5 Online Discussion Tips For Students

via Edudemic

Have you ever felt that your online students needed more direction on how to approach a discussion board? Have you thought that with just a bit more assistance students would really engage in the forum and take it to the next level, rather than just do the minimum required to get points?

I have written several useful tips that I would encourage you as faculty to share with your students. These guidelines will assist students as they complete the online discussion board assessment that is inherent in every online course.

Dear students: in order to make this essential assessment both worthwhile and meaningful please take a moment to review these helpful tips and thoughts on how to approach an online discussion board:

1. Firstly, be sure to read all the submissions by your classmates. Most learning platforms, like Blackboard, give your instructor and option to see which students have read what. However, please don’t approach an online forum with the reduced mindset that you HAVE to participate and that I am checking up on your level of engagement, because then in reality you will lose sight of the point of the exercise. For example, if you were in a brick and mortar classroom you would “hear’ all the comments, so why wouldn’t you read all the comments in an online class? The more you participate in the forum the more you will get out of it.

2. Despite what I just said please recognize that an online forum does not translate exactly to a discussion in a traditional class. Because the discussion board is asynchronous the responsibility is on all the members of the class to make sure that the conversation flows, and this only happens if students buy into the assessment and do the work. I promise it will pay dividends.

3. When you are commenting on the posts of your classmates, stay away from the “That’s a good point, Joe.” Or “I agree, Sue.” Those types of comments good places to start but please do not end there. Give your fellow classmates feedback and tell them why it is a good point or how it resonated with you. Put yourself in the role of your teacher and critically evaluate the post of your classmate by providing substantive feedback in the form of a detailed and well thought out response. Peer feedback is the most powerful kind! In addition to assisting your classmates it will help you learn how to critically evaluate a piece of writing. This is a life skill that will serve you long after you leave the classroom.

4. Remember that an online forum is meant to be a discussion, so always respond to those classmates that respond to your original posts. This develops community and rapport and quite frankly it is the polite thing to do. You wouldn’t ignore someone if they spoke to you, would you?

5. Finally, feel free to discuss your opinions on the topic, but always remember to be respectful of different positions that maybe voiced. If your opinion is backed up by facts, be sure to reference your sources appropriately. Some discussion boards are designed to not have a right or wrong answer whereas others ask for research to support a position. Be sure to recognize the difference and respond accordingly.

Jeff Piontek my comments: As a leader in educational technology and online learning I believe that how students communicate with each other and their teachers.

The Future of Gamification

by: Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie

via Pew Internet

Overview

Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation.

“The development of ‘Serious Games’ applied productively to a wide scope of human activities will accelerate simply because playing is more fun than working,” observed Mike Liebhold, senior researcher and distinguished fellow at The Institute for the Future.

Click here to view credited survey participants’ contributions to the discussion of the future of the Internet and gamification by 2020

Click here to view anonymous survey participants’ contributions to the discussion of the future of the Internet and gamification by 2020M

About the Survey

The survey results are based on a non-random, opt-in, online sample of 1,021 Internet experts and other Internet users, recruited via email invitation, Twitter or Facebook from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population other than the experts in this sample.

Click here for full report

Disney ‘Connected Learning’ Aims To Infuse Games with Learning

Via edSurge

By contrast, the launch of the Disney Connected Learning program has been as subtle as, oh, say a green screen.

Six years ago, Disney began exploring how use its considerable design, entertainment and financial muscle in the “learning” arena. It decided to try to create games that children would find genuinely entertaining that were nonetheless built on legitimate learning “goals.”

Over the past two years, it has quietly been refining eight games based on learning objectives in its wildly popular online site for kids, Club Penguin. Several of the games have been hits. “Pufflescape,” for instance, is the second most popular game in Club Penguin. More than 30 million children have played it over the past two years.

“No child should have to choose between a ‘learning’ game and ‘fun’ game,” says Starr Long, who is executive producer of Disney Connected Learning.

Whether the students are learning anything deeper than they do when they play the purely “entertaining” games in Club Penguin, however, is still anybody’s guess.

Disney, on the other hand, has learned a lot in the process. This has been a long project: After a slow two-year start, in 2009 it recruited top talent in the massively multiplayer online industry–Starr Long, who started his career as director of Ultima Online, now the longest-running MMO in history. It convened a team of more than a dozen well-regarded educators including Stanford’s Roy Pea and the University of Georgia’s John Olive and Linda Labbo. Together, they identified 2,500 learning goals, or targets–crucial concepts that students need to understand by the fifth grade. They worked through the ideas until they had learning concepts for students from preK through 5th grade. The goals could not contradict the Common Core standards, noted Long, but they also had to be relevant around the globe. “One woman even wrote a dissertation on this,” Starr says.

