Advice for Teachers New to Twitter

Liz Davis is the Director of Academic Tech at Belmont Hill School, an independent school outside of Boston. She blogs about the power of technology in transforming learning. I subscribe to her blog and follow her on twitter, and you can, too. Here is a link to her blog and to her twitter profile.

This particular recent post gives advice to teachers that are new to Twitter. It includes the basics like using your real name and a real photo of yourself, filling out your profile info, and what and how often to share. She also lists a number of good people to add to your network if you are a teacher.

Liz is a good teacher to follow. She shares a lot and gets what teachers are interested in and need. Once you follow someone like Liz, look at whom she is following, and start following some of them. That is utilizing good people as a filter. This is how you build up a good and useful network.

9 Great Reasons Teachers Should Use Twitter

Katie Donald shared this blog post with me tonight. I tweeted it to my network, and I hope you will do the same with yours. I also condensed the 9 things, and posted a link to the orginal blog post by Laura Walker, a Modern Language teacher in a high school in the UK. About Laura.

Here is a great quote from the post:

“Following smart people on Twitter is like a mental shot of expresso!”

1. Together we are better.

2. Global or local: you choose

3. Self-awareness and reflective practice

4. Ideas and workshop sounding board

5. Newsroom and innovation showcase

6. Professional development and critical friends

7. Quality-assured searching

8. Communicate, communicate, communicate

9. Getting with the times has never been so easy.

I would add a 10th, because top 10 lists just rest better: It's fun!

I'll admit that it takes a little time to get your head around why you should invest the time and energy, and it takes a little time and work until you see any payback, but it can become a great source of encouragement, connection, and information for passionate professionals.

Thanks for passing along the info, Katie!

Follow MrsLWalker on Twitter.

9 Great Reason Teachers should Use Twitter original blog post

The Lubin Files: Annotate the web with Diigo. A Technology Review

Check out this website I found at lubinlib.typepad.com

I am liking Diigo. It has helped me learn to enjoy reading on the web. In fact, I am liking it so much that I transferred all my Delicious bookmarks, so my devotion is feeling pretty permanent at the moment. (That was rather Yogi Bera-ish!)

Posted via web from jamiereverb's posterous

Marc Prensky Bio

Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning, and Don't Bother Me Mom -- I'm Learning.

Prensky is also the founder and CEO of Games2train (whose clients include IBM, Nokia, Pfizer, the US Department of Defense and the LA and Florida Virtual Schools) and creator of the sites www.dodgamecommunity.com and www.socialimpactgames.com.

Prensky has created over 50 software games for learning, including the world's first fast-action videogame-based training tools and world-wide, multi-player, multi-team on-line competitions. He has also taught at all levels.

Prensky has been featured in articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and the BBC, and was named as one of training's top 10 "visionaries" by Training magazine. He holds graduate degrees from Yale (Teaching) and Harvard (MBA).

Marc Prensky on YouTube

This YouTube features Marc Prensky talking about handheld learning.

Read About Digital Learning

Forty years after Joan Ganz Cooney's landmark study stimulated the creation of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop has established a new center devoted to accelerating children's learning in a rapidly changing world. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will focus new attention on the challenges children face today, asking the 21st century equivalent of her original question, "How can emerging media help children learn?"

These studies are worth looking at:

Pockets of Potential -- Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence of how these devices can help revolutionize teaching and learning.

The Power of POW! Wham!: Children, Digital Media and Our Nation's Future -- this paper specifically deals with digital technologies and elementary school students.

Getting Over the Slump: Innovation Strategies to Promote Children's Learning -- this report deals with using media technologies to help 4th grade students get over the reading slump.

Engaging Digital Natives

In the 21st century, teaching is about "engaging digital natives." What this means is that we adults have a lot of learning and catching up to do compared to our students who were born into a digital age and seemingly with digital intuition.

Below is a comprehensive slideshare presentation that outlines the different aspects of "engaging digital natives."

Marc Prensky Articles

Marc Prensky has tons of articles posted on his website.
Our discussions are going to focus on these articles:

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants Part II
Backup Education?
Marc Prensky's Essential 21st Century Skills
The Role of Technology and Teaching in the Classroom

All of these articles can be downloaded and none are very long.

Digital Learners New Literacies

This video illustrates Curriculum 2.0

The iTouch for Learning

How can we use technology in learning everyday? You know the students would like it, so why not?

