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Scooped by
John Evans
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Ask our team, “What’s new?” and you’ll hear about how we’re learning on the go with podcasts. Ask our teacher bloggers about new practices they’re trying in their classrooms and you’ll hear how their encouraging reflective learning with podcasts. At the start of a new school year, we think they are a great way to continue learning and stay engaged. So grab your headphones or sync the bluetooth, and get ready to listen and learn–here is our list of favorite podcasts you should check out to support your learning.
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John Evans
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A new whitepaper from personalized learning nonprofit KnowledgeWorks explores how wearables, augmented reality and virtual reality could play out in education. Take one example shared in the report of a fourth-grader: She's wearing a Hello Kitty "smart sleeve" and toting her tablet in a matching knapsack as she heads into the homework center after school and begins to tackle a writing assignment. After 10 minutes of staring at a blank screen and experiencing a rising heart rate, her wearable triggers a "nudge" from an app that reminds her that it's OK to ask for help. She clicks on an icon and receives a holographic image of her coach in a corner of her device, calmly and clearly offering her immediate help.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but it made each of us who we are today. Without curiosity, none of us would learn very much at all. Learning is based more on curiosity than any other human characteristic. Children who are curious are always interested in discovering more. Children who lose their curiosity usually turn off and tune out. Children are naturally curious, but sadly, rigid school systems and curricula have often knocked this out of them by the time they graduate."
Via EDTECH@UTRGV
Rigorous math instruction through productive struggle can guide students toward becoming highly capable creative problem solvers in non-routine situations.
Tons of free resources for professional development for educators.
Via MIND Research Institute
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John Evans
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Take a well-deserved break and enjoy our picks for the best recent parody videos for educators and their students.
The needs of the twenty-first century demand new approaches to learning. Today, student success requires skills for collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving, and these skills are increasingly becoming a focus in both K-12 and higher education settings. But twenty-first century learning needs to be much more if we are to expect young people to both navigate an unknown and complex future and meet the challenges that accompany it. We need change-makers, people who will redefine problems, inspire new ideas, take informed risks, and never stop learning. Change-makers implement and evolve solutions that aim to better the individual and the whole, be it a classroom, a school, a community, or a society. This is the approach of a designer and the focus of this publication. Design touches all aspects of our world. As this publication shows, designers work to impact the human experience, and they generally do this with particular mindsets that encourage looking at challenges as opportunities for design. Four mindsets typically guide the behavior of a designer: human-centered, collaborative, optimistic, and experimental. Designers also often act in a particular way, following a process that helps them generate and evolve ideas, beginning with problem-defining and empathy, using synthesis and prototyping to develop strategic ideas, and ending with implementation. Taken together, how designers think and act make for design thinking, a human-centered approach to creative thinking and problem solving. Thinking and acting as a designer and, in turn, employing design thinking are powerful ways to encourage people to become change-makers in education.
Via Edumorfosis
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Scooped by
John Evans
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There are unique pressures in the business of education. The current vision of education is so ensconced in the minds of so many of the world’s population, that the necessary changes are nearly impossible to enact. Almost everyone that has experienced the institution of education, which is almost everyone on the planet, believes he or she knows what education is. The problem is that institutionalized education is woefully behind the times. And those who have come through the system are institutionalized.
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Scooped by
John Evans
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As I wrap up my first month of consulting, I have one overarching takeaway: in every building, in every district, in every city, in every state, there are administrators, teachers, and students who are so passionate about learning that you can feel the positive energy in the room. It’s humbling. It’s heartwarming. It’s inspiring.
Yet, what I also see are lots of educators and students who frequently second guess themselves, continuously ask for permission to do anything, or who render themselves silent in large groups and appear to have “given up.” However, behind closed doors, these are the same educators and students who are overflowing with enthusiasm and have a wealth of knowledge.
Naturally, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the strikingly similar behaviors both adult educators and student learners demonstrate in our current educational system. What causes passionate learners to become apathetic toward their passion? Why do students and adults alike ask for permission to learn? And, I keep coming back to one simple conclusion.
