"The study gave a large sample of kids the "Gordon Diagnostic System" GDS test of sustained concentration ability. This dates to the 80s and it consists of a box, with a button, and a display with three digits. There are three different tasks but the main one is a sustained attention test. The goal is to watch a series of numbers and quickly press the button whenever a "1" is followed by a "9". Easy... but it takes concentration to do well.
Over the period of 2000-2006, the researchers gave the GDS to 445 healthy American kids, not diagnosed with any learning or behavioural disorder and not taking medication. They compared their scores to the standardized norms - which were based on a sample of American kids back in 1983.
The results showed that today's kids scored pretty much the same, on average, as the 1983 kids. The average age-standardized scores were extremely close to the 1983 means, across the board. Children diagnosed with ADHD, as expected, scored much worse. Oddly, kids with an Autism Spectrum Disorder did just as badly as the ADHD ones."
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| Transit trolley where the G clamps holding it together form handles |
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| Rear projection screens |
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| Bar clamps with eyelets used to hang displays from. |
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| Modified clothes rack becomes a 'z rack' or mobile whiteboard / screen /divider. |
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| Hanging screens could be combined with suction cups/plungers to be affixed to walls/windows etc. |
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| Portable 'scoop stool' screen |
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| T-walls for portable display space. |
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| T walls in different configurations can create many different spaces. |
| Finding: | Translation: |
| 1. Quality teaching is focused on raising student achievement (including social outcomes), and facilitates high standards of student outcomes for diverse learners | Teaching should be about learning and achievement. Set and maintain high expectations of what students are capable of. |
| 2. Pedagogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities | Learning is a social activity and we learn best when in a caring community. Communities give care and support to learners. |
| 3. Effective links are created between school cultural contexts and other cultural contexts in which students are socialised to facilitate learning | Acknowledge who students are and let them bring this to the classroom. Use it for learning. |
| 4. Quality teaching is responsive to student learning processes | Know how learning occurs in the brain, but also know that every brain is different. Account for this. |
| 5. Opportunity to learn is effective and sufficient | Give learning time to occur. Use the students' timeframe, not yours. |
| 6. Multiple task contexts support learning cycles | Use a range of different approaches and arrangements: theory & practical; abstract & real world; individual, group and whole class. |
| 7. Curriculum goals, resources including ICT usage, task design and teaching are effectively aligned | Everything in the organisation should be geared towards giving teachers and students what they need to learn. |
| 8. Pedagogy scaffolds and provides appropriate feedback on students' task engagement | Give specific, effective, appropriate feedback that helps students to learn better. |
| 9. Pedagogy promotes learning orientations, student self-regulation, metacognitive strategies and thoughtful student discourse | Teaching should encourage students not only to learn, but to become better learners. |
| 10. Teachers and students engage constructively in goal-oriented assessment | Teachers and students should all what is being assessed and how it will be assessed. Assessment should impact positively on student motivation. |
"Quality teaching is identified as a key influence on high quality outcomes for diverse students. The evidence reveals that up to 59% of variance in student performance is attributable to differences between teachers and classes, while up to almost 21%, but generally less, is attributable to school level variables."
"Lightworks is the fastest, most accessible and focused NLE in the industry, because it is based on the simple idea that the editor, not the computer industry, knows what’s best. The latest release of Lightworks is based on the cumulative knowledge from twenty years of top-flight editing.
"Novacut is not just a video editor, it's a revolution. An open source, collaborative, cloud-enabled platform that is created by artists for artists. The ambitiousness of the project, the passion of it's team and their commitment to the filmmaking community inspires me. They are thinking about the entire pre- to post-production pipeline and designing tools that empower storytellers and support the creative process from the ground up. If this is the future of filmmaking, sign me up!"http://blog.novacut.com/
"This is indeed the challenge – how we move from the peripheral interest in OERs, driven mostly by individual practitioners at the edges of their 'day jobs', to where there is wider acceptance and adoption of OERs as a core part of an institutional approach to the organisation and management of resources to support learning"
"We all have books we love so much, we'd like to give them to the world. We want to share them, but also reward their creators. With digital books, it can be hard to do both. Unglue.it offers a win-win solution: Crowdfunding. We run pledge campaigns for books; you chip in. When, together, we've reached the goal, we'll reward the book's creators and issue an unglued ebook. Creative Commons licensing means everyone, everywhere can read and share the unglued book - freely and legally. You've given your favorite book to the world."If you could gift one book to the world, what would it be? Head over to https://unglue.it/ to see what others have come up with.