Just the Right Touch: Culbreth Students Show Off Their iTouch and its Capabilities

"About a dozen Culbreth faculty members also demonstrated how the iPod Touch is useful in their classrooms. Pre-algebra teacher Robert Bales showed how students can pull stats from a recent Carolina basketball game, for example, off of the ESPN application. Bales said the stats are a fun and exciting way to learn about important math fundamentals like fractions, decimals and percentages.

Ann Collins said students in the Culbreth writing center used their iPods to look up YouTube videos of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts swearing in President Obama as part of a discussion on the finer points of public speaking."

Trends in Technology

The link below is to the 6th Horizon Report which is published annually highlighting and describing the emerging technologies likely to have a great impact on teaching, learning, research, and creative expression in learning environments. This report is the culmination of a long-term research collaboration between the New Media Consortium and EDUCASE Learning Initiative.

Some of the trends discussed in detail are:

Mobile everything
Cloud Computing
Geo-everything
The Personal Web
Gaming for learning
Cell phones in learning

Reading this report gives a great overview of what is on the horizon in technological advancement.

The 2009 Horizon Report

Horizon Report K-12 Edition

Blooms Taxonomy 3.0

Blooms has been through versions that missed, namely 2.0. But, you can read about Bloom's taxanomy updated for the digial age here:

Blooms 3.0 - large downloadable .pdf

About Jenifer Fox

Jenifer Fox, author of Your Child's Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them will speak at Grace-St. Luke's Episcopal School on Tuesday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m. in the church sanctuary on the corner of Peabody and Belvedere. Jenifer Fox was the President of Purnell School, an independent, girls boarding high school in New Jersey until this fall when she became the full-time director of The Strengths Movement. Passionately written, Your Child's Strengths proposes a strengths-based philosophy that provides the tools to prepare kids for their future in a world that demands greater adaptability and creative thinking than ever before. Fox draws on both her research and her experience as Head of School to show parents and teachers how to identify a child's strength based on their actions, how to encourage those strengths once you have identified them, and how to help kids implement the strengths they reveal. Fox's strengths curriculum, The Affinities Program, grows out of a belief that building on students' strengths is the best way to help them grow into the people they were meant to become. The program provides specific and engaging exercises and activities to help young people discover their strengths and use them to carve out a path toward a meaningful future.

Jenifer Fox wrote and implemented The Affinities Program, the first four year strengths-based high school curriculum, at Purnell School. The Affinities Program won a Leading Edge Award in 2004 from the National Association of Independent Schools. In 2007, Jenifer Fox, the Purnell School and The Affinities Program were featured in PBS Special "Go Put Your Strengths to Work" with Marcus Buckingham. Fox, Buckingham and Purnell School were featured on The Today Show in April, 2007. Fox earned a B.S. in Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. in English from Middlebury College and an M. Ed. in School Administration from Harvard University.

Grace-St. Luke's is excited to host Jenifer Fox because her perspective that education should focus on developing each child's strengths and abilities to their fullest potential is a long held belief and school practice. Teachers and school staff are leading the way at Grace-St. Luke's focus on strengths awareness and self understanding by assessing each of their strengths using Tom Rath's book, Strengths 2.0, determining their individual learning styles, which correlate to teaching styles, and by engaging in a multiple day school workshop on Myers-Briggs personality types and conscious communication. Being dedicated to educating children for their future, not our pasts, is driving Grace-St. Luke's initiative to align is programming, organizational learning, and curricular emphasis with the demands of the 21st century culture and marketplace.

Jenifer Fox in Independent School magazine

There are certain things that educators know, and that is why parents and society entrust them to educate children. One of those things is how children best learn.With rapid advances in technology, there have been rapid and paradigm-shifting streams of new information about how children learn and this creates a big challenge for classroom teachers and schools as they strive to know best how children learn. The rub: how to keep up with the most recent and most helpful information. One of the universal classroom tensions that this situation has created is this, as Jenifer Fox illustrates it:

"Tutoring vs. a Developmental Approach to Learning
If, as educators, we understand how children learn, we know that conceptual structures are formed in sequences and these sequences must be achieved through scaffolding of simple understandings to more complex ones. A variety of factors affect these essential linkages and, if one link is weak, each newly added concept becomes confusing to a child...Many teachers and parents believe that one-on-one tutoring works because kids perform better when the focus is only on one child. Or they believe that a child doesn't understand because the child takes longer to learn and, if the tutor can simply take more time with the student, he or she will grasp the concepts. Both assumptions may be true, but the problem is that, most often, tutoring is practiced as if they are always true. When there is a developmental weakness in a child's conceptual understanding, tutoring will not work unless the tutor understands both where the weakness in the scaffolding occurs, and how to ameliorate understanding. Unless tutoring takes a developmental approach, students will not understand the problems simply because the tutor is working one-on-one or taking more time. "

Learning - whose problem is it? This is one of the most crucial debates infusing education circles across the country right now in both the public and private school arenas: Are teachers responsible for teaching or for student learning, or both?

I am not suggesting that Jenifer Fox and The Strengths Movement is the answer, but without a doubt, Fox is weighing in on the paradigm shift and is one of the leading voices in the conversation.

What do you think?

Read full article:
Questioning The Tutoring Paradigm by Jenifer Fox, Independent School Summer 2008

Jenifer Fox Videos and Podcasts

You can listen and hear Jenifer Fox talk about the Strengths Movement here:

The Strengths Movement Videos and Audio

Five Minds For The Future

Howard Gardner's newest book (2007), Five Minds for the Future, outlines the specific cognitive abilities that will be sought and cultivated by business leaders in the years ahead.

The five types of mind that Gardner believes will be most needed in the future are:

The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.

The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.

The Creating Mind: the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.

The Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.

The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.

In the sub-category of each of these minds, Gardner outlines the skills and intellectual approaches that adults will need to tap in order to function successfully in the 21st century. Unlike Tony Wagner, who enters the 21st century skills conversation with a defined list of the skills schools need to add to their programming, Gardner describes the end-product of education in these minds, suggesting that one specialize in a particular mindset.

How are we creating these types of minds in our students?

Video Intro of Gardner

This is a good video about the impact of the theory of multiple intelligence in context of the other thinkers in the field of measuring IQ.

Five Minds Excerpts

Howard Gardner is suggesting that the Five Minds that he describes increase one's likelihood of success in fulfillment in a hyper-competitive, hyper-connected world where information overload is almost a permanent state of being for many. His newest books is an extension, or is at least congruent, with his theory of Multiple Intelligences in that no one person is realistically expected to be competent at all aptitudes.

Below are mini-descriptions of each mind or aptitude in Gardner's own words:

"The disciplined mind has mastered at least one way of thinking. Without at least one discipline...the individual is destined to march to someone else's tune." Key to understanding this mindset is to understand the difference between learning a discipline versus learning subject matter. Learning a discipline means that you learn to think in a trained way like every other person working in that discipline. Scientists are a good example. Scientists observe the world, develop hypotheses and theories, design experiments etc. There are a myriad of subject areas in science. Subject matter would be the facts, formulas, and historical figures etc. within a certain subject ares. A disciplined mind is a developed and fluid critical thinking framework that is developed.

"The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also other people. The capacity to synthesize becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates."

"The creating mind breaks new ground. It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers. In doing so, the creating minds seeks to remain at least one step ahead of computers."

"The respectful mind notes and welcomes differences among human individuals and between human groups [cultures]...In a world where we are all interlinked, in-tolerance or disrespect is no longer a viable option."

"The ethical mind conceptualizes how workers can serve purposes beyond self-interest. The ethical minds acts on the basis of analysis [ethical literacy]." Cultural and religious values would play an important part in developing the ethical mind, as well as domains such as philosophy and theology.

Podcast - Five Minds

Here is the link to Harvard Business Review Ideacast with Howard Gardner"

HBR Ideacast #37: Five Minds for the Future (13:48)

Five Minds for the Future: This week, IdeaCast Producer Steve Singer talks with Howard Gardner, author of the new Harvard Business School Press book Five Minds for the Future. We live in a time of vast changes, and those changes, says Gardner, call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In our HBR IdeaCast interview, Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead, and helps us understand how we can cultivate them.

Another Gardner Podcast

Here is another podcast option:

Austalian Institute of Company Directors Five Minds For The Future (29:49)

This interview focuses on the synthesizing brain as it relates to the work that a board member is called to do.

How Children Learn

This interview talk specifically about The Disciplined Mind.