THE DEFICIT MODEL OF EDUCATION HAS WORN US ALL DOWN
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Scooped by
John Evans
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Augmented reality has become a field with limitless possibilities. It holds huge promise for improving educational systems across the globe.
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Scooped by
John Evans
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IN 1953 B.F. Skinner visited his daughter’s maths class. The Harvard psychologist found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. A few days later he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. By the mid-1960s similar gizmos were being flogged by door-to-door salesmen. Within a few years, though, enthusiasm for them had fizzled out.
Since then education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop, even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life. One reason is the conservatism of teachers and their unions. But another is that the brain-stretching potential of edtech has remained unproven.
Today, however, Skinner’s heirs are forcing the sceptics to think again (see article). Backed by billionaire techies such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, schools around the world are using new software to “personalise” learning. This could help hundreds of millions of children stuck in dismal classes—but only if edtech boosters can resist the temptation to revive harmful ideas about how children learn. To succeed, edtech must be at the service of teaching, not the other way around.
Though no hard numbers are available yet on how many K–12 classrooms are using virtual or augmented reality, new estimates suggest the technology could reach 15 million students by 2025.
But without research to show the impact, experiences like landing on the moon or the sinking of the Titanic could be closer to entertainment than education, argue critics, who say much of what’s being marketed as virtual reality is not groundbreaking—or even new. Computer scientists first began experimenting with “virtual experiences” in the 1950s, and by the 1980s goggles and gloves had been developed to simulate immersion in a virtual world.
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John Evans
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"Bronwyn Bevan (former Director of Research and Learning at the Exploratorium) just published an expanded literature review of the research on Making for the National Academies of Science committee on Out-of-School Time STEM.
Though practice is still way ahead of research in Making and Tinkering, this new paper references 66 different studies, many of them are new ones published in the last 18 months. Recent publications document how STEM-Rich Making supports the development of STEM learning identities, deepens engagement with STEM concepts and practices, and leverages learners’ cultural resources.
The paper was published in the journal Studies in Science Education, and it might be of interest to anyone interested in the connections between research and practice in our making and tinkering programs. You can download it by clicking here.
https://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/pdfuploads/bevan_making_sse-min.pdf "
Robust computer science curriculum is necessary for our society's future. Here are five steps to engage teachers and students in this critical area of study.
Via Gust MEES, John Evans
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John Evans
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In the last few years, machine learning applications have quietly entered every aspect of life: social media to speech recognition, radiology to retail, warfare to writing articles, coding to customer service, robotics to route optimization.
During the 40 year information age, we told computers what to do. With advances in artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, and faster processing chips we can feed computers giant data sets and they can (in narrow slivers) draw some inferences on their own. As we reported in Ask About AI, the rise of code that learns marks the beginning of a new era of augmented intelligence. It’s a great opportunity for us to expand access to a great education and for young people to make a big contribution.
Given the importance of relationships in human development, AI will augment rather than replace the work of educators in many ways. We’ll all have to get better at collaborating with teams that include smart machines. In other professions, augmentation will lead to automation with the potential for significant dislocation. Amazon’s workforce, for example, is about 20% robots.
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John Evans
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Many educators don’t realize that Skype could be a valuable classroom asset that gives students lots of new opportunities to learn. When you hear about Skype, you most likely think of video calls that you might make in your spare time. However, there is an entire world of untapped resources available through Skype for your school.
If you have been trying to incorporate new ideas into your classroom, signing up for a Microsoft Educator Community membership might be a smart move. You can give your students access to tons of resources and real-world experiences that will deepen their knowledge of the concepts you teach. Find out what sort of classroom activities you could plan in our essential guide to the use of Skype in your classroom.
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John Evans
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"If you’re a student or a teacher you can never go amiss with a handy list of useful education apps. App technology is continuing to change the face of education with innovative new ideas all the time. This list provides you with 30 of them for your own classes to use every day.
