Archive of ‘student-centered learning’ category
3 Tips for Managing Phone Use in Class
Setting cell phone expectations early is key to accessing the learning potential of these devices and minimizing the distraction factor.
Liz Kolb September 11, 2017
Ask your students questions such as:
- What do you like to do on your cell phone and why? (If they don’t have one, what would they like to do?)
- What are the most popular apps and websites you use?
- What do you think are inappropriate ways that cell phones have been used?
- What is poor cell phone etiquette? Why?
- How can cell phones help you learn?
- How can cell phones distract from your learning?
- How do you feel about your cell phone and the activities you do on your phone?
- What should teachers know about your cell phone use that you worry we do not understand?
- Do you know how to use your cell phone to gather information, to collaborate on academic projects, to evaluate websites?
- How can we work together to create a positive mobile mental health?
Using a Stoplight Management Approach
Post a red button on the classroom door: the cell phone parking lot.
Post a yellow button on the classroom door: Students know their cell phones should be on silent (vibrate) and placed face down in the upper right-hand corner of their desk. They will be using them in class, but not the whole time.
Post a green button on the classroom door: Students know they should have their phones turned on (either silenced or set on vibrate) and placed face up in ready position to use throughout the class.
Establishing a Class Contract
Ask your students to help you develop social norms for what is and is not appropriate cell phone use during green and yellow button times. Should they be allowed to go on their social media networks during class? Why or why not?
Ask them to brainstorm consequences and write them into a class contract.
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more on the use of smart phones in the classroom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=phone+classroom
Designing and Developing Digital Credentials
Part 1: September 13, 2017 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 2: September 19, 2017 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 3: September 28, 2017 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
https://events.educause.edu/eli/courses/2017/digging-into-badges-designing-and-developing-digital-credentials
Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning—even outside the classroom. As such, those not traditionally in the degree-granting realm—such as associations, online communities, and even employers—are now issuing “credit” for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging granular or discrete skills and competencies these programs explore, there’s much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.
Learning Objectives
During this ELI course, participants will:
- Explore core concepts that define digital badges, as well as the benefits and use in learning-related contexts
- Understand the underlying technical aspects of digital badges and how they relate to each other and the broader landscape for each learner and issuing organization
- Critically review and analyze examples of the adoption of digital credentials both inside and outside higher education
- Identify and isolate specific programs, courses, or other campus or online activities that would be meaningfully supported and acknowledged with digital badges or credentials
- Consider the benefit of each minted badge or system to the earner, issuer, and observer
- Develop a badge constellation or taxonomy for their own project
- Consider forms of assessment suitable for evaluating badge earning
- Learn about design considerations around the visual aspects of badges
- Create a badge-issuing plan
- Issue badges
NOTE: Participants will be asked to complete assignments in between the course segments that support the learning objectives stated above and will receive feedback and constructive critique from course facilitators on how to improve and shape their work.
Jonathan Finkelstein, CEO, Credly
Jonathan Finkelstein is founder and CEO of Credly, creator of the Open Credit framework, and founder of the open source BadgeOS project. Together these platforms have enabled thousands of organizations to recognize, reward, and market skills and achievement. Previously, he was founder of LearningTimes and co-founder of HorizonLive (acquired by Blackboard), helping mission-driven organizations serve millions of learners through online programs and platforms. Finkelstein is author of Learning in Real Time (Wiley), contributing author to The Digital Museum, co-author of a report for the U.S. Department of Education on the potential for digital badges, and a frequent speaker on digital credentials, open badges, and the future of learning and workforce development. Recent speaking engagements have included programs at The White House, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Smithsonian, EDUCAUSE, IMS Global, Lumina Foundation, ASAE, and the Federal Reserve. Finkelstein is involved in several open standards initiatives, such as the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Badge Alliance, American Council on Education (ACE) Stackable Credentials Framework Advisory Group, and the Credential Registry. He graduated with honors from Harvard.