“No child should have to choose between a ‘learning’ game and ‘fun’ game,” says Starr Long, who is executive producer of Disney Connected Learning.

Over the next four years, Long’s team built a programming environment to support how to connect those learning goals to “events” or actions. They also built a developer’s platform, a parent-facing app, the digital plumbing to report children’s progress through the games to that app and so on. They evaluated between 20 and 40 game prototypes. Two years ago, they began beta testing their eight top game picks.

Currently three of the 26 or so games in Club Penguin incorporate these learning goals: Pufflescape, Jelly Bean Counter and Bits & Bolts. (Another five games are slated to go online in April.)

In Pufflescape, a creature (a Puffle) bounces and glides through an obstacle courses, collecting prize tokens and unlocking higher levels.

The Puffles interact with their environment according to the rules of Newtonian mechanics. Different levels of the game encode or represent different learning goals.

Meanwhile, about 30,000 parents of those Penguin-playing kids have download a Facebook app that creates a “profile” as the kid plays through the games, letting parents know what learning concepts their kids have played through. Play through a level and the app will share that you and your Puffle have experienced simple levers or more complex ones. “We want to empower the parents,” Long says. “There’s a real need for parents to connect with kids who are living a different life than we did.”

(Parents get other benefits from their Facebook app, too, such as learning “secret” codes that they can share with kids who get stuck on games.)

The three learning games currently in action in Club Penguin echo familiar game play themes that were pioneering in the likes of Donkey Kong and even Tetris.

But these are just the beginning.

Long says that Disney will soon be releasing five preschool titles for mobile platforms, created from scratch, that use Disney characters such as Cinderella, Toy Story, Ariel, Cars and Fairies–and are based on the scaffold of learning goals created by the team of educators. “We want to build content and long-term, want to work with other to build content” based on the Connected Learning platform, Long says. Disney has not yet worked out the specifics of its partner strategy.

But will kids absorb mechanics or the rules of motion from their Puffles or whatever characters are in the game? Will they understand that the rules of physics will dictate how a creature will bounce or if it can catch a lever in motion at a certain moment? Or, skeptics will ask, couldn’t kids just go outside and throw a baseball at the roof of the house and watch it fall?

It’s too soon to tell what kids will learn from the games, Long says.

“We’re not making any claims about what they’re learning,” he observes. “We are just saying that the child is exposed to the concepts that are inherent in the game play.”

Many edu-game companies shy away from any efforts to do rigorous testing of how much learning might happen in their game. Long isn’t daunted by the problem; he believes that Disney needs more data–say, enough games that at least half the learning objectives were covered by games. So far, the games constructed cover less than 5% of the concepts, he says.

What he has learned is this: “You can make these games as compelling and exciting as one that don’t have learning concepts embedded in them.”

Money, Time, and Tactics: Can Games Be Effective in Schools?

There are so many people out there in education who truly don’t understand the power of games and gaming in education. I have been fortunate enough to work with a few people who are experts in the field, Henk Rogers (Tetris) and Mark Loughridge (F9 Entertainment) in the development of games, animations and simulations we have used SUCCESSFULLY in education. You can see some of our work on our website  and if you are interested in collaborating then contact us.

via Mindshift

If it’s true that 97 percent of teens in the U.S. are playing digital games, then the focus on how games can fit into the shifting education system becomes that much more important. Schools, districts, and individual educators are trying to figure out how games and learning can fit into the current complicated landscape.

The newly released report Games for a Digital Age: K-12 Market Map and Investment Analysis,released by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Games and Learning Publishing Council,describes the many different criteria in play in detail, including obstacles from the policy standpoint, lack of teacher development, as well as how the Bring Your Own Device movement is influencing the push towards games and learning.

“Games are more popular than ever with youth today with many students spending hours a day playing them,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. “What we don’t know yet is whether and how they can be a key ally in driving pathways to academic success.”

Though it’s well worth reading the report in its entirety, below are excerpts pulled from the report, conducted and written by Dr. John Richards, Leslie Stebbins and Dr. Kurt Moellering.

ON FINDING WAYS TO USE GAMES WITHIN CLASS TIMES

Envisioning the Future of Education Technology

via Envisioning Technology

The History of Education (Infographic)

To understand where we’re heading in education and edtech, it’s important to look back at our educational roots.

As we searched for some of most memorable moments and discoveries in the history of education, we found there are lots of things that haven’t changed in hundreds of years! The groundwork for clunky, physical textbooks was set by the Ancient Greeks, and in the Middle Ages, the lecture format of teaching emerged.

