From Questions to Concepts: Interactive Teaching in Physics — by Physics Professor Eric Mazur at Harvard

How can you engage your students and be sure they are learning the conceptual foundations of a lecture course? In From Questions to Concepts, Harvard University Professor Eric Mazur introduces Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time teaching — two innovative techniques for lectures that use in-class discussion and immediate feedback to improve student learning. Using these techniques in his innovative undergraduate physics course, Mazur demonstrates how lectures and active learning can be successfully combined. This video is also available as part of another DVD, Interactive Teaching, which contains advice on using peer instruction and just-in-time teaching to promote better learning. For more videos on teaching, visit http://bokcenter.harvard.edu

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative: Seeking Evidence of Impact

From http://www.educause.edu/ELI/EDUCAUSELearningInitiative/SeekingEvidenceofImpact/206622

As the pace of technology change continues unabated, institutions are faced with numerous decisions and choices with respect to support for teaching and learning. With many options and constrained budgets, faculty and administrators must make careful decisions about what practices to adopt and about where to invest their time, effort, and fiscal resources. As critical as these decisions are, the information available about the impact of these innovations is often scarce, uneven, or both. What evidence do we have that these changes and innovation are having the impact we hope for?

What are the current effective practices that would enable us to collect that evidence? With the advent of Web 2.0, the themes of collaboration, participation, and openness have greatly changed the teaching and learning landscape. In light of these changes, what new methods for collecting evidence of impact might need to be developed?

Established practices and good data have made inroads in these areas. Often, however, they are scattered, disconnected, and at times in competition, making it challenging for the teaching and learning community to discover and compare their merits. Bringing these practices together and encouraging the invention of new ones will enable more institutions to measure impacts and produce data, providing a richer, evidence-based picture of the teaching and learning landscape on both the national and international level. The ELI announces a program intended to bring the teaching and learning community into a discussion about ways of gathering evidence of the impact of our innovations and current practices.

We hope to bring all types of higher education institutions and professional associations into a conversation on this theme. We envision an inclusive discussion that includes faculty members, instructional support professionals, librarians, students, and research experts in a collaborative exchange of insights and ideas.

Join us as we

  • Catalyze new collaborations to advance evidence-based applications of learning innovation to benefit higher education practices
  • Initiate a collective exploration that will serve to reinvigorate the community’s enthusiasm for and dedication to the task of identifying evidence of impact
  • Enable participants to become (re)acquainted with a variety of current effective practices, so they can make appropriate choices about which ones to adopt locally
  • Encourage the teaching and learning community to explore and discover options for new ways of gathering evidence
  • Inaugurate ongoing dialogues, projects, and collaborations that help to enable institutions to effectively gather and share evidence of impact
As the pace of technology change continues unabated, institutions are faced with numerous decisions and choices with respect to support for teaching and learning. With many options and constrained budgets, faculty and administrators must make careful decisions about what practices to adopt and about where to invest their time, effort, and fiscal resources. As critical as these decisions are, the information available about the impact of these innovations is often scarce, uneven, or both. What evidence do we have that these changes and innovation are having the impact we hope for?What are the current effective practices that would enable us to collect that evidence? With the advent of Web 2.0, the themes of collaboration, participation, and openness have greatly changed the teaching and learning landscape. In light of these changes, what new methods for collecting evidence of impact might need to be developed?

Established practices and good data have made inroads in these areas. Often, however, they are scattered, disconnected, and at times in competition, making it challenging for the teaching and learning community to discover and compare their merits. Bringing these practices together and encouraging the invention of new ones will enable more institutions to measure impacts and produce data, providing a richer, evidence-based picture of the teaching and learning landscape on both the national and international level. The ELI announces a program intended to bring the teaching and learning community into a discussion about ways of gathering evidence of the impact of our innovations and current practices.

We hope to bring all types of higher education institutions and professional associations into a conversation on this theme. We envision an inclusive discussion that includes faculty members, instructional support professionals, librarians, students, and research experts in a collaborative exchange of insights and ideas.

Join us as we

  • Catalyze new collaborations to advance evidence-based applications of learning innovation to benefit higher education practices
  • Initiate a collective exploration that will serve to reinvigorate the community’s enthusiasm for and dedication to the task of identifying evidence of impact
  • Enable participants to become (re)acquainted with a variety of current effective practices, so they can make appropriate choices about which ones to adopt locally
  • Encourage the teaching and learning community to explore and discover options for new ways of gathering evidence
  • Inaugurate ongoing dialogues, projects, and collaborations that help to enable institutions to effectively gather and share evidence of impact

Organizing your teaching materials — from The Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog

The future of colleges and universities -- from the spring of 2010 by futurist Thomas Frey

From Spring 2010

From DSC:

If you are even remotely connected to higher education, then you *need* to read this one!


Most certainly, not everything that Thomas Frey says will take place…but I’ll bet you he’s right on a number of accounts. Whether he’s right or not, the potential scenarios he brings up ought to give us pause to reflect on ways to respond to these situations…on ways to spot and take advantage of the various opportunities that arise (which will only happen to those organizations who are alert and looking for them).


22 books for beginner Instructional Designers –from The Upside Learning Solutions Blog by Amit Garg

“Separating teaching from learning is like separating a breeze from the wind.”

Darren Kuropatwa via November Learning guest blogger Lorraine Orenchuk

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From DSC:
For those of you involved with creating learning labs, smart classrooms, group study areas, etc. — or for those who want to enable more efficient group collaboration within your classrooms — you need to check out Steelcase’s Media:Scape product line.

