Month: August 2018

Bookmarked Reclaiming Educational Reform by Benjamin Doxtdator (Long View on Education)

You might think I’m overly critical of Ted Dintersmith, who probably really cares about education and the future of young people. When you watch Bill Gates tour High Tech High which he invested in years before it featured in Dintersmith and Wagner’s film, you get the sense that he probably really cares about young people, too. But we must not base policy on personality. Hoping that  Dintersmith may be the anti-Gates we’ve been waiting for confines us such a superficial analysis of personality. When billionaires like Dintersmith get behind efforts led by private schools to reshape admissions to colleges, we need to put these education reform agendas through a rigorous, historical analysis. Maybe you will enjoy Dintersmith’s book for the tour he takes you on of schools across the U.S., but you’ll need to look elsewhere to understand what’s really at stake in the movement to ‘disrupt’ ‘obsolete’ schools.

Benjamin Doxtdator continues his critique of Ted Dintersmith. Picking up where he finished last time, he explains that Dintersmith and Tony Wagner are not the alternative to the personalized education movement that we maybe hoping for. I always feel conflicted by such conversations wondering if I am trying to have my cake and eat it too?
Liked The Power of an Idea Meritocracy (ideas.darden.virginia.edu)

An Idea Meritocracy is an environment in which the best idea wins. The best idea is determined by the quantity and quality of the data, not by positional power. I have studied examples of companies that have created Idea Meritocracies, including Google, Intuit, Pixar Animation Studios and Bridgewater Associates. In those organizations, an Idea Meritocracy has played a key role in driving consistent high performance and has warded off complacency and group think by empowering employees to have the curiosity and courage to challenge, to explore like scientists by asking the three W’s: Why? What if? Why not?

📑 20 Tech Tips in the Mathematics Classroom

Aimee Shackleton:

20 Tech Tips in the Mathematics Classroom – Teacher Information, Robots and iPad Apps

Desmos – online graphing calculating system www.desmos.com

Desmos provides a range of questions and challenges associated with graphing (see Dan Meyer for more http://blog.mrmeyer.com/)

Graphing Stories – handouts, videos and stories associated with graphs www.graphingstories.com

Which One Doesn’t Belong – find a reason why each one does not belong wodb.ca/index.html

It is not about the answer, but about the discussion. The next step to Which One Doesn’t Belong is getting students to make their own

Maths Tweet Blogosphere exploremtbos.wordpress.com & https://twitter.com/ExploreMTBoS

What Can You Do With That? #WCYDWT https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2010/teaching-wcydwt-introduction/

Visual Patterns http://visualpatterns.org

Between 2 Numbers – If this then what www.between2numbers.com

Three Act Maths by Dan Meyer https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jXSt_CoDzyDFeJimZxnhgwOVsWkTQEsfqouLWNNC6Z4/pub?output=html

101 Questions – pose questions based on a provocation www.101qs.com

Youcubed – a collect of tasks that could be used as starters www.youcubed.org

WolframAlpha – a space to ask computational questions www.wolframalpha.com

EquatIO https://www.texthelp.com/en-au/products/equatio/

Bookmarked B-Tags, Photos, Technology & Surveillance by Ian O’Byrne (W. Ian O'Byrne)

These technologies provide amazing opportunities to provide real services to our lives. I experienced this first hand as we enjoyed our time in this road race, and will look forward to the next one together. I was impressed by the use of technology as I was interacting with these sources and signals. At the same time, I was still plagued by a number of questions as I was thinking about these tools, and other possible uses. In our current and future societies, we need to examine these uses and think about how or why we use these solutions.

Ian O’Byrne reflects on the use of ChronoTrack B-Tags consisting of two stickers that contain RFID antennas to track participants in a fun run. This is used to monitor participants, but also connect them with commercial opportunities. Along with facial recognition and smart badges, this is another example of the continual evolution of the surveillance state.
Bookmarked K-12 DCP Conference (ReconfigurED.)

Anthony Speranza:

When using technology, we need to be careful of rhetoric

It is not the technology that is disruptive, but what we do with the technology that is disruptive

When talking about technology we often get caught up in discussions of *evidence* and *return on investment*. The problem is that benefits can not necessarily be measured in the same way

We can talk about the effect size of technology, but the problem is that this does not capture the different ways that technology is used within the classroom

It is what the teacher does with the technology that will make the ultimate difference

The use of computers is more effective when: there is a diversity of strategies, pre-training, multiple opportunities, student in control, peer learning and feedback optimised.

