they select from those they have done) are graded on improvement.  If they show the three  improvements, they get an A. For each learning gap that is not changed into a strength, they loose ten points.  So far students have shown drastic improvements, their speeches have gone from being below proficient or being proficient to being above proficient. They have learned to support their speeches with image-based PowerPoints that drive home their messages. When we raise the bar and prove ways for students to improve, they go over the bar!

How do you have your students improve and become above proficient?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Christensen, Horn and Johnson in their Disruptive Class argue that one of the most disruptive ways to improve education is to have children 0-3 years hear more “language dancing” (Risley and Hart term) where the parents  engage in face to face conversation with the infant and talk in adult, sophisticated language.  The business talk  of  “Let’s get in the car”  or “Eat your peas” does not contribute much to language development. They quote research to show that a significant portion of a person’ intellectual capacity is determined in his/her first 36 months and the most critical is the first year. Risley and Hart affirm that some working class parents do talk to their children and some affluent parents do not. Race, age, or income are not factors, simply the amount of time that parents talk to their children.

I would like to propose a  serious change in education.  I advocate that the federal govt or state pay retired teachers to go to talk to young babies for two hours a day for five days a week. Even if the teachers are paid $10 an hour or twenty dollars a day or $100 a week for a total fifty two weeks or  $5,200 a year, that would be a tremendous Return on Investment (ROI).  Imagine students going into school having heard 48 million words as opposed to the 13 million words.   Hopefully, the children’s parents after hearing the sophisticated talk of the retired teachers will change their talk to their children. We could get rid of HeadStart and use that money.  Many of the reasons for universal Pre-K would be eliminated.  All students would start school at a high level of language.  All students could start off being successful and continue to be successful.

Let’s starting talking to babies now!

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Like many teachers, I use PowerPoint to guide the lesson. I like that I can have all the images, videos, quotes, essential questions, class activities, etc. in one place for the lesson.  Lately, I have been thinking more about student engagement during class. I’ve come up with a simple way to verify that students will be engaged.  I use a distinct color such as dark blue  in the PowerPoint to indicate  all the  student activities  such as questions to be answered, small group discussions, and  comparison charts to be done. Before I teach a lesson, Iscan my PowerPoint slides to see how often I am engaging the students- I simply look for the dark blue text.  Since I’ve begun doing this, I find myself  wondering how I could be talking/showing for so long without students being asked to think through the topic.  I find myself adding more opportunities for students to  become engaged with the material.

Go dark blue and see what happens in your class.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Robyn Jackson in Never Worker Harder than Your Students differentiates between standards and expectations.

The standards specify what high level content or process learning we want of the students. Expectations refer to our belief that we can help the students  to get there. If we have high expectations, then we believe that we can help the pupils to be successful. If we have low expectations, then we do not feel that we can help them learn. If we truly have high expectations, then we will figure out what we can do to help the students to  grow in the standard to the point of achievement. We do not focus on what they cannot do, we focus on what we can help them be able to do. We do not focus on what they do not know, we focus on how to help them obtain the prerequisite knowledge or skills in the context of the course. If we have high expectations, we do not ask students to learn the missing material or skills on their own, we build knowledge or skill development into our class into mini-lessons targeted to help them. If we have high expectations, we take responsibility for their growth; we work on the solution, not cursing the problem. If we have high expectations for our students, we promise ourselves that they will be successful in our class due to our efforts.

Do you have high expectations for your students? How do your students know?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

In a previous post, I emphasized that students need an abundance of positive comments before they really believe that what they have done is good.

Likewise, when we examine our comments to students in the margins and at the end of their papers, we may discover that  the messages that we think are positive or neutral appear to the students as negative ones.     For example, in “Good topic sentence. Follow it up with more evidence”   the message seems to us to be a positive; however, the second sentence deflats the praise. The previous examples strikes students as a “set up and slap down” comment.

