http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TIitZpqv4

 

Active Learning Strategies for Your Classroom

According to Pat Wolfe – “No matter how creative, colorful or exciting a lesson is, if the teacher’s brain is the only one interacting with the material, the teacher’s brain – not the student’s brain – is the only brain forming dendrites.”

The traditional lecture, where the lecturer talks and the student listens, is the most common teaching method used in most classrooms. But does this method promote student learning? Think back about your own learning – how did you learn? What do you remember best? 
Evidence indicates that students learn better when they are actively involved in the learning process.

What is active learning?


Students need to do more than just listen

Student-centered activity that “substantially involves students with the course content through talking and listening, writing, reading and reflecting.”

More importantly, the student has to be engaged in higher order thinking tasks such as analysis, problem-solving, synthesis and evaluation

Why active learning?


It stimulates higher order thinking and skills. It promotes learning in students with different learning styles

Some strategies

Students can be engaged in individual or small group activities both in small and large-sized classes. Simple techniques that can be adopted with very little preparation include: pausing to enhance recall; think-pair-share – where the student is given time to think, then turn to their neighbor and share their thoughts); question and answer pairs; one-minute-paper; focused listing (students are given time to list key points) and buzz groups. Other strategies that require more planning include scenarios/case studies, reading assignments, simulations, interactive computer programs and problem-based learning. Simple active learning methods that could be easily used with technology, such as PowerPoint games are also freely available. Today, I would like to expand on the simplest of techniques that require least preparation.

Pausing


Let me describe an interesting study on the technique of pausing The instructor pauses for two minutes every 12-18 minutes of lecture. During the pauses, the students worked in pairs to discuss and rework their notes without any interaction with the instructor. At the end of the lecture,students had three minutes t to write down everything they could remember from the lecture.

 

The only learning that really sticks is that which is self discovered.

 

Blogs are student centered: Learning as conversation

A shortening of the term Web log, the Blog is an online publishing tool that enables people to easily publish their loves, passions, dislikes, peeves, discoveries, and insights.

My own familiarity or the lack thereof with technology.

How ironic? My Dad introduced me to the Blogosphere…

What the heck is a blogosphere?

The collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network.

WWW Yarn: Envision we are all connected

Blogs are social!

For linking bloggers with common interests.

Have you ever blogged? Where?

I reveal my secret blog passion… www.chowhound.com

Blogs are tailored to the individual:

You can learn about things that interest you. There are Blogs on all kinds of wacky things.

How can this help me as a teacher?

I did a google query: “using blogs for education purposes”

Teachers can use classroom blogging for their own communications and as a tool for giving voice to what their students are learning and how they are learning. Teachers use blogs to “document, reflect, plan, mentor, analyze and to communicate” between other teachers and mentors, providing guidance and support.

Who uses blogs?

Perseus Development Corporation, for instance, finds 51.5 percent of all blogs are being developed and maintained by ages 13–19 (Henning, 2003). A similar study finds that 40.4 percent of blog authors are under age 2

http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

http://1laptop1student.blogspot.com/

http://doteduguru.com/id92-social-survey-delicious.html

 

This is an Internet Survey shows most tagged pages on the internet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4194669.stm

 

Blogs are cool: YOU can say what you want, how you want!

Blogs allow informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper.

Facebook, the wall functions as a blog

Blogs can improve communication outside the classroom.

Blogs provide new ways of learning!! 

http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html

 

The Blog identity creates opportunities for personal expression!

‘I like the fact that we are making stuff that people in Japan could read if they have a computer.  It’s like we’re making ourselves famous in our little, out-of-the-way town!’ — Megan, Age 10.

 

Best reasons to use blogs in the classroom:

Ability to post text or graphics to the Web without sophisticated technical knowledge

Blogs are current, easy to comment on things happening now

For collaborative activites.

For reflection and debate

Micro-publishing experience. We all can be “authors”

For knowledge storal and retrival

Blogging combines immediate publication with the archive

 

Surveys say….!!!…. students like blogs. 

Blogs can be used to teach and carry out research…

http://teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk/index.php/2005/10/15/using-wikis-for-educational-purposes/

http://www.blognetnews.com/Education/search.php?rss_query=educational+purposes&rss_query_match=exact&feature=topic

 

Word I didn’t know: Wiki??? Whats that??? According to Wikipedia:

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.[1][2] Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.[2] Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.[3]

“Wiki” (/wiːkiː/) is originally a Hawaiian word for “fast”. It has been suggested that “wiki” means “What I Know Is”.[4] However, this is a backronym. “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of the same word.

http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/

http://adamsnews.wikispaces.com/

 

 

The Eternal Question… Cake or pie??? MY favs…

Flourless chocolate cake topped with chocolate ganache with a spoonful of peanut butter whip mousse and warm caramelized bananas garnished with a peanut brittle

Carrot cake with pineapple topped with cream cheese frosting  and diced pecans

Coconut cake passion fruit filling fresh raspberries and blackberries

Key Lime pie

Apple pie a la mode

Sweet potato or pumpkin pie

English Mincemeat Pie

Jamacian Rum Cake

Blueberry cobbler with one scoop of ginger ice cream and one scoop of cinnamon ice cream

A new one i want to try… Is it cake? Is it pie??

http://desertcandy.blogspot.com/2007/10/puppy-love.html

 

 

Do people think (process information) differently when they grow up using computers and internet as educational/recreational tools? 

