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Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Group Following Educators on Twitter: How to Get Beginners Started
Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Group Following Educators on Twitter: How to Get Beginners Started
Vicki Davis' explanation of the TweepML educators list she created based on Jane Hart's 100 learning professionals to follow. This gives you an easy way to follow a bunch of educators and e-learning people without having to manually add each person.
Imported from Diigo#twitter#education#elearning
·coolcatteacher.blogspot.com·
Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Group Following Educators on Twitter: How to Get Beginners Started
The Bamboo Project Blog: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
The Bamboo Project Blog: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
Interesting ideas about intrinsic motivation for both managers and instructional designers. Rather than rewards, instructional design should focus on motivating learners through autonomy, mastery, & performance.
<p>Rewards actually impede our problem-solving ability because they cause us to restrict our consideration of other ideas and to focus on only one or two ways to solve the problem.&nbsp; As one of the studies Dan references discovered,<strong> "once the task called for even<span style="text-decoration: underline;"> rudimentary cognitive skill</span>, <em>(my emphasis)</em>&nbsp; a larger reward led to poorer performance." </strong></p><p><strong><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial;">In a nutshell, rewards work for tasks where you don't have to think. As soon as you have to engage in any kind of thinking, rewards STOP WORKING. </span></strong></p>
Imported from Diigo#motivation#instructionaldesign#problemsolving
·michelemartin.typepad.com·
The Bamboo Project Blog: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
GDocBackup (fhtino)
GDocBackup (fhtino)
Open source Google Docs backup tool. It checks whether the Google Docs file already exists on your computer and if it's an older version and only downloads a backup copy if needed.
Imported from Diigo#opensource#tools
·gs.fhtino.it·
GDocBackup (fhtino)
Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer
Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer
Tips that can apply to instructional design, graphic design, web design, etc. They are broad, but it's helpful to have these kinds of ideas articulated clearly rather than being something that people do but can't explain. I especially like "Obsess about ideas and not tools."
Imported from Diigo#design
·presentationzen.com·
Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?

Like the title says, a research review on PLCs, synthesizing results from 10 articles.

  • All research supported the idea that learning communities change teaching practice, although not all articles were specific about what changes took place.
  • In one study, teachers in PLCs developed more student-centered classrooms. Some other studies discussed specific teaching strategies used as a result of PLCs.
  • All studies showed a change in school culture through "collaboration, focus on student learning, teacher authority, and continuous teacher learning."
  • All 6 studies that looked at student achievement found that student learning improved. However, this was only seen when the focus of collaboration was student learning and not just working together.
  • Their conclusion: "The focus of a PLC should be developing teachers’ “knowledge of practice” around the issue of student learning"
  • "...working collaboratively is the process not the goal of a PLC. The goal is enhanced student achievement."
Imported from Diigo#plc#education#learning#research#community
·nsrfharmony.org·
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?
"Living and Learning with Social Media"
"Living and Learning with Social Media"
danah boyd on implications of social media for education, focusing on teens
Youth engage with others to work out boundaries, to understand norms. This is how they learn power and authority, how they learn the networked architecture of everyday life. It's easy to eschew this, to argue that this is irrelevant, but most people spend a decent amount of their time working through social issues as a part of being an adult in this society. We talk about it as "politics" usually but it's about people. And teen years are where this is worked out.
Since we're using social network sites as a case study, let me point out one of the places where they FAIL miserably. On social network sites, you have to publicly list your Friends and you have to have the functioning network to leverage it. What happens if you're an outcast at school? Does bringing it into the classroom make it worse? What happens if you're forced to Friend someone who torments you because you share a class? And then you have to face that person in your "private" space online as well? Bringing social network sites into the classroom can be very very tricky because you have to contend with social factors that you, as a teacher, may not be aware of.
It's critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn't inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they're doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it's simply different. They're coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don't necessarily think about them.
Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they're seeing. We can call this "media literacy" or "digital literacy" or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools - they need to understand the structures around them.
Imported from Diigo#socialmedia#socialnetworking#education
·danah.org·
"Living and Learning with Social Media"