Students may see our statements or questions as direct commands rather than suggestions. “Can you think of other possibilities?” can easily be translated as “You dummy, why can’t you get a good answer?”

When we write on students’ papers, we have to promote a positive tone since many students will read any non-positive statement as a negative one.

If you are interested in implementing  formative assessment in the classroom, my book,
Formative Assessment: Responding to Students is available through Eye-on-Education.

Do you use a positive or negative mentality in your class? Do you focus on pointing out the positives of students’ learning or do you concentrate more on the negatives?

Tom Connellan, “Inside the Magic Kingdom”, pgs 91-95 asserts that

If students see…………………………….they perceive it as

1 compliment, 1 negative………………negative

2 compliments, 1 negative…………….neutral

3 compliments, 1 negative……………positive

I almost agree.  I think that students need an abundance of compliments before they really believe the comments are positive. I think that 3 to 1 is borderline positive. I would argue that a 5:1 ratio is needed for students to feel that they are doing positive work. If they feel that positive about their work, then they are willing to make formative changes.  If they do not feel very positive, they will not attempt the changes.

Try the 5:1 rule and see the change in your students.

For any one who is interested in implementing formative assessment in the classroom, my book,
Formative Assessment: Responding to Students is available through Eye-on-Education.

I recently  attended a college’s award ceremony for faculty and staff.  I was impressed with all the categories of awards.

I’ve made up some awards that I would like schools to give. These awards will not be given to just one teacher but to any teacher who does any of the following:

Focus their students’ learning on the standards

Spend more working with students than lecturing

Diagnose students’  learning problems instead of just giving grades

Give specific feedback that actually help the students to move forward in their learning

Keep cumulative records of students’ strengths and learning gaps in a specific learning goal

Celebrate their students’ standards-based learning successes

Transform academic learning  into real world learning

Invite parents and other experts in the classroom (physically or virtually)  to share their wisdom about a learning goal

Involve the students in meaningful community or global projects that truly make a difference in other students’ lives.

Empower students to feel that they are capable of being successful

Share the learning goal, assessments, and success strategies with other teachers

What other awards would you like to schools to give?

When my students hand in their final English essay, they also hand in their peer reviewed draft. I’ve noticed that usually they do not incorporate the changes that peers suggest.

I gave them a survey on peer review to help me better understand their use of peer’s comments. They admitted that they use very little of peer review.

Some of their reasons:

The reviewer isn’t as smart as I am.

I don’t care what they “feel” about my paper. What is good/bad according to the rubric?

They don’t understand the rubric.

It does not help me when a reviewer finds a mistake if he cannot tell me how to fix it.

They don’t understand my thinking/how I wrote the paper.

The reviewer found some spelling mistakes but missed the big things like my first body paragraph having two topics.

They don’t try/ they do not  take it seriously.

How well do your students peer review each other? How valuable is the peer review to the author?

For any one who is interested in implementing formative assessment in the classroom, my book,
Formative Assessment: Responding to Students is available through Eye-on-Education.

My wife just purchased an all-in-one printer-fax-copier.  The machines lists eight special features. However, next to six of the eight features, there is a comment such as  “Optional hardware/service needed to utilize this feature.”

I wonder how often we give instruction to students but we have not included the optional features.  As I talk and survey students more about their writing, I find out that my assumption that the students  already know “how to” or that they remember “how to” are not true.  The wonderful lesson of two days ago has not been internalized so that they do not use the new technique; they revert back to the learning gap.  Likewise, they face a new writing pattern and they suddenly disregard all the good writing structures they used previously.  Finally, they encounter a writing topic that engages them so much that they forget the writing pattern completely.  All subject areas have optional features.

As I break the writing process more into thinking units and have the students practice these ways of thinking, I find that optional features need to become part of  the standard writing process. I have to be prepared to help the students negotiate their thinking so that they use these features.  They have to internalize the formative writing process so that they can produce high quality work at any time and in any condition such as in an in-class writing essay.

