Edusim3D - a peek at School 3.D

A comment in a previous post recommended I check out Edusim3D.

I had already seen Youtube videos of the Edusim and visited the site. However, it was time to try it out. I downloaded the current Alpha .04 zip file from their Ning and followed the directions.I unzipped it to the folder I selected. The sim started right up.I was able to move my little rabbit avatar very easily around the environment.I could create, move, and resize 3D shapes, but I couldn’t change the colors or textures of the shapes. I could also add light sources and portals to other worlds. I could even browse the web in a Firefox window. It was slow, but cool.Lessons could be downloaded as prebuilt environments.I tried out the moon base enviroment. It looked neat, but I would have liked to create more structures that matched the ones there.
Greenbush is a regional education resource center in SE Kansas. I’ve been there, and it seemed to be a great place. However, Greenbush’s Edusim is cutting edge technology. It’s not World of Warcraft (one of the most sophisticated vitural worlds). It’s not Second Life. It is nowhere near being ready for prime time, but is has tremendous educational potential. This goes beyond School 2.0. This sim is looking toward what School 3.0 or School 3.D will look like in years to come.

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The Reading and Constructivist Learning Parallel

The Constructivist Celebration | 2¢ Worth

I need to know what you mean by constructivism and why you think it’s the “best single concept”.

Constructivism is like reading, it’s all about the connections.  When you read, you make connections with your background knowledge, whether a
Text-to-Self Connection, Text-to-Text Connection, or Text-to-World Connection.  The Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman tell us that you cannot comprehend what you read unless you have schema to which to connect the new information.  Otherwise it slides off like rain hitting a tin roof.  It bounces off and slides down into the gutter where it is lost.
If it makes a connection, the new information either agrees with or challenges the reader’s schema.  If it agrees with his or her background, then it is incorporated into the old schema to form a new and improved schema.
If the new information challenges the old schema, it is for two reasons: either the information is wrong or the schema was built upon a misconception.  Confirming the new information with other sources (a 21st century skill) will solve the former conflict.
The later conflict, a misconception, is tricker.  Confronting misconceptions can best be addressed through Inquiry.  The student investigates the conflict of facts and discovers that his or her particular view of the world was mistaken.
The student must then make a choice.  He or she either tenaciously hangs onto the misconception, usually out of fear or prejudice, and rejects the new facts.   Or, in an “ah-ha” moment of realization, the student learns something new. The student  reorients his or her world view to incorporate the new realization, forming a new schema.  These are the moments I live for in teaching.  The sudden light of understanding in a child’s eyes that had moments before been a look of realization make all the other struggles of teaching worth it.
Misconceptions in schema must be identified, confronted in a nonjudgmental way, and incorporated with an open mind into new schema.
What if there is no background knowledge to connect?  The teacher must plan guided experiences on which students investigate, create, and evaluate.
Did you notice that we stopped talking some time back about reading and have been talking instead about learning?  Reading and learning go hand-in-hand.  Reading is a very complex process and learning is no different.  Both rely upon connections to background knowledge.
Experiences build schema, not textbooks and worksheets.  Converstations and  collaboration build connections, not lectures.  Observations rebuild misconceptions, not standardized testing.  Teachers build learning, not No Child Left Behind.
In constructivism, it’s all about the student connections.  Read, construct, connect.  That is what learning is all about.

David Warlick said in The Constructivist Celebration | 2¢ Worth

Perhaps the best single concept that describes where we should be focusing our efforts, as educators, is constructivist learning.

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What are the best practices in teaching?

What are the best practices of teaching. This top ten list of best principles of learning comes from New Zealand is the summary of a full report that is a synthesis of research-based teaching practices.

Quality Teaching for Diverse Students in Schooling: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES) - Education Counts

1. Quality teaching is focused on student achievement (including social outcomes) and facilities high standards of student outcomes for heterogeneous groups of students. Research-based characteristics.
learning processes. Research-based characteristics are specific to curriculum context and the prior knowledge and experiences of the learners.
2. Pedagogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities.
3. Effective links are created between school and other cultural contexts in which students are socialised, to facilitate learning.
4. Quality teaching is responsive to student learning processes.
5. Opportunity to learn is effective and sufficient. Research-based characteristics
6. Multiple task contexts support learning cycles. Research-based characteristics
7. Curriculum goals, resources including ICT usage, task design, teaching and school practices are effectively Research-based characteristics
8. Pedagogy scaffolds and provides appropriate feedback on students’ task engagement. Research-based characteristics
9. Pedagogy promotes learning orientations, student self-regulation, metacognitive strategies and thoughtful student discourse. Research-based characteristics
10. Teachers and students engage constructively in goal-oriented assessment.

I found the study on a link from Tom Hoffman’s presentation at a educon2.0 workshop on the Coalition of Essential Schools Ten Common Principles The ten principles are:

Tuttle SVC: The Historical Role of the CES Common Principles

1. Learning to use one’s mind well
2. Less is More, depth over coverage
3. Goals apply to all students
4. Personalization
5. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
6. Demonstration of mastery
7. A tone of decency and trust
8. Commitment to the entire school
9. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning
10. Democracy and equity

Lists don’t do as much for me as stories. I’ll look for stories that will help illustrate what best practices in teaching look like.