We have to have the belief that when we implement technology that it will have the desired effects, such as student self-reporting, meta-cognition and clarity of learning

Steve Cutts provides some interesting provocations about technology http://www.stevecutts.com/illustration.html

What do Google’s DeepMind and IBM’s Watson mean for the future of school?

“Today content is ubiquitous and its’ free” Tony Wagner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5XRrfetu4

52,000,000,000, the estimated number of pages indexed by Google. Growing exponentially

Saroo’s story demonstrates problem-based literacy and numeracy approaches https://www.blog.google/products/maps/google-earth-25-year-search/

Google ‘Talk to Books’ offers a new AI approach to search beyond the indexed web https://books.google.com/talktobooks/

Google Search has changed the way that things are. Now we have technology that not only gives an answer, but also shows the process behind it

Kids today will expect the use of technology

What does it mean when students would rather do YouTube and check out of school?

The qualities required in the 21st Century need to go beyond the traditional foundations https://widgets.weforum.org/nve-2015/WEFORUM

Three stages of educational technology use via Sonny Magana: translational, transformational and transcendent Framework

We need to think about school as it can be

Checked into K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference 2018

Blogging in the Classroom

Using Doug Belshaw’s notion of ‘Digital Literacies, I will focus on critical thinking, creativity and communication. If a school wished that they could cover just about all the Digital Technologies Curriculum using blogging. Blogging has so many entry points that it can be differentiated to the needs of any learner and/or classroom.

 

Ongoing Reporting with GSuite

Using Doug Belshaw’s notion of ‘Digital Literacies, I will focus on critical thinking, creativity and communication. Although this does not necessarily cover coding, documentation and ongoing reporting covers most other aspects, such as data collection and creating digital solutions. The point of ongoing reporting is to be differentiated. The challenge is choosing the right solution for the problem at hand. This will be addressed in the session.

You can find a link to the resource to work through here. This is also something that I have explore elsewhere.

Liked

Bookmarked Robot Predictions (Audrey Watters)

It’s been almost six years since I rode in one of Google’s self-driving cars. I think about all the data that Google has amassed since then – all the mapping data and geolocation data and sensor data and historical data and traffic data and all the machine learning that their machines are supposedly doing with that. Why, it’s almost as if the problems of navigating the world with AI are much, much harder than engineers imagined.

I really like Audrey Watters’ point about investing in public transport:

Personally, I’d prefer to see greater investment in public transportation than in cars, and I’d rather hear stories that predict that sort of future.

Interestingly, that might be a more logical space for automation, especially trains.

Bookmarked Melbourne suburban train loop, including 12 new stations, promised by Victorian Labor – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (mobile.abc.net.au)

A plan to build a multi-billion-dollar underground rail loop connecting Melbourne’s western and eastern suburbs via the airport, and link all major train lines, has been unveiled by the Victorian Labor Government.

I am intrigued by the announcement of a ring rail around Melbourne. Will they still complete Metro Tunnel 2 connecting the Werribee line with Clifton Hill? I also assume that the Werribee link would probably involve connecting the Wyndham Vale V-Line (which will surely become a part of the metropolitan transport system) with Werribee. It is intriguing to place this against the plan proposed in the 60’s.
Liked

Replied to

Now I know what my problem has been all these years … Colour! If only my principal had allowed me to print in colour I could have made so much more difference.
Bookmarked Toolographies — the new essential ingredient of student research? by Matthew Esterman (Medium)

Perhaps we need to have students include a toolography, a list — perhaps annotated — of the tools they used to source, to organise and to present their information.

This is an interesting ideas in regards to the evolving place of research and libraries.
Liked Shallow Reactions by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

I think shallow responses are kind of nice—sometimes you don’t have time to reply fully and it can be polite to just 👍. In fact, I sometimes go back to likes and flesh out the reply. So it acts like a bookmark, an ‘ack’ and a reminder to return. That’s not too shallow?

I have found my ‘likes’ since going all IndieWeb have become much more purposeful as I really make an effort to include a quote or something that highlights why it is interesting. This is a vast contrast to my Twitter/G+ experience.
Replied to A Note to My Child’s Teacher by Bill Ferriter (Tempered Radical)

I guess what I am saying is that I want my kid — a kid who has never really felt appreciated by a teacher — to walk away from your room each day convinced that you care about her as a person.  If you can pull that off, you will change her life for the better — and in the end, that’s our primary responsibility as classroom teachers.

I love this post Bill. It has me thinking about my own daughter’s teachers. I was wondering though about a different response, celebrating the successes or strengths of the teachers?

When I think about the teachers my daughter has had, there are a number of things that have stood out? For me, it has been relationships and a focus on strengths.

Originally posted at Read Write Collect