How do you build in the options for success for your students?

As I work with my students to develop their writing skills, I want to know what they already know about writing. I want to activate their prior knowledge and experiences. However, there is a down side to activating prior knowledge. A science teacher friend says that his students have many more misconceptions about science, then conceptions. He is careful to find out their misconceptions about a topic at the very beginning of the unit so that he can spend time in helping them to understand that their misconception is not valid science thinking. If they continue with this misconception, they will never grasp the real conception. I find that the same thing happens in writing. Students have misconceptions about writing such as “if I write it, it has to be good”,  “A very long story at the beginning of a very short essay is a great introduction.” or “One small piece of evidence is enough to convince my reader”.

I think we have to be aware that activating prior knowledge means activating whatever the student s may  think they “know” about the topic. Such activation does not assume that all prior “knowledge” is really positive knowledge. Activating prior knowledge provides a great formative assessment tool since we can “see” the students’ previous learning.  Therefore, we can guide the student forward instead letting student being stuck in his/her misconceptions.

Do you activate and diagnose students’ prior knowledge and  figure out strategies to  help the students improve in their learning?

One Laptop Per Child XO laptop

Students get excited about helping out other students, especially if they feel that they are making a real difference. By assisting the One laptop per child (OLPC) program, they can completely change the life of a child in a third world nation.

The OLPC program has a a powerful mission “To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.” The One Laptop per Child is “an education project, not a laptop project. Their goal is to provide children with access to libraries of knowledge, ideas, experiments, and art — to provide a window into the world, with examples and references on which to build.”

For children in these third world nations, the laptop program is their way to a very different world than the one in which they live. With these laptops, they can learn not just from their local teachers (if there are any) but from people all around the world. They and their parents can learn to read. They can collaborate on activities with other students so they can learn from each other. They can share resources so that children in the village have books to read. Their world expands and so does their future possibilities.

These laptops are designed for children. In addition to educational logic activities (OLPC’s name for applications), students can express themselves through a paint activity and various music activities. They can communicate with others through a chat activity and a record (pictures and video) activity; in addition, they can share any activity with any other child. These young students have learning tools such as a calculator activity, a word processing activity, and a say- the-typed-text activity. These third world students have a web browser and screen shots of many wikipedia entries. These learners can switch from the three views of neighborhood (all those who are connected or nearby with an XO laptop), the circle of friends (those who are connected and share applications), and the home view (all of the child’s favorite activities.

The OLPC has created a powerful laptop with many exceptional features. The screens can be read in direct sunlight. Likewise, due to their mesh capabilities, the laptops instantly create peer-to-peer networks so that students can collaborate with each other. The laptop batteries are very long lasting. The case is extremely rugged. The OLPC works in many languages from Spanish to the small minority language of Quechua.

Students can help out in many different ways. A wonderful class project is to raise enough money to buy a computer for a student in a third world nation. Also, the students can create videos, podcasts, posters, and “ads” about this great project that they share within the school and the community. They can get media coverage to tell the wider community about the importance of the OLPC program. They can host an OLPC event in which they show videos illustrating the difference that the OX laptop is making in students’ lives. They can help any regional OLPC support group in designing activities for children and in testing these activities.

Help students to make a difference in the lives of other students. You can make a difference by using Amazon’s Give a Lap Get a Laptop program now through Christmas.

I sort of blabbed this out some time ago on Plurk: http://www.plurk.com/p/1f9l9 (edited slightly here)

Explains the About Me, Best Posts and Sneeze Pages. Also Why Do you Need to Write Good Descriptive Titles for your Posts. Shows who are your targeted readers.

Stuntdubl posted about the importance to showcase your top posts.

You probably have some GREAT posts buried in your archives that I will never see if you don’t bring them to the top. Bring them to my attention!!

Jim Boykin added his Favorite Posts to the footer of his blog template.

Problogger recommends to create Sneeze Pages and Posts to propel readers deep within your blog.