Today, we’re excited to be part of a bustling edtech community modernizing and improving education. Free digital textbooks, open online classes, and open educational resources make education more affordable and accessible for students around the globe. For a full look at the past, present, and future of education, check out the infographic below!

– See more at: http://blog.boundless.com/2013/02/the-history-of-education-infographic/#sthash.YXVaYsUn.dpuf

The Benefits of Using Social Media in the Classroom

This is a great article by a great leader who understands what needs to be done for our students, teachers and parents and is actually not afraid to do it!!

via eSchool News

Hesitation on administrators’ part is often cited as a top barrier to incorporating more social media tools in classrooms. But with a carefully crafted social media policy, educators and administrators can learn to use social media tools effectively with students.

Advocates of social media in the classroom say that, when used properly, social media tools can boost student engagement, link students to content experts and real-world examples of classroom lessons, and help them establish an online body of work.

“I think we need to rethink the way we’re doing education,” said Patrick Larkin, assistant superintendent for learning for Burlington Public Schools in Massachusetts. (For more on the district’s technology efforts, read abouteSN’s 10th annual Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards. Burlington Superintendent Eric Conti was one of the 10 winners.)

Larkin said that social media tools can help students develop proficiency with technology; learn to create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia text; and manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of information.

School leaders “have to get teachers comfortable with it first, before students will learn how to do it responsibly and effectively,” Larkin cautioned, adding that educators often have to learn and develop comfort levels with social media policy and new concepts associated with social media tools.

Shortly after Conti assumed the superintendency in Burlington, he expanded the district’s technology experimentation and social media policy, which Larkin said was very restrictive prior to Conti’s arrival.

“It has to start with the leaders in the schools embracing [social media] and modeling it, not just talking about it, and that trickles to the teachers, because eventually we want it to end up in the classroom,” Larkin said.

Along with its expanded social media policy, the district embraced Project 365, a popular concept in which schools post daily blog entries featuring a student, educator, parent, or other school-related idea or news.

Incorporating social media tools into classroom instruction has helped the district expand its reach and educational abilities, Larkin said.

“To be able to know where to find people and connect is one of the most important things we can teach our students to do,” he said. “If we can find out how the world is ticking and how things are changing from [using] social media tools outside of schools, I think it’s past time that we started embracing this tradition in our classrooms.”

He added: “Whether we are embracing these tools in our classrooms or not, most likely, your students are using Twitter.”

Larkin has many student followers on Twitter and follows those who follow him. He locked his account so that fellow Twitter users could not view the students’ accounts.

Advocates of social media in the classroom say that, when used properly, social media tools can boost student engagement, link students to content experts and real-world examples of classroom lessons, and help them establish an online body of work.

Twitter’s emergence gave the district the chance to impart a valuable lesson to students.

“We know that colleges are Google-searching our kids; we’re heard it first-hand from admissions officers,” Larkin said.

Larkin took actual Tweets that used foul language from students, made the users anonymous, and presented the tweets to students and asked them what they would think if those tweets popped up during a college admissions officer’s search.

Students were shocked to see how easily that information appeared online, he said, adding that many students didn’t know that unless they made their Twitter accounts private, anyone could view their Tweets—even if that person did not follow them on Twitter.

“If we’re not having these conversations in our schools and as a community, I think you’re doing your kids a disservice—and the parents; parents need help, too,” he said.

And students need more than rules on what not to do, Larkin said.

“If the only thing we’re saying is, ‘Don’t do something wrong,’… Our goal should be to not have empty Google searches when someone does a search of our students, but that they find amazing work when they do those Google searches,” he said.

Students and teachers in the district are working to make sure that examples of student projects, research, and extracurricular activities appear online.

Too often, school social media use only appears in the news when it concerns something bad, Larkin said, and his district strives to spread the word about students’ responsible and positive social networking.

“The fact that we’re able to share good news—that’s what our goal is; to share what students are doing and what teachers are doing,” he said.

“I think we really have to focus on the ability that our students have to be creators,” Larkin added. “Social media is the way to get that out.”

Opening up lines of communication via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking tools also helps students check on their peers’ safety. In one case, a student saw something alarming on a friend’s Facebook page and reached out to Larkin because he was worried. The student in question was safe.

“He reached out to me because he could—we’re connected, which is great. The times I’ve been contacted, it’s been when people needed to contact me,” Larkin said.

“The positive examples don’t get the play in the news media,” he said. “But our job in our schools is to show that these things are used responsibly and well, routinely, and that’s been the case for us.”

