in the cloud

What do you think makes someone a leader to learn from?

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:40:16 -0500

What My Connected Students Taught Me about Motivation There are...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:54:09 -0500

What My Connected Students Taught Me about Motivation

There are many books on the topic “learning in the 21st century,” and I think I have read most of them. The authors are educators and educational experts I know and admire. Many write about what students want and how students learn. What occurred to me was that there are no books about this topic written by students.

Who are more important in students’ learning than the students themselves?

Helping Workaholics to Help Employers — And...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:07:06 -0500

Helping Workaholics to Help Employers — And Themselves

Workaholics tend to live in extremes, with great job satisfaction and creativity on the one hand and high levels of frustration and exhaustion on the other hand. A new Florida State University study provides insight to managers on how to help these employees stay healthy and effective on the job.

They found about 60 percent of these workers identified themselves as workaholics who characteristically “feel guilty when taking time off.” These self-identified workaholics reported positive and negative career consequences.

“We discovered that workaholics really struggle when they feel that they are alone or swimming upstream without a paddle,” Hochwarter said.

Workaholics who said they had access to resources reported:

40 percent higher rate of job satisfaction;

33 percent lower rate of burnout;

30 percent higher rate of perceived job importance;

30 percent lower rate of exclusion from others;

25 percent higher rate of career fulfillment;

20 percent lower rate of work frustration.

Takeaway: REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

image via flickr:CC | jehgasperotto

Simple Questions that Focus Difficult Work These questions have...

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:20:09 -0500

Simple Questions that Focus Difficult Work

These questions have enabled me to highlight the significance of professional learning and position it within a broader context in ways I hadn’t done before.

What is it that we want our students to know and be able to do?

What do we want our teachers to know and be able to do to develop and sustain effective learning environments for students?

What do leaders need to know and be able to do to create optimum conditions for teaching and learning?

In what ways can we ensure teachers and leaders develop the skills they need to be consistently effective?

image via flickr:CC | Michael Dales

"Fear of failure is not a big issue for most kids going off to first grade. Their life is not yet..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:33:41 -0500

“Fear of failure is not a big issue for most kids going off to first grade. Their life is not yet framed with questions of success and failure. Even after a year in kindergarten where their mission was to make friends, create, do fun things, and learn as much as they can, the concept of failure isn’t really on the brain, much. Unfortunately, most schools try to change this.”

- In Education Failure IS an Option: New Myths for Successful Kids and Better Schools

Digital Fun for Creative Kids Send your students home with some...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:47:07 -0500

Digital Fun for Creative Kids

Send your students home with some educational apps to work their creative muscle over the summer. The list is maintained by Common Sense Media and are grouped by categories and age to make it easy to age-appropriate tools.

image via flickr:CC | Toca Boca

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:31:09 -0500

All Virginia students to use computers for standardized...

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:13:41 -0500

All Virginia students to use computers for standardized tests

All Virginia students will have to log on to a computer to take this year’s Standards of Learning tests, making Virginia one of the only states to wholly abandon the nearly ubiquitous paper-and-pencil bubble sheets.

How other states will be able to rapidly upgrade computers and Internet access in a slow economy is “the $64,000 question,” said Douglas A. Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. “Probably add a few more zeros there,” he said.

image via flickr:CC | bionicteaching

"Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:27:05 -0500

“Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.”

- Celebrating Inequality

Why ability grouping in schools is a mistake

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:40:28 -0500

Why ability grouping in schools is a mistake:

Although I understand that many elementary schools are moving to ability-based classrooms in the belief that they will do a better job of teaching what students are expected to know and do under the Common Core State Standards, I still think they are a big mistake.

Teaching to the presumed level of a whole class never works as well as hoped because students still have significant differences in work habits, paces of learning, and outside of school experiences. But there is another, more serious problem: the effects on students in the low level classes.

Do Teachers Want Cameras In Their Classrooms?

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:53:57 -0500

MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:06:59 -0500

MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used:

Are professors who develop and teach MOOCs responsible for how those MOOCs are used?

"In hindsight, it’s ridiculous that I felt my choice of major somehow reflected my value, just as how..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:20:00 -0500

“In hindsight, it’s ridiculous that I felt my choice of major somehow reflected my value, just as how my decision to come to a state university affected how I felt in comparison to my friends at private schools. I am ashamed to admit I once thought Maryland was below me, and I am ashamed to admit I thought English was a selfish, indulgent choice of study, as though I was less noble or helpful than my friends in engineering or biology.”

- University of Maryland’s English Department Commencement Address by Jamie Lee

Ed. Schools Lag Behind Digital Content Trends

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:33:52 -0500

Ed. Schools Lag Behind Digital Content Trends:

Teacher education institutions risk becoming obsolete if they do not do a better job preparing future teachers to use digital curricula, experts say.

Two-thirds of College Students Think They’re Going to...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:47:25 -0500

Two-thirds of College Students Think They’re Going to Change the World

Writer Peg Streep is writing a book about the Millennial generation and she routinely sprinkles great data into her posts at Psychology Today.

Recently she linked to at study by Net Impact that surveyed currently-enrolled college students and college-graduates across three generations Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers. The questions focused on life goals and work priorities. They found significant differences between students and college grads, as well as interesting generational differences.

caffeinegalore pours: Coffee by DaveLawler

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:11:25 -0500

caffeinegalore pours:

Coffee by DaveLawler

Doing anything amazing turns out to be really hard. Incredibly...

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:13:46 -0500

Doing anything amazing turns out to be really hard. Incredibly hard. In the startup world sometimes we thought there were instant successes when people hacked together a website and the next day they had millions of users. There are no instant successes. Good products take time to build. We have to fight for every user. When we see that a user deleted our app it seems like the end of the world. Basically when you’re building something at any moment you can be really close to giving up.

The question is how many times should you really try before you call it quits?

"Student voice is important but it is essential that if we ask them to take the time to share their..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:27:20 -0500

“Student voice is important but it is essential that if we ask them to take the time to share their thoughts, that we also show progress in what they have asked.”

- 10 Expectations From Students

1956 short film on how to take a test. Has much changed?

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:24 -0500

1956 short film on how to take a test. Has much changed?

From Passive Viewing to Active Learning There’s a big...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:40:15 -0500

From Passive Viewing to Active Learning

There’s a big difference between watching a video and learning something from it. Videos are great for presenting visual information and emotional appeals, but not particularly effective at diving below the surface of non-visual theoretical or abstract topics or for driving critical thinking. What’s more, any video presented in class must compete for attention and memory with the five-plus hours the typical student spends outside of class watching television programs, movies, and other onscreen entertainment. (Nielsen, 2013)

To help increase the educational effectiveness of an online course video, consider applying one or more of the following active learning strategies…

image via flickr:CC | Poetprince