One of the challenges that faces blogs that have been around for a while is that they end up with a wonderful collection of posts in their archives that are rarely read by readers.

I found these blog posts examples from Nancy White, Most Viewed Posts First Quarter 2009 – What next? and Tony Karrer, Top 20 Posts for Q1 2009 and Top 9 Posts You May Have Missed .

Don’t forget to add an About Me Page to your edublog

Finally, Performancing posted about the importance of writing good blog post titles:

Good titles act as a gateway, as i’ve said before, they proceed your content, lay the red carpet if you like and work as ambassadors for you and your blog.

and Problogger remembers us that post titles are important to grab attention from search engines, feed subscribers and blog surfers.

These are some useful title templates to help you write post titles, 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work and 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work

Konrad Glogowski:   I just discovered this blogger, educator, and teacher in recent days, but he has some really interesting posts and experiences to share with us.  You can visit his blog and read more at http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/. 

blog of proximal development

I only just announced the new authors to this blog, saying that there were another 2-3 people I wanted to have on here very much and I can already announce 2 of them, that’s how fast things go indeed.

So first you will see Geert Desager here as well as part of the authors. Geert is a Microsoft colleague who is now in charge of Trade Marketing in South-East Asia and traveling through the region pretty much all the time. Geert is also the man behind ‘Bring The Love Back’ a little movie that traveled the world itself as well.

And then I’m also very happy to say that Ewan McIntosh will write some of his travel experiences on this blog… and Ewan is probably the one who travels most of all of us. We’ve only met in real life 3 times – in Antwerp, Paris and Geneva

Great to have all these frequent traveler buddies on here. Hope you’ll enjoy ‘the ride’. Don’t forget to read these people’s own blogs as well, as they rock.

The two teachers’ blogs I explored earlier have a lot of good content, but are rather plain in terms of design and use of media. So I followed a link on one of them that led me to another educator’s blog that offers much more varied content for analysis. This is 2 cents Worth, a blog from David Warlick, who is not only a teacher but also the author of several books on education. Warlick is an evangelist for a new, digital paradigm for education in the 21st century, so it is no surprise that his blog is sophisticated in its use of blogging, podcasting and hypertext technology.

Warlick uses WordPress, but has his own, non “WordPress” URL. A striking image of a china cup, filled with black coffee relecting a blue light, tops the blog. A Creative Commons bug inside the banner prominently alerts us that this blogger is eager to share his words and ideas (with attribution, in non-commercial, non-derivative works). Large orange RSS bugs just below the banner make it easy for users to subscribe to this blog.

The blog is composed in black and grey text on a white page with grey borders. Numerous images and thumbnails make the page colorful, but never cluttered.

The blog uses a two-column format, with stories on the left and a narrow strip of items (what should I call these?) on the right, including a photo of the author, a list of books by him (with thumbnails of the book’s covers), a list of books he has recently read, a series of thumbnails of Flickr photos from his recent travels, a Clustrmap showing where in the world visitors to this blog come from, a series of Seesmic podcasts, a blogroll, an archive, and finally a link to the International Edubloggers Directory. Whew!

The blogposts themselves are richly illustrated with photos, charts and screenshots. The posts are about events and developments in the digital world that relate to education. Recent posts include a story about a teacher who assigned his students to write Wikipedia articles, and comments on Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Every One.”

My eye was attracted to the Seesmic podcasts (are they podcasts?) in the right hand column. Warlick uses these to post random thoughts, but also to respond to inquiries from people who have commented on his blog. I liked getting to know the author a little better by seeing and hearing him.

One thing I missed on this blog was some kind of “About Me” section. Perhaps it’s in there somewhere, but I missed it. I certainly learned a lot about the author just by exploring his blog, but I had to go to to Google to find another Worpress page that gave me biographical information about him. But this reminds me that I don’t have any kind of “About Me” information on my blog either. I think I’d better get to work on fixing that right now.