My thinking so far on best practices includes:

1. Helping my students be the best they can be, whether they want to of not.
2. Make learning centered around the student, not around the textbook.
3. Cooperative learning makes learning fun, and helps everyone in the group to learn more if done properly. Kagan cooperative learning structures are an excellent, but proprietary example.
4. Hands-on, minds-on learning is the best for all students.
5. It’s Ok for learning to be fun. Games focused on objectives are a fun way to reinforce learning.
6. Technology tools can amplify learning if used to categorize/organize, communicate, collaborate, and create.

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Memorization, the mind, and making connections

The outboard brain, memory, transfer and learning » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I won’t pretend to know what really defines a “genius.” I do perceive that people who can synthesize ideas from different areas or disciplines, see new connections, and make new discoveries DO have a remarkable DEPTH of knowledge which is tied to specific facts and ideas. Those people aren’t simply generalists, they ARE experts on various subjects. The need to be able to have so much information MEMORIZED and stored directly in your brain for ready access appears to be FAR LESS important than it was in the 1st century A.D., however.

Is there no place for memorization in school anymore?

It depends.

What is the purpose of the memorization? Is it famous quotes or poetry that will enrich their lives and their writing? Is it unrelated names, facts, and dates that will be memorized long enough to regurgitate it back onto a test and never be used again? Is it a list of spelling words for the test on Friday (I’m guilty of this too), or is it connected to to their writing because they frequently misspell it? Does the learning stop after the multiplication facts are memorized, or does the learning apply those facts to higher level math situations?

Sometimes the information needs to be memorized so it is instantly available when needed and can allow for quick connections to subtle patterns that otherwise might be missed.

For example, a series of numbers might have a recognizable pattern if you knew your multiplation facts and perfect squares. Then they can continue the pattern in order to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, much of the memorization in School 1.0 is simply for the test and is then forgotten. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

That’s why school School 2.0 needs to be about making connections: between people, between ideas, between cultures. The brain works by making connections. The more connections made with a bit of information when it is stored, the more likely it is to be remembered. That is why higher level learning help retain so much better what is learned. Each level of Blooms Taxonomy is another layer of complexity. Each layer of complexity multiplies the number of connections the content. So, the more complex the learning environment and the variables within it, the better the students learn the content.

Yes, there is a place of memorization in education. Yes, you can look up basic facts. However, that is just the beginning of the learning, not the end. Sometime we just have to slow down, observe the learning environment around the content, and reflect on what you have learned. Connection - “Stop and smell the roses.”

Geniuses know where to find the information they need because they did their research to become an expert on that topic. They also made lots of connections to memorize a lot of facts, too. Why did they memorize it? Was it just for the test?

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Reflections on Workshop 2.0 - Blogs as Classroom pages

I just finished my first workshop for this year. It was on Making Classroom Web Pages with Blogs. It was open to all teachers in my district, only 4 came. I tried a new, modified format which had mixed results.

Workshop 2.0 - I wanted a workshop that was more interactive than a standard “sit and get” workshop.
Overall the workshop was a success. The participants learned a lot of what they wanted to know through our conversations and left with a classroom web page (actually 3 pages). I’ll do a 3 hour version of this workshop next month at our local Southwest Center for Educational Excellence. Upon reflection, I think there are some things I would like to change for next time.

1. I showed them 3 places to make web pages: Blogger, Edublogs, and Wetpaint. I think I will leave out Blogger next time. The purpose I put it in was to show them how easy it is to make a blog, but it took more time than it was worth.
2. I think I’ll invert the agenda and show Wetpaint first instead of last, since they have to sign up for it anyway to edit any pages. I ran out of time to show them more about Wetpaint, even though we used it for the whole workshop.
3. I had a separate notes and agenda page. The notes page was unnecessary because it involved too much flipping back and forth. We could just use the agenda page for notes.
4. Instruct the participants on how to flip back to the wiki on a separate tab to take notes. I don’t think they understood that it was Ok to edit the agenda. I could ask separate people to add various notes to the agenda during the workshop. Collaborative note-taking on a wiki is a very new idea, and may take a while to work out kinks.
5. Most participants still wanted to use pen and paper to jot notes on. I guess I’ll give in and copy an agenda for them to take notes on.
6. The beginning workshop writing prompt needs to be more open-ended, but not general in purpose. Maybe, “Why do you want create a web page?” This needs to be one wiki page instead as comments on a blog entry. They will also need an overlap task for those who finish their answer early.
7. To get participants to use the treaded discussion, I need to teach it, give a stimulus video, then give them some time to think, type, and reflect.
8. I need to be prepared to talk about Edublogs control panel.
9. I should include how to add a Feedjit map and Voki script to the blog.
10. Quit 5 minutes early to allow reflection time at the end to comment on a “Takeaway” Edublogs post.

There were also many things I liked.

1. I loved using the Wetpaint wiki as an online handout while teaching about the Wetpaint wiki.
2. I think it would be Ok to integrate more about 21st century skills: internet safety, blogs, wikis, connected networks, collaboration, Creative Commons, global focus, and the role of creativity in learning. They were curious about the direction technology is moving in education.
3. The discussion was great.
4. The examples of how I had used blogs, wikis, and my classroom web page in my classroom were very illustrative.
5. They were fascinated by the Feedjit and Clustermaps map of visitors. (It’s one of my favorites, too.)

Workshop 2.0 is a new approach, but I think it has tremendous potential after some adjustments. Read/Write Web interactions will have to be taught, though. If you have ideas or comments, please leave them below.

• Since it was such a small group, the workshop turned out to be a good mix of lecture, discussion, hands-on, and one-on-one just-in-time learning.

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