Visible thinking: what is it and how do we achieve it? Harvard"s Project Zero, an educational research group has put together a comprehensive site on Visible Thinking, chock full of strategies for changing the culture of your school and incorporating thinking routines into your classroom.
But what digital tools work best to promote visible thinking? Blogging stands out as one of the best tools, where thoughts, discussion, debate, minds being changed, are all evident – sometimes all in one discussion thread. AND the broad reach of online blogging only adds to to the layers and richness of the learning.
Realtime online discussion can also facilitate visible thinking. Tools like PollEverywhere, Socarative, or Padlet, help generate class participation, while also generating formative assessment.
And finally you can't read about "visible thinking", without running into "visible learning".
Digital Story Telling is an effective tool for visible learning. William "Bud" Deihl from Virginia Commonwealth University(VCT) Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) has put together an excellent wikispace on "Making Learning Visible". The page "Digital Story Telling" is of particular interest. I love how Bud has laid it out with guiding questions and 7 elements of DST. My favourite line: "1st, it (digital storytelling) is not about the technology, but considers technologies or approaches as the means to achieve storytelling goals."
Check out the other tabs in the wiki, including Screencasting
UBC has put together a course for using screencasting for visible learning. The course is available free on iTunesU. Our ES teachers have had great success using ExplainEverything, Showme, and Educreations on iPads, all included in this course.