Vicki Davis manages the Cool Cat Blog. In celebration of her 38th birthday, she compiled a list of 38 “cool” free websites.

1. Songbird – This is THE cool opensource alternative to iTunes and it is connected with Skreemr, the music search engine.
2. Timebridge – This scheduling system plugs into google calendar or outlook and lets you invite people to a meeting, select four time alternatives, and then it books the meeting time that everyone can attend and puts it on your calendar. It reminds them and it rocks!!
3. Get Atomic Learning Free for 3 months — I’m copresenting in a webinar with Atomic Learning and Technology & Learning on Monday. If you register AND attend at 4 pm EDT, you will get 3 months FREE from Atomic. This will give you not only the seminar I did for them on Web 2.0 but also, the one that is coming out soon about how to flatten your classroom.
4. Diigo – This cool tool has transformed my bookmarking, blogging, sharing, and twittering. Install it, set it up to send to your delicious account. Join the educators group (getting close to 400 members) and ad4dcss groups — when you send things to the group, make sure you select at least one of the tags that “pops up” (these are from our tag dictionary.) Also, go to tools and set up a nice little daily autoblog based upon a tag you specify. (Some just put the tag “blog” for everything they want to go to their blog that day!)

   To get the most out of it, you definitely should use firefox and install the cute little bookmarklets. This is a definite tool for those writing papers!

5. Zoho Notebook — This notebooking service completely and utterly rocks! Zohonotebook gives you the ability to EMBED video and web pages as well as snag notes from many places. It is an amazing tool! (Check out some of the pages I demoed in a workshop a while back.)
6. Google Forms – Google spreadsheets has a cute little tool hidden in the Share tab, the ability to create a form. We’re using this for the Horizon Project managers to submit their weekly reports. It is so fast and easy and a great way to pull information into a spreadsheet. I even have my national honor society students entering their service time for me into the spreadsheet.
7. Firefox – If you’re still stuck in Internet Explorer, you simply must try firefox. Give yourself a present! The plug ins are incredible. My favorites are: the diigo plug in, technorati tag plug in,
8. If you’re in Princeton come to a free Conference next Friday, May 2nd – Can you tell, I love free? I like to do work with people who provide their services to the general public and openly share information. This conference on Friday is chock full of amazing speakers and I’m going to enjoy being on a panel with some of them to talk about Flat Classroom.
9. Twitter – Again, try this one. Some say they don’t “have time for twitter” or don’t “get it.” Just sign up, add me as a friend, and then go in and see whose talking to me, add some who sound interesting and then reply to their messages by saying @theirID — so to reply to me, you’d say @coolcatteacher — You may just find yourself conversing daily with some of your heroes.
10. Hulu.com – I’ve been beta testing this beauty which lets you watch all kinds of TV shows. Now, you can watch too!
11. Mogulus – Do you want your own 24/7 TV station? You can do it here. Schedule things to play. Merge videos from other places on the Net. Very cool.
    