One of the pieces of this configuration that I love is that they have created an easy-to-use interface in a puck-like device. What I want to see happen is for students to pull up to a movable/reconfigurable table, connect their device, and click the puck to “play” their media for the class (without interrupting the flow of the class).

Also, one monitor on the “totem” can be used for one set of information/data — or even a remote speaker via videoconferencing for example — and the other monitor can be used for someone else’s data/desktop.

Here are some images for you:

Also see the Media:Scape ad/video:

This product line is also available through Custer Workplace Interiors.

Custer Workplace Interiors

Teaching with Digital Video — from ISTE by Lynn Bell and Dr. Glen L. Bull

Teaching with Digital Video

With digital video, your students can:

Watch a demonstration of the speed of sound
Analyze classmates’ poetry performances
Create videos that document cultural differences

And the best part is that it’s engaging. Your students are most likely already watching, creating, uploading, and sharing digital video in their spare time, so why not incorporate this tool they already enjoy in the classroom?

Bull and Bell bring together lesson plans, ideas, and resources aligned with the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) and content-area standards so that you can use digital video in the classroom effectively. The book also includes information on acquiring, creating, and communicating with digital video.

Learn more about this book and topic: listen to an interview with the editors Glen L. Bull and Lynn Bell on ISTE Casts.

www.iste.org/digvid

Also relevant here:

A Top Ten List for Successful Online Courses — Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT)

Abstract
Many of us have been teaching online courses for several years. In that time we have learned what works and what doesn’t from a mix of hands-on-experience, fellow online faculty, platform specific training, and exposure to pedagogical research. While training and research have their value, we learned the most about preparing an effective online course from personal experience and working with our peers. When asked to prepare a presentation for new online faculty we sat down and pooled our knowledge with respect to course design and course management. The result of this collaborative session was a list of pragmatic practices required for a successful online course. While the list could be longer, and certainly doesn’t include all our favorite practices, we believe we have included those practices that are the key to success.

CFTL releases Ready to Succeed in the Classroom and Grappling with the Gaps

The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning today released two reports: Grappling with the Gaps and Ready to Succeed in the Classroom. The Center’s work in this area is part of the broader Ready to Succeed Initiative funded by the Stuart Foundation, which focuses on improving educational outcomes for children and youth in the foster care system (emphasis DSC).

Grappling with the Gaps identifies current gaps in the research on the education of children and youth in foster care based on interviews with twelve experts in education and child welfare from across the nation.

Ready to Succeed in the Classroom includes a suite of documents that brings forward the voices of classroom teachers. Through a series of discussion groups held by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, experienced teachers shared their ideas, advice, strategies, and recommendations for how to improve the educational outcomes for these students. The publications provide practical advice and ideas for classroom teachers, school and district administrators, and community members.

For example, experienced teachers, who have had children and youth in their classrooms who are in the foster care system, share their beliefs that it is important to keep expectations high and make them absolutely clear and consistent, whether they are about learning, respect, classroom behaviors, effort, or anything else. Although teachers expressed a great deal of compassion and sympathy for their students in the foster care system, they also felt that lowering or altering expectations for these students constituted a profound disservice to them. “I tell them the past doesn’t have to shape the future,” one teacher explained.

Ready to Succeed in the Classroom and Grappling with the Gaps are now available for free download at our Website: http://www.cftl.org/whatsnew.php

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Public School 69 teachers the first in NY to experience a new concept in K-12 education: the digital teaching platform — from eSchoolNews.com

Dallas, Texas — June 23, 2010 — Public School 69 – The New Vision School, an 87-year-old school in the Bronx surrounded by single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings, has plenty of experience with technology. But this month the school catapulted to the forefront of New York’s educational technology cutting edge as the first public school in the state to introduce its teachers to a new concept emerging in K-12 education: the digital teaching platform.

This June, 12 teachers from P.S. 69 participated in a comprehensive professional development program to introduce the Time To Know digital teaching platform to their fourth and fifth grades classes this fall. Time To Know is a complete, interactive curriculum system designed specifically for today’s one-to-one computing classrooms. The digital teaching platform empowers teachers to easily manage instruction, individualize learning, assess mastery in real time, and provide immediate feedback to students. Designed around guided constructivist principles, Time To Know’s digital comprehensive curriculum helps students build 21st century skills, including problem-solving skills, higher order thinking, and cooperative learning to prepare them for high stakes tests and the future.

“When your school test scores are in the mid-90s, it’s difficult to maintain and improve upon that level of performance. But when I saw Time To Know, I knew this was a tool to bring my school to the next level. A key benefit of the program is that it allow teachers’ individual personalities and teaching styles to shine,” said Cohen. “My teachers are thrilled with the professional development they’ve received. The Time To Know staff members are very knowledgeable about the standards for New York City and for the state, and how to meaningfully connect the standards with curriculum and assessment to improve student achievement.”

More…

52 habits of highly effective teachers

52 habits of highly effective teachers — from onlineuniversities.com

Topical areas include:

  • Habits for Communicating
  • Habits for Building Relationships
  • Habits for Classroom Management
  • Habits for Improving Yourself
  • Habits for Expanding Your Community


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Highlights from the New Media Consortium’s Summer 2010 Conference — by Alan Levine

New Media Consortium's Summer 2010 Conference in Anaheim

Whether you were there or not, below you will find our collection of media and highlights from the 2010 Summer Conference, hosted by the University of Southern California.

Top 100 technology blogs for teachers — from onlinedegrees.org

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