Susan Manning, University of Wisconsin-Stout
In addition to helping Credly clients design credential systems in formal and informal settings, Susan Manning comes from the teaching world. Presently she teaches for the University of Wisconsin at Stout, including courses in instructional design, universal design for learning, and the use of games for learning. Manning was recognized by the Sloan Consortium with the prestigious 2013 Excellence in Online Teaching Award. She has worked with a range of academic institutions to develop competency-based programs that integrate digital badges. Several of her publications specifically speak to digital badge systems; other work is centered on technology tools and online education.
EDUC-441 Mobile Learning Instructional Design
(3 cr.)
Repeatable for Credit: No
Mobile learning research, trends, instructional design strategies for curriculum integration and professional development.
EDUC-452 Universal Design for Learning
(2 cr.)
Repeatable for Credit: No
Instructional design strategies that support a wide range of learner differences; create barrier-free learning by applying universal design concepts.
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more on badges in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=badges
Welcome to the Re-Imagining the First Year of College Project George L. Mehaffy
Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change
undertake innovations simultaneously in 4 “buckets”—1. Institutional Intentionality, 2. Curriculum, 3. Faculty and Staff, and 4. Students.
some examples of innovations in each area:
• Institutional Intentionality
* Administrative structures
* Budgeting
*Data and Data Analytics: Predictive analytics, use of data in scheduling and advising, etc.
* Collaborative, not individual. Creating opportunities for crowdsourcing, collective projects, etc.
* Creating a supporting environment for innovation * Building a culture of obligation
• Curriculum
* Personalization. Software that takes each student on a different journey
* Course Re-Design: Blended courses such as the ones we are working on. Interdisciplinary courses, gateway courses, etc.
* Pathways: Reduced choice, math alternatives, First Year Seminar, Orientation, Summer Bridge
* Degree maps
• Faculty/Staff:
* Incentives for teaching in the first year
* Research about first year outcomes
* Collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs
• Students
* Non-Cognitive Factors: belonging, mindset, etc.
* Advising: Professional, linked to data, intrusive, etc.
* Career Focus: purpose, ethnography of work, early field experiences
* Reduction in choices
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more on first year college experience in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=first+year
https://web.seesaw.me/
Seesaw saves time on organization and parent communication, makes formative assessment easy, and provides a safe place to teach 21st Century skills.
QR code connection, available across mobile devices
Alternatives:
Google Classroom https://classroom.google.com/
Quizzlet https://quizlet.com/
Showbie https://www.showbie.com
alternatives for student portfolios:
https://www.commonsense.org/education/blog/top-11-apps-and-websites-for-student-portfolios
https://www.commonsense.org/education/blog/edtech-quick-take-seesaw-vs-freshgrade
two popular digital-portfolio apps: Seesaw and FreshGrade.
See Saw digital learning journal.
See Saw digital learninurnal. https://www.symbalooedu.com/
Report: VR and AR to Double Each Year Through 2021
By Joshua Bolkan 08/07/17
https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/08/07/report-vr-and-ar-to-double-each-year-through-2021.aspx
a new forecast from International Data Corp. (IDC).
Canada will see the fastest growth, with a CAGR of 145.2 percent over the forecast period. Other leaders in terms of growth include Central and Eastern Europe at 133.5 percent, Western Europe at 121.2 percent and the U.S. at 120.5 percent.
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Leslie Fisher Thinks Augmented Reality First, Then VR in the Classroom
An interview with the former Apple K–12 systems engineer, who will participate in multiple sessions during ISTE.
By Richard Chang 05/12/17
https://thejournal.com/Articles/2017/05/12/Leslie-Fisher-Presents-at-Ed-Tech-Conferences-for-a-Living.aspx
THE Journal: What do you think about virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the classroom? Is the cost point for VR prohibitive?
In virtual reality, one of my favorite apps is CoSpaces. It allows anyone to design a 3D space, and then interact with it in virtual reality.
Virtual reality can be quite affordable with Google Cardboard. We can get into basic interaction in VR with Cardboard. There are 40 or 50 VR apps where you can simply use Cardboard and explore. Google Street View allows you to do virtual viewing of many different locations. That technology augments what the teacher is doing.