 

Its your choice:

 

                                            Apple Pie

                                                  or

                                Flourless Chocolate cake

 

        

As teachers we choose what style works best for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apple pie

INGREDIENTS 

          1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie

          1/2 cup unsalted butter

          3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

          1/4 cup water

          1/2 cup white sugar

          1/2 cup packed brown sugar

           8 Granny Smith apples – peeled, cored and sliced

 

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Melt the butter in a saucepan. Stir in flour to form a paste. Add water, white sugar and brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature and let simmer.

Place the bottom crust in your pan. Fill with apples, mounded slightly. Cover with a lattice work of crust. Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the crust. Pour slowly so that it does not run off.

Bake 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Reduce the temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Continue baking for 35 to 45 minutes, until apples are soft.

 

or 

 

Gluten-Free Flourless Chocolate Cake

16 oz. Belgian dark chocolate

1 1/2 cups organic cane sugar (or 1 cup organic light brown sugar and 1/2 cup white cane sugar)

3/4 cup very hot strong coffee

2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into pieces (or dairy-free margarine)

2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

8 large free-range happy organic eggs, at room temperature

1 tablespoon good vanilla extract- yes, a tablespoon!

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare a 10-inch Springform pan by lining the bottom with parchment, and buttering it.

Break up the dark chocolate into pieces and pour the chocolate into the bowl of the food processor. Pulse until the chocolate breaks up into small bits. Add the sugar. Pulse until the chocolate and sugar turns into an even, sandy grain.

Pour the hot water or coffee slowly into the feed tube as you pulse again. Pulse until the chocolate is melted. Magic!

Add the butter pieces and the cocoa powder, and pulse to combine. Add the eggs and vanilla, and process till smooth. The batter will be liquid and creamy.

Pour the batter into the lined Springform pan. Wrap the outside of the whole pan with a big piece of foil. Bake at 350 degrees F in the center of the oven, till puffed and cracked and lovely – about 55 to 65 minutes. Note – it took an hour plus 15 minutes here at high altitude. Use a wooden toothpick to check the center of the cake; pick should emerge clean, maybe with a crumb.

 Place the cake pan on a wire rack to cool. The cake will deflate. Don’t worry!

 When cooled a bit, press down on it gently with a spatula to make it even, if you wish. Or not.

 When the cake is completely cooled, cover, and chill it for three hours (up to eight hours) until serving. Release the cake from the pan. Slice and serve.

Serve slices with drizzled chocolate sauce or a sprinkle of powdered sugar. Add a few fresh berries or mint leaves to the plate, if you like.  

 

 

 

Potential downside to blogging in the classroom??? 

People outside of this classroom didn’t get any cake! 

Monetary bias for computer access.

 

What else is a downside?

 

Upside?? 

Personality, choices and selection.

It is more than what you like it is how you express your self. How you communicate who you are that is different from me.

Everybody likes/wants something different.

The take home message??

May I have a to go box please….

You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course – This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…

You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion – One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation. Never, ever, mention number of words!



You should use blogs for what they are good for – Blogs are by no means the answer to everything, they are very strong alternative tools but if you want to build quizzes, run polls, have near-synchronous conversation, do listserv-y kind of discussion or strictly manage just about anything then you’ll probably want to look at another tool. Use blogs to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.


NO NO NO!!!

How NOT to use blogs in education

Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… 

 

Sharing is caring!

EDTAGS – social tagging for educational purposes

Just to give you a summary, the idea is to bring together websites that are relevant in the educational area, including ESL/EFL. It is a place for you as a teacher to find resources, but also to add resources that you find so others can also profit from them.

Social tagging also leaves the idea of folders with fixed names, becoming more flexible and more dynamic, i.e. you choose the key words that you find relevant. You can choose as many as you think apply so others may find the relevancy as well. They, in turn, may choose to use the same tags, but can choose other instead or in addition to make the tags more meaningful to themselves.

Educational Uses of Blogs: Good sites I found….

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

http://www.gcast.com

http://blogsavvy.net/how-you-should-use-blogs-in-education/

http://weblogg-ed.com/

http://www.21classes.com/

http://weblogg-ed.com/

 

Examples of good classroom blogs…

http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/blogs.html

http://itc.blogs.com/minds/files/EddieAichelle.mp3

http://itc.blogs.com/minds/files/TinaVincentGrey-M.mp3

http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

http://wkeartsmarts.blogspot.com/

 

How would I use a blog in my classroom?

For brainstorming, planning and feedback on collaborative projects

For an after hours critique of work done in class

To Pen pal with another class over the web

Disseminate information to parents and others : Virtual tour of students work

Have students post reflections on their work

Using art to tell stories writing to accompany art work

Not just good for pictures and writings, blogs are the perfect place for video and audio sharing

Blog is perfect place for students to show off their work