Schools can follow a few basic guidelines for using social networking in class, and they can add to or customize the rules according to their unique needs:

• Run parent technology nights to help parents learn about different social networking resources and learn how to use them.
• Be aware of acceptable use policies and guidelines regarding personal vs. professional accounts and use.
• Keep in mind the purpose for using the social media tool.

Teachers often create Twitter hashtags specific to class projects or initiatives so that students can collaborate, discuss the subject matter anytime they wish, and then locate all tweets that include that specific hashtag.

“[Teachers have] access to tools, but we still ask teachers to think about their goals and objectives,” Larkin said. “A crappy lesson with an iPad is very similar to a crappy lesson without an iPad.”

The district’s ultimate goal is to be a BYOD school, and grades 6-8 one-to-one implementation begins in February after an initial implementation at the high school level.

BYOD plans will progress, but initially, Larkin said that district leaders “didn’t feel that the adults were ready to have a bunch of kids with different devices and platforms.”

In addition to iPads and Twitter, the district uses NetTexts for eBooks, Edmodo, Twitucate, EverNote, and Notability.

“Make sure administrators support you first; make sure parents know what is coming, and pay attention to age specifications on sites,” Larkin said.

Can Student-Driven Learning Happen Under Common Core?

via Mindshift

Teachers use different strategies to help students learn. With the inevitable arrival of the Common Core State Standards, however, the big unknown is what will happen when the assessments are released and the states and the federal government develop policies to accommodate them. If the assessments fall back on the kinds of narrow questions we saw with No Child Left Behind, and if governments create the same kind of high-stakes accountability, teachers will be herded back towards lower levels of prescriptive learning that leave little room for student voice and ownership.

But if assessments mirror the broad principles and effective pedagogy that the CCSS authors have championed, there is hope that rote learning and teacher-driven classrooms will not be necessary in order for students to pass the test.

STUDENT-DRIVEN LEARNING

Most student-driven classrooms start with a question. It’s usually one that springs from a common place but allows for individualization by students based on their interests. It allows them to build questions and go about answering them, utilizing the skills and knowledge that the curriculum provides. The teacher facilitates this learning, to be sure, but also gives authority to the student to “own” their question. The student moves to center stage and the teacher assumes a supporting role.

Three of the eight mathematical practices that lie at the heart of all the Common Core’s K-12 math standards could be statements that describe a student-centered classroom.

For example, the capacities stated in the CCSS to “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them,” “reason abstractly and quantitatively,” and “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others” are all integral to successful units where students ask and answer their own questions — and to a classroom where they see their viewpoint as valuable to the educational process.

The “tension” will come when the the goal of student-driven learning bumps up against the traditional teacher’s instinct to provide the context and the questions for students to use. Especially in the beginning years of CCSS implementation, this tension will be heightened as teachers learn what they are expected to teach (not just content but things like “sense-making, “reasoning,” and “constructing”) but have not yet figured out the places where they can turn the reins over to students.

HOW DO WE TEACH PERSEVERANCE?

A key CCSS principle (Math Practice MP1) is to “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.” The alignment between student-driven learning and CCSS is very close here. Student-driven learning revolves around identifying problems that students believe are important to them and applicable to their real life, and then finding ways to solve them. The CCSS encourages teachers to help students “find the meaning of a problem and look for entry points…analyzing givens, constraints, relationships and goals.” If a teacher has already established (or begun to establish) the student-centered classroom, this will be familiar territory.

Through artful inquiry-based instruction, teachers can co-learn along with students by gently guiding and providing probing questions of their own. We have to be patient as our kids gain the ability to do this. Students who have spent years in NCLB classrooms will struggle to find how to make sense of problems. Why? Simply because they have seldom been presented with complex scenarios. The deeper student learning that can emerge from this style of teaching can’t be assessed with a multiple choice question. So we haven’t encouraged teachers to become skillful in this way, and we’ve raised a generation of rote learners.

Most student-driven classrooms start with a question. It’s usually one that springs from a common place but allows for individualization by students based on their interests.

Even so, our students can reconnect with their innate curiosity and excitement about learning. Over the past several years of shifting my practice, I have seen their natural curiosity return. When it does, persevering isn’t nearly so hard. Until it does, teachers will have to continually re-assure and support students in building deeper, higher level kinds of questions.

ELA STANDARDS AND STUDENT-DRIVEN TEACHING 

Within the first ELA strand, writing, the Common Core articulates steps for writing a good argument and defending it. Details about how these skills are going to build up from lower grades (with increasing amounts of sophistication) are not present in the standards. That will fall to the collective expertise of teachers working together to make this happen, and to curriculum writers at the district or state levels. We will have to work at understanding what kinds of vertical alignments are needed so we can craft lessons to be matched with our students’ needs at each level.

