Imagine the Possibilities

Data collected on students at schools can create a profile from kindergarten through college. See the story on Marketplace, or listen here:

Empowering Students - Scott McLeod

After struggling to allow students the space and freedom to make choices both about what they read and about how they respond to or represent what they have learned from their reading, I know that this type of learning is much more sustained, powerful, and realistic for today's student's. I also know that students at all levels are much more engaged with this approach.

Are students meeting the standards when these techniques are used? I believe students who are actually reading are definitely meeting more of the standards than students who are not reading.

Can their achievements accurately be measured? Well, in my experience, students taught in many diverse ways have consistently performed as expected on standardized tests and on departmental aligned testing.

Introvert?

I have not posted in a while, but I saw this great article on educating with the introverts in mind. I see a lot of connections to the technology integration I have done in the classroom. Particularly the synchronous blogs. I am intrigued by the ideas on small groups or pairs.

See the article at How to Teach a Young Introvert

Sugata Mitra does it Again

This guy has the right idea. If I could do this more, I would love it. Maybe the research projects could be more like this. Or, at least that is another way to approach this - self-organized learning.

Legacy Work

This reminds me so much of the work we did with bookdrum last semester, but it takes it one step farther. I think I could incorporate this with my class this semester by showing the bookdrum site, and then saying we are going to add to it. That way, the studetns would learn all of the information that is there already, but they would continue to gather more bookmarks and make more connections to outside research. I am not sure if I would be able to add more information or not. I will have to check into it.

It does make me want to continue with the wiki idea, but just put a new motivational spin on it. "This will be used by future students. You will be helping them to understand what is going on in the book."

Treat Students as Entrepreneurs

I really like this presentation. It goes against all ideas of standardization, but it really relates to teachers who believe it is more important to teach about what makes each person into a hero rather than having students memorize a standard definition of hero.

Mr. Rogers at US Senate

I love this; so simple, and it worked.

Motivation and Grades

Here is an interesting video on motivation and grades from Joe Bower. Can't see my school trying this anytime soon, but I like the reflection on student motivation.

Shelly Wright - Flipping Bloom's

Sometimes when I read something, I am just overwhelmed with the simplicity of the message. It makes me wonder how I lasted this long without ever reading anything like it before. The article from Shelly Wright was one of those moments for me.

In the article, Shelly describes how flipping Bloom's Taxonomy can make the classroom so much more project oriented and engaging for the students. Basically, she starts projects with the synthesis or creation part, and then backtracks through analysis and the other levels of Bloom's to arrive at knowledge. This makes so much sense to me.

Two things I feel deserve another moment to reflect upon are the value this style of teaching places on student's inherent abilities both to create and to reflect. If you run a class like this, you have to walk into it thinking, "Come on, you guys can do this. I know you can." Then, you also have to incorporate the act of reflecting on what the students created and on how they could improve it based upon their analysis of master texts.

This article makes so much sense to me. Thinking in this way will allow me to refine my practice in several of the units I struggled with this year.

See it at Shelly Wright's blog.

One aspect of teaching that is not understood enough is motivation. Many have studied the effects of motivation in the work force, but I wonder if these same concepts hold true in a classroom?