Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Breaking News on “Teacher Prep” Regulations for Distance Education
It is proposed that a college’s program could fall short in ONE state and lose the right to offer TEACH grants to distance students in ANY state. That might work if every state used the same criteria, but that’s not required. The “Discussion of Costs, Benefits, and Transfers” is a baffling attempt at measuring activity for which there is no good data.
One of the big draws of the Raspberry Pi is to learn programming. It can be used to learn to program Ruby, Python, Scratch, and even setup your own web server.
More for the use of MineCraft in Education in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=minecraft&submit=Search
https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2016/03/kelman-social-intranets.aspx
Steve Kelman Mar 28, 2016 at 4:38 PM
Ines Mergel report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, called The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally.
co-locating subject-matter experts
traditional technologies have important limitations
when teaching about efforts many agencies are making to break down functional stovepipes, which often involves having functional experts spend significant time in offsite cross-agency teams with “functionals” from other specialties. This has a number of advantages, but creates risks that employees won’t have anywhere to go to get answers to questions or refresh their knowledge base. My students and I also discussed communities of practice, which allowed employees to ask questions to fellow experts not at the same location.
“social intranet” — a one-stop shop where agency employees can go to find or request information in a number of different ways to help them do their jobs. The social intranet consists of wikis; places for people to go to ask questions or solicit collaboration; publicly available conversation threads; central places for blogs; and opportunities for people to create profiles and (in a professional context) “friend” each other. These elements all appear at one web address, with its common home page, to which an employee can link.
These different features work in different ways. Wikis, for example, allow a group of employees to add knowledge to a text that is then accessible to the whole organization — and to which everyone can edit and add. Other employees can subscribe to the updates. Blogs, on the other hand, allow longer text to provide project updates, comment on industry developments, or introduce new issues more transparently than blast e-mail updates can manage.
Most intranet collaboration platforms do not require an approval chain to publish, which lowers the barriers to quick sharing. And while the personal profiles and “friending” often start by providing occasions for social conversations, the intention is for these to be a gateway to knowledge sharing; Mergel quotes a manager as saying, “The social feeds into the professional.”
Around the world, in both developing and developed countries, too many primary and secondary students are falling below proficiency levels. Measuring and monitoring performance and understanding the factors at play in student achievement can help educators create the right conditions and design the most effective interventions for student success.
link to the article (PDF file) ; THE_IBM_data_Analytics_for_Achievement k12
http://academica.ca/top-ten/chronicle-releases-report-how-students-families-look-value-higher-ed
PSE institutions are starting to notice changes in the ways that students and their families evaluate the value of higher ed, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has released a new in-depth report looking at what factors influence these judgments. The report, titled Education Under Review: Examining the value of education for student success—in career and life, investigates the importance students and their families place on critical thinking skills, career readiness training, and student debt, among other factors. Among the report’s key findings is that only 13% of student respondents said they believed the higher education system as a whole provided excellent value. Report
My note: the US News and World Report is behind times on its reporting, unless this article has been held for a while by their editor: teenagers moved from Snapchat as quickly as they moved away from Facebook to Twitter and from Twitter to Snapchat. The generation, which is running US News and World Report is way too slow to notice the nomadic social media moves of the Millennials.
Here is the January 2016, exchange among faculty on the blend/online education listserv, which could’ve helped the author, Alexandra Pannoni line up with the times:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/01/11/social-network-highered/
The cited case from Nebraska, Katelyn Gilroy, a library media specialist, who is using Snapchat or school purposes, can undoubtedly have a niche in education, enticing students to learn about their library, reading, etc.
However, it is questionable to present the media specialist’s case from Nebraska as a blank statement; a case, which can be adopted nationwide. Ms. Pannoni fails to mention that since 15 years ago, when instant messaging was the “snapchat” of the times, U.S. students consider these applications their “virtual mall,” where they like to hang out, but are not keen to consider them for educational purposes. In the same fashion, U.S. students are somehow unique in considering Facebook, later Twitter, then Snapchat and now Kik, Yammer, Celly, or Elgg a domain reserved for their private, extracurricular activities.
More about use of social media in education in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=social+media+education&submit=Search
pro domo sua
In one sense, the LMS has been a huge success. In just a few years starting in the late 1990s, purchases by colleges of these systems went from zero to some 90 percent of all American institutions.
Actual adoption by professors, however, has been a different, slower story. Just over half of students reported using an LMS in most or all of their courses as recently as two years ago, two decades after the creation of modern learning-management software. In short, professors aren’t as sold on using an LMS as administrators are.
http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/persuasion-30034.html
The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate. Students begin by determining their goal or thesis. They then identify three reasons to support their argument, and three facts or examples to validate each reason. The map graphic in the upper right-hand corner allows students to move around the map, instead of having to work in a linear fashion. The finished map can be saved, e-mailed, or printed.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/09/47-alternatives-to-using-youtube-in.html
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2016/03/more-than-40-alternatives-to-youtube.html