Common Core writing standards appear to emphasize “the ability to write logical arguments based on substantive claims…reasoning…and relevant evidence.” If students were able to demonstrate this ability in their writing, they would be able to describe and defend their ideas to others. And that empowering skill set is exactly what a student-driven classroom seeks to achieve.

THE INTERSECTION OF ELA AND STEM SUBJECTS 

More tension will arise for traditional teaching as educators are called upon to expand the student’s understanding of non-fiction and technical topics, like those associated with STEM subjects and social sciences. In recent years, students have been heavily focused on writing narrative and creative writing kinds of pieces. The expansion of real-world study topics called for in the Common Core should open up the student-driven classroom even more.

Writing’s partner is speaking and listening. In a student-driven classroom, there is much “argumentation, debate and discourse” as students wrestle with the questions. The best of those classrooms foster respect between students as they learn from each other. They have to develop the ability to hold their own during small group discussions as well as classroom discussions.

What should please teachers is the fact that the CCSS standards address the formal, stand-in-front-of-the-class presentation and the collegial discussions between students. When I read about “….informal discussions that take place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding and solve problems,” I see support of student choice. These words underscore the importance of students’ conversations about what they are learning and the interpersonal skills that are necessary for undertaking co-learning of ideas and content. Building understanding and solving problems are goals that demand we address the group dynamics involved in studying a real-world situation and brainstorming ideas back and forth.

Ultimately there is room in the Common Core’s vision and principles for advocates of student-driven learning to thrive. As teachers gain experience in the CCSS standards that apply to their grade level, they will identify places where there are opportunities to put student questions at the forefront of their lesson plans. Over time, as students build up their ability to read, write, speak and find solutions to increasingly more complex kinds of problems, they will be able to take more and more ownership of the learning process.

All this assumes, of course, that the large-scale assessment and accountability systems are designed to promote this potentially powerful marriage of the Common Core and student-driven learning. I’ve been teaching a long time. I know how big that assumption is. But at the classroom level, the best way I know to make it happen is to show what could happen. So I’m going to keep doing that.

Marsha Ratzel is a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, where she teaches middle school math and science. Her book about shifting her science teaching practice to emphasize student-driven learning will be published this spring by Powerful Learning Press. A portion of this post originally appeared on Voices from the Learning Revolution.

How Are Smartphones Being Used? [Infographic]

via Tatango

5 Free Apps for Classrooms with a Single iPad

via Edudemic

You don’t have to be in a 1:1 classroom to infuse technology into your instruction. If you have one iPad in your classroom, turn it into a technology station during literacy or math small group work. A group of 3-4 students can work collaboratively on one iPad with these fantastic free apps:

1. Toontastic: Students can work in small groups to write a script based on a story they know or one they’ve created. Toontastic allows users to tell their story by choosing a setting, creating characters, and moving each character while they record dialogue. Students must identify the tone of a story, sequence events, and act out the different parts. Each child can play the role of a character, or take on jobs like set designer and director. Using Toontastic students can draw and record their tale, creating a final product that’s perfect to share with the class or on a back-to-school night. These videos are also great for digital portfolios.

2. Math Fluency: Instead of having students use paper flashcards to quiz each other on math facts try one of the free iPad apps – there are many to choose from – that quiz students on addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. Using just one iPad (or iPod Touch) students can work in teams to quiz one another to reinforce these basic skills. Fluency is an important foundational skill and digital flashcards are an easy way to create a technology math station.

3. Camera: The iPad camera offers many opportunities for students to work together collaboratively. Students can snap pictures of their group acting out scenes from a story or describing the feelings of a character. Whether they’re filming public service announcements, retelling a story they’re read, giving a book recommendation or conducting interviews, small groups can work together to complete a task using the iPad camera.

4. Screencasting: Doceri and ScreenChomp are two fantastic free apps that students can use in small groups. Have a team solve a math word problem and document the steps they’ve taken to find their answer. Students can each take on a role (as speaker, writer, timekeeper, director) or each model a different part of the problem. These tutorials can be shared with the whole class or included in digital portfolios. Differentiate the task by having students work on problems at their level or in a heterogeneous group. These screencasts can be used as a form of assessment to see if students can explain their thinking – and work collaboratively.

5. Teleprompter: Students can practice choral reading to build fluency using the iPrompt iPad app. Choose a famous text – or one you and your students have written – and cut and paste it into the app. Change the font size and speed of delivery to meet the needs of your students. Have students read in unison or act as a timekeeper for another child. It’s a great way to connect to the Speaking and Listening anchor standards of the Common Core.