It makes you wonder, what makes for a useful education app? Versatility, functionality, and features relevant to daily classroom activities. You’ll find all of that and more in the following list. - Explore ways for students and teachers to get organized
- Find fun collaborative tools
- Digital storytelling and visual presentation apps
- Interactive whiteboard tools
- Digital portfolios and more
Enjoy this list of 30 useful education apps teachers and students will love using!"
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John Evans
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“Imagine a high school student in your district. Her class is learning about muscles, but instead of watching a video or reading about it in a book, she can move a virtual arm and see an exposed bicep muscle contract. Are engines her thing? She can safely experiment with a virtual torque wrench in a mechanics class. It sounds powerful, doesn’t it? Not to mention effective.“
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Scooped by
John Evans
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“Innovation” is one of the most used words in education right now. It is something that I am obviously passionate about, hence the reason I wrote the book, “The Innovator’s Mindset”. I am scared that we use the word “innovation” in the wrong way when there is power to this type of thinking. Words do not become “buzzwords” because they are used too frequently; they become “buzzwords” when they are used frequently in an incorrect manner.
Here are some misconceptions about the word that we need to dispell to protect “innovation” in education from becoming a buzzword.
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Scooped by
John Evans
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Over the past five years students in some parts of the world have been greeted in their classrooms by teachers who appear to have come off the set of a George Lucas movie.
Robots have been teaching classes in Japan, South Korea and Abu Dhabi.
Throughout the world humans in various jobs are being replaced by robots at an ever-accelerating pace. The question for many people is whether their work will disappear with the rise of the machines.
Most think not.
Creativity has always been a part of a successful classroom, however recent advances in technology are making it possible to increase the ability for students to use their creativity in academia. With the ability to take and store thousands of pictures and videos, and listen to music in the palms of our hands, our students have the ability to be more and more creative in their projects, assignments, as well as group and individual tasks.
Via Nik Peachey
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Scooped by
John Evans
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“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
We should learn from experiences, particularly if those experiences show our previous beliefs to be untrue. So why are people so easy to fool when it comes to beliefs about learning?
For years, a stream of articles have tried to dispel pervasive but wrong ideas about how people learn, but those ideas still linger. For example, there is no evidence that matching instructional materials to a student’s preferred “learning style” helps learning, nor that there are “right-brain” and “left-brain” learners. The idea that younger people are “digital natives” who use technology more effectively and who can multi-task is also not supported by scientific research.
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Scooped by
John Evans
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Updated: I've updated this post and page since publishing my most recent book about student choice. I'd love for you to add resources you've found in the comments section of this post so I can
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Scooped by
John Evans
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Though no hard numbers are available yet on how many K–12 classrooms are using virtual or augmented reality, new estimates suggest the technology could reach 15 million students by 2025.
But without research to show the impact, experiences like landing on the moon or the sinking of the Titanic could be closer to entertainment than education, argue critics, who say much of what’s being marketed as virtual reality is not groundbreaking—or even new. Computer scientists first began experimenting with “virtual experiences” in the 1950s, and by the 1980s goggles and gloves had been developed to simulate immersion in a virtual world.
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Scooped by
John Evans
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In the last ten years, technology has changed the way we work and communicate with others — and it’s also changed how we interact in the classroom. In fact, some educators argue that technology can improve the classroom by eliminating the need for a physical one, and allow students to learn remotely, from wherever they do their best work. While it’s still too early to know if this is the most effective way to teach, it’s important to stay-to-update on these innovations in education and see what we can learn from them. In these TED talks, students and educators share their …
Design is an artistic endeavor that values the creative and human centered application of math, science and technology. Using design to help others learn science is not intuitive, however, once practiced you will see how humanistic and authentic it is to incorporate design in any subject. Below is a list of the most promising benefits that I have noticed in the past six years for using design as a framework and making as the engine to empower students as they gain and apply their scientific literacy.
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![[PDF] Thinking & acting like a designer: How design thinking supports innovation in K-12 education | iPads, MakerEd and More in Education | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/1N5gbB-s78kmmrEonqZOYTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