Most kids can’t afford to buy their own
Oculus headset. That price point is quite a bit higher. But we don’t need to have 30 kids using Oculus all of the time. Two or three might work
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more on VR and AR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
Speeding Up Your Podcasts Won’t Solve Your Problems
https://plus.google.com/+DanievanderMerwe/posts/CSFxq67eSC4
https://theringer.com/inefficiency-week-podcasts-speed-comprehension-f0ea43949e42
My note: sometimes around 2011, the Chronicle had a report on Berkeley students listening to coursecasts at 2X (can’t find the reference). Here some other sources about #speedlistening:
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more on podcast in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=podcast+education
Do critical thinking skills give graduates the edge?
It has long been claimed that critical thinking ability sets graduates apart. But are universities really preparing students for the modern workplace? David Matthews reports
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/do-critical-thinking-skills-give-graduates-the-edge
what value is higher education supposed to add? And how is this different from what school or vocational education offer?
A further question is whether even the academic brand of critical thinking is being particularly well taught at university. According to Bryan Greetham, a philosopher and university researcher who has written several books on how students and professionals can improve their thinking, “We tend to want to do the simple thing – which is to teach students what to think, not how to think.”
This was most famously explored in the 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The authors, American sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, found that 45 per cent of US undergraduates failed to significantly improve their critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years at university. Other US-based studies have raised similar concerns. One from 2009, “Improving Students’ Evaluation of Informal Arguments”, published in the Journal of Experimental Education, warned that college and high school students have “difficulty evaluating arguments on the basis of their quality”.
But if universities don’t have the resources to offer intensive classes, could they weave the teaching of critical thinking skills into regular teaching? Britt thinks that academics can easily make time for quick “check-ins” during their lectures to ensure that their students understand what they’ve been told.
High school experience, of course, varies enormously by country. In France, studying philosophy – arguably the closest that traditional disciplines get to explicit critical thinking courses – is compulsory. In England, meanwhile, the critical thinking A level has recently been scrapped.
As well as calls for critical thinkers and smart thinkers, there are also frequent demands from politicians for more “entrepreneurial” university graduates – who, instead of joining graduate recruitment programmes at large employers, might start their own businesses.
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critical thinking
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=critical+thinking
Employers’ Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students’ Lives
Employers’ Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students’ Lives
At the recent Next New World conference hosted by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, panelists addressed the question of how the American education system can better prepare students
Tony Wagner deeper learning network like New Tech Network, Expeditionary Learning, High Tech High and Big Picture as school models
The changes and trends in K-12 education often seem completely divorced from higher education and the grueling college application process that lands students at colleges all over the country.
Gallup recently did a study of college graduates to gauge how engaged they are with their work and whether they are thriving in the world.
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more on Millennials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=millennials
Updating the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment for Better Student Learning Outcomes
- John Baker Monday, July 3, 2017
- http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/7/updating-the-next-generation-digital-learning-environment-for-better-student-learning-outcomes
a learning management system (LMS) is never the solution to every problem in education. Edtech is just one part of the whole learning ecosystem and student experience.
Therefore, the next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE), as envisioned by EDUCAUSE in 2015 … Looking at the NGDLE requirements from an LMS perspective, I view the NGDLE as being about five areas: interoperability; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; accessibility and universal design.
Interoperability
- Content can easily be exchanged between systems.
- Users are able to leverage the tools they love, including discipline-specific apps.
- Learning data is available to trusted systems and people who need it.
- The learning environment is “future proof” so that it can adapt and extend as the ecosystem evolves.
Personalization
- The learning environment reflects individual preferences.
- Departments, divisions, and institutions can be autonomous.
- Instructors teach the way they want and are not constrained by the software design.
- There are clear, individual learning paths.
- Students have choice in activity, expression, and engagement.
Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
- Learning analytics helps to identify at-risk students, course progress, and adaptive learning pathways.
- The learning environment enables integrated planning and assessment of student performance.
- More data is made available, with greater context around the data.
- The learning environment supports platform and data standards.
Collaboration
- Individual spaces persist after courses and after graduation.
- Learners are encouraged as creators and consumers.
