Posted on September 28, 2008 by James Sigler. Categories: .
I watched this TED Talks video tonight and found the conclusions interesting. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments went into remote areas of India and researched the effect of Ed Tech and children teaching each other.
His conclusions were:
The more remote the school, the worse the quality of the schools.
Education Technology does much more to improve teaching and learning in schools in remote schools than in more suburban schools. Thus education technology should start in remote schools where it will make the most impact for the investment.
Values are acquired, not imposed.
Children can learn each other in groups by watch how others do something and listening to how they did it.
I think these conclusions have implications for us ed tech advocates. It validates that education technology itself does impact the quality of a school.
Many times ed tech starts in the least effective places, affluent suburban school districts that can afford to finance the technology themselves, instead of in more remote rural (and inner city?) area. However, that means the money has to come from somewhere besides the school district. Where?
Finally, kids can learn on their own, especially values. We need to model how to learn, and then get out of their way and let them learn. Sure we can guide and give help to those who need it, but many times we tend to be controlling and dogmatic in our teaching. We need to let them by doing some of their own exploration and learning from each other.
I’ve made myself take time over the last few months to read longer texts, and after plowing through three really, really engaging and challenging novels in the past month or so, I’m feeling like my brain is back in gear somehow. It’s getting closer to balance.
The mental reading process is very akin to the mental learning process. There is value in the mental persistance in reading longer, engaging texts, because that builds our “mental muscles” for persistance in learning. As student reading levels rise, the length of the texts they read increases, so they need to be able to stick with those texts on their reading level.
However, there are different kinds of reading. My 3rd graders are moving from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” The good readers are able to easily adjust their reading rate depending on the density of the material. However, poor reader have to be taught this skill. Academic texts are very dense and require the reader to slow down, read carefully, and possibly take notes. Fiction is not an dense and be read more quickly. Personal writing like letters and blogs can be rather light and quick to read. Students have to learn to adjust their reading rates, so a constant diet of any one kind of reading will not help them reach their ultimate potential as a reader.
Is there value to reading online? Yes, but it is a different kind of reading. Online reading can best be done in a couple ways. One way is more linear, with the page fitting on the screen and a link taking you to the next page. The other is hyperlinked writing in which the reader can click links within the article to read further about ideas within it.
Posted on September 26, 2008 by James Sigler. Categories: .
I know you probably already know about the K-12 Online Conference 2008, but it is such a great opportunity for profession development that don’t want anyone to miss it. The previews have already started. The actual online conference will be Oct. 20-24 and Oct. 27-30. You will also be able to download the presentations afterward. They presentations are really top-notch. It is the biggest event of the year. Don’t miss it!
So, if it isn’t about the technology, then what is it about?
David spurred me to clarify the thought behind the almost-edublogger-cliche “It’s not about the technology, it about the …”
…learning… …teaching… …thinking… …students…
Pick whichever one you want. Education is a complex process that will not be fixed with a “silver bullet” (to use another cliche). 19th century school s operating in a 21st century world do need to be fixed. The problem with painting schools with such a broad brush is that in all schools there are many good teachers putting their absolute all into their students’ learning. Some of them are more effective than others because some of them have figured out more than others what works with students (also known as experience). Unfortunately, what works well for one student, may not work as well for others, so a teacher must be a Jack of many trades and a master of most. More and more is being demanded from teachers within the same amount of time.
The students have changed since the 19th century industrial age, but the structure of the institution has not. Bells still demand a beginning and an end to learning, so students can trundle to the next class or home to do homework. Classes and learning are departmentalized and disconnected. School 1.0 is not fun.
Some teachers have learned to adapt within the system to connect learning to other learning and to the students’ lives. Schools need to to upgrade to become more student-friendly, more flexible, more real-life…more fun. School 2.0 includes technology, which makes it more interactive.
Posted on September 19, 2008 by James Sigler. Categories: .
Every time I logged in my Wordpress dashboard, the “Wordpress 2.6 is available! Please update now” kept flashing at me. I finally gave in and downloaded the grade. I read the directions and backed up my blog before I upgraded. Boy is it a good thing that I did! After I manually updated upgraded from WP 2.1 to 2.6, my blog wouldn’t load. After hours of searching Wordpress forums, I managed to get it working again. My relief was replaced by shock when I realized that all my categories had suddenly dissappeared. The new version of Wordpress allowed me to easily tag my posts, but converting categories from previous posts to tags was useless if I didn’t have the categories.
I found a solution by David Cumps that showed how to manually reenter the categories. Remy Blaettler posted a trickier but automated fix for the problem.
I imported the backup I made back into the blog, but it didn’t quite work. The real categories were added to the end of the blank ones, so they did not match up to the correct posts. I’ll try deleting all the categories and restoring the backup again.
The other problem is that I only backed up this blog before upgrading. I did not back up my class blog Global Frig Door. That means I either try to figure out the categories manually, or just do without previous categories. Since most of the previous posts were about last year, that won’t matter as much.
I like the WP-Cumulus 3-D tag cloud plug-in better than the categories drop-down list anyway. Since, I’ll be tagging all my posts from now on, I guess the categories don’t make a difference from now on. However, I still wish I had them for this blog, so I could convert them to tags.
Manually or automatically, I’ll get them working sooner or later.
Be careful when you upgrade your Wordpress. Upgrade to 2.3, then from 2.3 to the current version. There was a break in the code at WP2.3. And always make sure you back up.
; ?>/widget_images/flickr.png)
Flickr/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/twitter.png)
Twitter/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/youtube.png)
YouTube/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/delicious.png)
Del.icio.us/jsigler; ?>/widget_images/gmail.png)
GMail/James Sigler; ?>/widget_images/blog.png)
Blog/James Sigler
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3599b136-919e-4270-b899-0d12109eea16)
Lunarpages web hosting