Visible Thinking

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.

Our friends at Te@chThought understand that formative assessment can take the form of conversation and suggest 5 Tools for Giving Students Narrative Feedback. One tool that is not on the list is Thinglink. This tool allows you to annotate images with text or sound. Look at this beautiful example: Here.

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.

Welcome back everyone!

Before the break I was working with the Grade 9's on creating presentations. A visit to Slideshare often gives me some great ideas to work with, good and bad. Today I came across David Theriault's, Turning Your Learning Inside Out. David is a HS English teacher (you can follow him on Twitter) and today he has made my job so much easier. In his slide show below, he gives great examples of taking the lesson out of the classroom, or rather, going beyond the 4 walls and making the learning transparent and more meaningful at the same time. Yes, of course he uses social media; it's all about connecting, right? Take a look. I love the "Novel Blackout Poems".

Thank you David!

Turn your learning inside out from David Theriault

The iPad in Education: Uses, Benefits, and Challenges

A survey of 6,057 students and 302 teachers in Quebec has produced an interesting preliminary report.* Karsenti and Fievez asked important questions, but I found myself frustrated reading the results. While questions addressed the use of iPads (or touch pads) by students and teachers, benefits were attributed using a traditional classroom setting and did not allow for the potential of such mobile technologies in a different and emerging learning environment. The questions shouldn't be, "Can we do all the same things better with an iPad?"– but rather, "How can we transform learning with these devices?"
A student may not write better on an iPad, but imagine what would happen to his/her writing after a Skype session with an actual "Lost Boy of Sudan", or a curator at the Charles Dickens Museum, or a graphic novelist. Or perhaps the student's content would improve after following a twitter discussion on a novel, gaining the perspective of readers on a global scale.
Recommendations made in the report wisely include professional development for teachers, but we must be careful to move past mere adaptation and recognize the paradigm has shifted.

* Karsenti, T., & Fievez, A. (2013). The iPad in education: uses, benefits, and challenges – A survey of 6,057 students and 302 teachers in Quebec, Canada. Montreal, QC: CRIFPE.

Learning Spaces

So one thing I keep running into as an educational technologist is the need to re-design the classroom. I am far from the first to notice this and my research shows me there are amazing things being done, from small classroom spaces to beautifully designed schools that have completely broken from the industrial-age prototype, embracing both nature and technology. Score! Technology does not have to mean "indoors". In fact, the the mobility of our new technologies begs it not to be.
Still, considering we are not all moving into new buildings, there are some things we can do to our classrooms. I've put together a Learnist with great info from Edutopia, The Third Teacher+, and I've included a few dream schools to inspire us:   Learning Spaces

Eduslam

Okay, let's get a little more practical. I came across Eduslam on Google Hangouts. Tanya Avrith and Holly Clark have educators from around the world  talking about ideas, tools, apps that can transform the learning going on in your classroom.  Basically it's teachers teaching teachers. Short (about 5 minutes) videos explain a practice that has proven successful. I can talk on and on about emerging technologies, but until I can show how effective they can be in a classroom, they will remain untested. Eduslam has classroom teachers explaining their experiences – where things went wrong, and where things went right – giving valuable insight into procedures you might have wanted to try, but just didn't know enough about.

Some of the topics are: Using Stories in the Math Classroom, Collaborative Writing in Grade 3, The Best way for Seniors to End the Year, Using Twitter in Grade One, App Speed Dating... I knew you'd like that one. Check out Eduslam!

The Digital Future

Huffington Post has published an article by Matthew Lynch about the recently-released New Media Consortium Horizon which details six up-and-coming technologies for K-12 classrooms. The article, "A Digital Future: K-12 Technology by 2018" outlines how things like Mobile Learning, 3-D printing, Learning Analytics, and open content will develop over the next five years. Things can change rapidly in 5 years, but the 6 technologies projected here look like they're here to stay.

Khan Academy Dashboard

Welcome back everyone! For my first entry this year I want to revisit a site we are all familiar with: Khan Academy. This site just keeps getting better. Not everyone is a fan, I know, but let's remember, it's a tool. Use it in any way that helps you, or your students, best. The dashboard allows teachers to see at a glance where their students are struggling, so that individual attention can be applied when necessary. Students also have a dashboard to follow their own progress. I urge you to watch the video below to see how both students and teachers can benefit from Khan Academy.