- Courses include public and private spaces.
Accessibility and Universal Design
- Accessibility is part of the design of the learning experience.
- The learning environment enables adaptive learning and supports different types of materials.
- Learning design includes measurement rubrics and quality control.
The core analogy used in the NGDLE paper is that each component of the learning environment is a Lego brick:
- The days of the LMS as a “walled garden” app that does everything is over.
- Today many kinds of amazing learning and collaboration tools (Lego bricks) should be accessible to educators.
- We have standards that let these tools (including an LMS) talk to each other. That is, all bricks share some properties that let them fit together.
- Students and teachers sign in once to this “ecosystem of bricks.”
- The bricks share results and data.
- These bricks fit together; they can be interchanged and swapped at will, with confidence that the learning experience will continue uninterrupted.
Any “next-gen” attempt to completely rework the pedagogical model and introduce a “mash-up of whatever” to fulfil this model would fall victim to the same criticisms levied at the LMS today: there is too little time and training to expect faculty to figure out the nuances of implementation on their own.
The Lego metaphor works only if we’re talking about “old school” Lego design — bricks of two, three, and four-post pieces that neatly fit together. Modern edtech is a lot more like the modern Lego. There are wheels and rocket launchers and belts and all kinds of amazing pieces that work well with each other, but only when they are configured properly. A user cannot simply stick together different pieces and assume they will work harmoniously in creating an environment through which each student can be successful.
As the NGDLE paper states: “Despite the high percentages of LMS adoption, relatively few instructors use its more advanced features — just 41% of faculty surveyed report using the LMS ‘to promote interaction outside the classroom.'”
But this is what the next generation LMS is good at: being a central nervous system — or learning hub — through which a variety of learning activities and tools are used. This is also where the LMS needs to go: bringing together and making sense of all the amazing innovations happening around it. This is much harder to do, perhaps even impossible, if all the pieces involved are just bricks without anything to orchestrate them or to weave them together into a meaningful, personal experience for achieving well-defined learning outcomes.
- Making a commitment to build easy, flexible, and smart technology
- Working with colleges and universities to remove barriers to adopting new tools in the ecosystem
- Standardizing the vetting of accessibility compliance (the Strategic Nonvisual Access Partner Program from the National Federation of the Blind is a great start)
- Advancing standards for data exchange while protecting individual privacy
- Building integrated components that work with the institutions using them — learning quickly about what is and is not working well and applying those lessons to the next generation of interoperability standards
- Letting people use the tools they love [SIC] and providing more ways for nontechnical individuals (including students) to easily integrate new features into learning activities
My note: something just refused to be accepted at SCSU
Technologists are often very focused on the technology, but the reality is that the more deeply and closely we understand the pedagogy and the people in the institutions — students, faculty, instructional support staff, administrators — the better suited we are to actually making the tech work for them.
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Under the Hood of a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment in Progress
- by G. Alex Ambrose, Kevin Abbott and Alison Lanski Monday, July 31, 2017
- http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/7/under-the-hood-of-a-next-generation-digital-learning-environment-in-progress
The challenge is that although 85 percent of faculty use a campus learning management system (LMS),1 a recent Blackboard report found that, out of 70,000 courses across 927 North American institutions, 53 percent of LMS usage was classified as supplemental(content-heavy, low interaction) and 24 percent as complementary (one-way communication via content/announcements/gradebook).2 Only 11 percent were characterized as social, 10 percent as evaluative (heavy use of assessment), and 2 percent as holistic (balanced use of all previous). Our FYE course required innovating beyond the supplemental course-level LMS to create a more holistic cohort-wide NGDLE in order to fully support the teaching, learning, and student success missions of the program.The key design goals for our NGDLE were to:
- Create a common platform that could deliver a standard curriculum and achieve parity in all course sections using existing systems and tools and readily available content
- Capture, store, and analyze any generated learner data to support learning assessment, continuous program improvement, and research
- Develop reports and actionable analytics for administrators, advisors, instructors, and students
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more on LMS in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=LMS
more on learning outcomes in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=learning+outcomes