Howard Gardner: How Children Learn on CNBC

Howard Gardner and Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner is an American psychologist who is based at Harvard University and is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences. The categories of intelligence that Gardner has quantified are: 1) bodily-kinesthetic 2) interpersonal 3) verbal-linguistic 4) logical-mathematical 5) naturalistic 6) intrapersonal 7) visual-spatial 8) musical. His theory was laid out in the 1983 book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

The theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Gardner in 1983. His motivation was to more accurately define the concept of intelligence. His theory argues that intelligence, as it is traditionally defined, does not sufficiently encompass the wide variety of abilities humans display. In his conception, a child who masters multiplication easily is not necessarily more intelligent overall than a child who struggles to do so. The second child may be stronger in another kind of intelligence, and therefore may best learn the given material through a different approach, may excel in a field outside of mathematics. The theory suggests that, rather than relying on a uniform or one-size-fits-all curriculum, schools should offer "individual-centered education" with curriculum tailored to the needs of each child.

Theory of Multiple Intelligence wiki

Howard Garner's homepage

Streamlining Email

eNews recently published a really good article that provides helpful tips to decrease the amount of email that one manages each day. The article, "Buried in Email? Try These Six Tips to Dig Out," is linked here. Here are the recommended tips:


1. Don't check email first thing when you first start work. Do the most pressing thing of the day before you allow yourself to be distracted by email which tends to become a black hole. Email can give one the false feeling that you are actually getting things done when you are actually losing needed time.

2. Check email in batches instead of all day long as it is received. The author uses the analogy of doing laundry: you won't do a whole load for one pair of dirty socks, would you?

3. Minimize exchanges. This means learning to propose actions and alternative actions so that meetings can be scheduled and plans made with more efficiency. "I can meet at time a, b, or c. Let me know which is good for you and I will mark it on my calendar."

4. Limit sending email. Sending less means receiving less, and shorter emails generate shorter responses. (Be careful with this one and really think about the purpose of the email and the audience. Emails for logistics can be short and sweet. The trick is to consider if other situations are email-appropriate or phone call-worthy.) Also, before sending mass emails, consider if you have permission to use other people's time and mental space with the hottest chain letter or newest poem of advice.

5. Take it to zero. This sounds radical but the author suggests dumping your whole inbox and starting over if it gets too cumbersome. A quick email to your address book stating what you have done and asking people to resend anything pending or important would be in order.

6. Use other forms of communication. There are so many to choose from and now it is a true consideration to choose wisely the most appropriate form of communication.

GSL Speaker Top Ten Most Influential Technologist

"Women who have succeeded in technology deserve recognition: They are an inspiration for everyone, demonstrating what can be achieved through creativity and hard work."

This is the first line in a recent article in Fast Company magazine entitled, "The Most Influential Women in Technology." Making the list of the top ten most influential women in technology is Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, who spoke at GSL last fall. Goodstein blogs at YPulse which provides a glimpse of Gen Y and their online habits and preferences.

If you are wondering how to use texting, Facebook, music and other culturally relevant ways to connect with your students, YPulse would be a good place to spend some time.

I Could Have Been A Contender

The article from The Boston Globe linked below illustrates what a fixed mindset looks like among high school students. The excuses become grander and actual self-sabotaging behavior becomes more rampant and dangerous. Learners who fail to study or exhibit other self-sabotaging behaviors may be attempting to protect their ego by lowering expectations. These behaviors are not only more common in males, but they may also spark a vicious circle in that learners who have a legitimate excuse for a poor performance on one exam are less motivated to study for future tests. "The handicap allowed them to say, 'All things considered, I actually did pretty well,'" said German psychologist Sean McCrea. "And there's no drive to get better."

After all, borrowing the words from Marlon Brandon, isn't it easier to not try at all, thus protecting your ego, and just settle regretfully for "I could have been a contender."

So, why is this related to middle, elementary, or preschool teachers? Because you and parents who are knowledgeable about the difference between a fixed and growth mindset can help students learn to take risks, learn to fail, learn a sense of efficacy (belief that hard work pays off), and develop a sense of resilence. Why you? Because it is easier to retrain in earlier years; high school is almost too late. Why you? Because learning to be a successful student involves developing a growth mindset and a curiosity and desire to learn.

Some Protect The Ego By Working On Excuses Early by Benedict Carey

The Power (and Peril) of Praise: How Not to Talk to Your Kids by Po Bronson