"So, day 3 of the year. 180 kids, 90 new, 90 veterans. Establishment phase. Here's the premise: you have crashlanded on a desert island. There are no teachers. How on earth, logistically, did [these teachers] manage this? Well you should ask them on Twitter. From what I gather and observed (I spent about 30 minutes of the day in attendance in person): the 6 teachers hid outside the open space, observing the kids via video links and open windows. They tweeted clues in via a large twitter screen that acted as a well of knowledge. They used a P.A. system to phone-in further clues. They had established rules: students must remain within 2 metres of their team. Students must ignore 'spies' (adults who entered the space, dressed in costumes). It was pretty much pure game-based-learning. Simulation. Here's the environment we've curated, now prove yourselves. And LO AND BEHOLD, they did! "
' "Education 2.0 [...] we have not experimented enough with [...] out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit [...] traditional (often broken) ideas into the 'computerized' model."Devlin's critique bring in Sal Khan and the flipped classroom and makes some good, balanced points about it:
"Which might sound fine if this statement were not preceded by his explicit mention of Khan Academy as one of the new experiments. For KA is precisely a traditional approach transported onto the Web, namely one-to-one instruction, sitting side-by-side with the teacher. Is KA valuable? Sure it is? But "all" Sal Khan has done is take the traditional textbook instruction and put it up on YouTube."Devlin's great point about the Khan Academy (which a lot of people miss) is..
"what resources like Khan Academy provide is instruction, not teaching/learning. Anyone who has been lucky enough to experience good teaching will know the difference"He goes on to say:
"Khan is a good instructor -- he explains well in a highly non-threatening, "I am your friend" way. That's not an easy thing to achieve when the entire information channel consists of his voice and a screen-trace of what his hand writes on a tablet screen."...
"Watching videos of people playing golf will surely help you learn to play, but you won't get very far without going out on the fairway, frequently, and doing so with a good coach who can watch what you do and correct your inevitable errors. Not once but many times, over a long haul."
A book sprint “brings together a group to produce a book in 3-5 days. There is no pre-production and the group is guided by a facilitator from zero to published book. The books produced are high quality content and are made available immediately at the end of the sprint via print-on-demand services and e-book formats.” The idea of a “sprint” originates in the coding world, where a group of developers work in a concerted way over a short, intense period to produce some new code. Originally they were face-to-face events, often held in conjunction with a conference or some other gathering, but in the last few years I have seen them sprout up as online events, both tightly and loosely coordinated. Similarly, while Book sprints began as face to face efforts, they too are starting to migrate into online-only events.I like the idea of a book sprint a lot, and will see if I can arrange something along these lines for later in the year.
"Do you have a plan that you stick with, no matter what? Do you have a plan at all? Do you have a plan that you're prepared to give up totally when a student proposes something, anything, interesting? Are you patient, listening to what's going on, allowing yourself to be pulled, and slick enough (skilled enough?) to react and create something magical out of your box to make a lesson sing?"
How much genuine value is there in fancy educational electronics? Listen to what the experts say.
"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," says Richard E. Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC. "Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."
Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s, "instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case."
"Google Takeout supports a new service: Google Docs. Now you can use the same interface to batch export your documents." From http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/two-ways-to-export-your-google-docs.htmlIt might be that Google's open approach to data has 'encouraged' Facebook to offer users the ability to download their information.
"A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open-source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard; Johns Hopkins; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.
"With the system having been designed and built to power 500 XO laptops it was - and very likely still is - the world's largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment."
The principles of the Vittra School revolve around the breakdown of physical and metaphorical class divisions as a fundamental step to promoting intellectual curiosity, self-confidence, and communally responsible behavior. Therefore, in Vittra’s custom-built Stockholm location, spaces are only loosely defined by permeable borders and large, abstract landmarks. As the architects explained, “instead of classical divisions with chairs and tables, a giant iceberg for example serves as cinema, platform, and room for relaxation, and sets the frame for many different types of learning,” while “flexible laboratories make it possible to work hands-on with themes and projects.”
