Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Teachers on Pinterest – A Great Resource for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/10/teachers-on-pinterest-great-resource.html
http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/11/excellent-videos-explaining-byod-for.html
Bring Your Own Device/Technology is an initiative meant to increase students learning opportunities through technology.
10 Excellent platforms to create your class website
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/coding-new-foreign-language-requirement-helen-mowers
In terms of cognitive advantages, learning a system of signs, symbols and rules used to communicate — that is, language study — improves thinking by challenging the brain to recognize, negotiate meaning and master different language patterns. Coding does the same thing. Students who speak English and Mandarin are better multitaskers because they’re used to switching between language structures. Coding, likewise, involves understanding and working within structures.
Foreign language instruction today emphasizes practical communication — what students can do with the language. Similarly, coding is practical, empowering and critical to the daily life of everyone living in the 21st century.
Programming is the global language, more common than spoken languages like English, Chinese or Spanish.
5 Reasons Why You Should Teach Kids to Code ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/10/5-reasons-why-you-should-teach-kids-to.html
http://www.middleweb.com/11559/learning-coding-in-writing-class/
http://www.educationdive.com/news/should-coding-replace-foreign-language-requirements/361398/
Washington state and Kentucky have both proposed legislation that mirrors this trend, with Washington asking that students be allowed to count two years of computer science courses as two years of foreign language studies.
In an October post, Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss wrote that coding is something like “cursive 2.0” — a practice that will soon become compulsory in schools across the nation.
Gardner now teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the author of numerous books on intelligence and creativity. His new book ”The App Generation,” co-authored with Katie Davis, explains how life for young people today is different than before the dawn of the digital age, and will be published on Oct. 22 by Yale University Press.
Gardner’s theory initially listed seven intelligences which work together: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal; he later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence and says there may be a few more.
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Excerpts from the blog entries under the article
Emily Sedlock
GRoo
1) Learning
The basis:
– how how human capacities are represented in the brain,
Multiple Intelligences:
– a number of relatively independent mental faculties
– a number of relatively autonomous computers—[that compute] … information
A strong intelligence:
– an area where the person has considerable computational power
What matters
– the power of the mental computer, the intelligence, that acts upon that sensory information, once picked up
So “learning” = us[ing … (different) cognitive faculties?
Q1: Is that ok to assume and say?
Q2: What of “dimensions” – cognitive processing (higher order thinking) and knowledge (concrete to abstract) and sense of self, or affect[ive]?
2) Teaching
– Individualize your teaching
– Pluralize your teaching. Teach important materials in several ways, …reach students who learn in different ways… [present] materials in various ways