    
12. AFI Screen Nation – The Amazing American Film Institute has a new site where your students may upload video and be evaluated by REAL producers, actors, and directors in Hollywood. Their curriculum is totally amazing and I use the videos that come with my united streaming account to teach digital film & movie making. I love the AFI digital storytelling curriculum and highly recommend it.
13. Toondoo – Make cartoons. This continues to be one of my perennial favorites for cartoons.
14. Ning (for VIDEO sharing) – I LOVE Ning in the classroom and just found a super cool new feature. If you upload video to ning, it automatically converts it to the most compressed, appropriate version for the web. You may then embed the video anywhere else. This is solving a lot of our access problems for the horizon project b/c schools just unblock the Ning and have access to all of the movies!
15. Intel Mashmaker – This lets you mash together all different types of websites and I am enjoying working with it. There will be some things I share soon. This is supposed to be a lot like Microsoft PopFly, which I’ve not tested yet.
16. Skype – This is another MUST have APP. If you haven’t tried it yet, get over there and take a look.
17. Classtools.net - Embeddable graphic organizers of every kind for your wiki or blog. I Adore this site and use it all the time in my classroom.
18. Wikispaces — This is my stable, well supported, wiki darling. One look at the horizon project wiki will tell you why.
19. Gmail – With the most robust spam filter anywhere, the ability to filter like a fiend, make folders, and import all accounts into one place, this account is a dream come true. Even if you use another service, you can enable pop on that account, set up a gmail and pull all of your accounts into one. And if you use firefox, they have a better gmail firefox extension from lifehacker that is a must install!.
20. Gcast – I’m really enjoying podcasting from my cell phone — just a lot of fun!
21. FriendFeed – A cool little service that I’m really beginning to enjoy to help me follow just a few people.
22. Technorati Watchlist – A must use for bloggers watching those responding to their work and just to follow the things you want to know more about. The RSS from the search for your blog belongs in your RSS reader.
23. PhotoBucket – THE place I put my private photos. I like Flickr, but somtimes I just want to make a really cool flash page for my website or do something neat with photos, and photobucket has more robust tools for my photos than I’ve found other places.
24. Big Huge Labs for Flickr — This has some amazingly hilarious Motivational Poster makers and just about everything you can imagine for your photos. Make monster posters, make labels, make anything. If you have photos, this is THE place to PLAY!
25. Feedburner is a must use for any serious blogger or school Webmaster. You can burn the feed to feedburner, which will let you move your feed from place to place without losing readers! You may also use Feedblitz to e-mail your blog posts to anyone who is “afraid” of RSS. Feedburner has so many other features that serious bloggers will appreciate.
26. Statcounter – This is my favorite place to track links, traffic, and more. Just a very reliable, accurate site.
27. Google Reader — My RSS reader of choice for linear, sequential RSS reading (down the page aggregation), Google Reader now lets you download google Gears and read your RSS offline!!!!
28. Netvibes – For single page aggregation, I use netvibes as my RSS reader although my home page starts up with iGoogle, I go to netvibes. Their new Ginger version allows you to publish your pages and share with others. I teach my students this handy RSS reader for their Personal Learning Networks.
29. EdTechTalk – Although I co-host a show here, I always get pumped when I listen to these shows. Do yourself a favor and take a listen.
30. Creative Commons Searching – This is THE place to look for images, graphics, and audio. It is a must use for students!
31. 4Info.net - I get the weather texted to my phone each morning. Every time a Georgia Tech football or basketball game ends, I’m texted the score. You can have stock tickers, rss reminders and more texted to your phone. It is amazingly cool.

    When I shared this in Maine, one guy jumped up and yelled, “I LOVE YOU!!!” It is that useful!

32. Newsmap – When I want to take time to read the news, this is what I use. I adore NewsMap. I teach my students to use it to get abreast of what is happening in the world. If you have 1 minute to read the news, go here.
33. Classroom 2.0 Live Conversations – Steve Hargadon is hosting these amazing sessions. Simply excellent. Another place to “get pumped” and have some great ideas.
34. My year long PD IS the K12 online conference — Go back and watch some videos (I love Silvia Tolisano’s presentation). I believe that you should consider requiring teachers to view at least one of these presentations and “report back” to the group.
35. Cool Cat Teacher Wiki – All my presentations, handouts, archives, and STUFF are there. I love to get out sometimes and when I do, I want to capture it.
36. Slideshare – I LOVE this slidesharing site. It is very useful.
37. VoiceThread – If I could pick ONE tool for elementary ed, this is it, hands down.
38. My blog – OK, I know this is ME and you’re already here. However, really, I don’t know which is more the gift, your gifts to me in the form of comments, links, twitters, and e-mails or my being able to share with you what I’m doing. If you’re able to live life a little better, make it through when you’re at your wits end, and learn something that improves your life, then I’ve done something.

In het mooie Maastricht loopt op 26 en 27 maart 2008 ‘dé conferentie voor onderwijsvernieuwing en ICT’ . Het centrale thema heet Design4all, integraal ontwerpen. Als lid van de programmacommissie is Wilfred Rubens, TSM-leermeester van het eerste uur, vandaag al naar Maastricht vertrokken. De voorbereidingen zijn er in volle gang. Pierre Gorisssen, van de TSM-feeds, zal er dit jaar wel niet bij zijn, schrijft hij op zijn ICT & Onderwijs Blog …

Hoe rechtgeaarde en geroutineerde sprekers als Karin Winters, Willem Karssenberg en Wilfred Rubens zich op hun talrijke presentaties voorbereiden,

is minstens even leerrijk als hun presentatie zelf. Dat een goede presentatie begint bij een goede voorbereiding weet elke presentator en elke leerling en student van de eerste klas van de basisschool tot het laatste studie- of opleidingsjaar al lang. Alle schoolboeken en leraren/docenten voor de klas herhalen het tot in den treure. En het web bulkt van de boeken en boekjes, cd-roms, sites, slides, filmpjes van hoe het wel en niet moet.

Audiovisuele ondersteuning? Voor en over presenteren? Van  de soberste proefpowerpointjes als vlugge opwarmingsoefeningetjes voor een les over mondeling presenteren naar een afgewerkte 1.0-PPt tot screencasts en tubejes en andere films: duizenden modellen, cursussen, discussies, tips staan er te bekijken en te beluisteren op leersites, blogs en SlideShare. 

Woorden wekken, voorbeelden trekken. Of hoe goede presentatoren zich voorbereiden: 

• Wilfred Rubens,
• Willem Karssenberg en
• Karin Winters                                               op naar Design4all in Maastricht … 

Zes edubloggers, meldt Wilfred, onder wie Karin Winters en Jef van den Hurk van Onderwijs voor Overmorgen, zullen van de conferentie verslag doen op de conferentieweblog van Design4all … Wilfred, druk bezet als programmacommissielid, hoopt op conferentietwitteren. En last but not least is er de weblog van de ICT-leerlingen die de conferentie ondersteunen.

Aan allen veel succes en plezier!

I’ve been tagged for Miguel Guhlin’s Passion Quilt Meme by Ann Oro.

Overcoming Obstacles

I am passionate about teachers using technology to overcome obstacles in their classrooms. Teachers can saddle the power of technology to hurdle barriers. It can take students beyond the walls of the classroom, and make learning relevant and fun. Technology isn’t beneficial when used just for the sake of using technology.

I was recently reminded of this when reading a post on The Edublogger, Tips on Blogging With Students. The post quotes a student sharing his frustration about his teacher’s redundant use of technology. In addition, Brian Crosby’s blog recently included a new video by the Skype team about Celeste, a student with leukemia who was “skyped into class.”

Download

This is just one of several ways that Brian has used technology to overcome obstacles. Please see his K12 Online Conference 2007 presentation for more.

With technology we can provide students with a worldwide audience, making their learning relevant and connected. Barry Bachenheimer’s 42 video calculates the traditional audience experienced by a student during his/her K-12 experience.

It’s not about the tools, but what we can do because we have the tools. It’s not about teaching technology, but teaching life skills, making learning real, and making students learners.

3 Simple Meme Rules:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

The five people I’m tagging: anyone who reads this and wants to add their square to the quilt

Image Credit: sms467
tag: Miguel Guhin Passion Quit Ann Oro Edublogger Brian Crosby Barry Bachenheimer edtech k12

How can you find specific blogs and info for education? Well, you could trawl the web or rely on google but an innovative new way is to use the Edublogger directory. Search blogger’s details much quicker for education resources.Organised by Patricia Donaghy in Dublin, this resource is intended to reference internationally. Membership is free; visit:http://edubloggerdir.blogspot.com.

I am member number 4.