Thursday, November 28, 2013

Crowdsourcing, Flipping and other Ways to Innovate in the Classroom

How To Use Crowdsourcing In The Classroom
Although crowdsourcing is a new term-du-jour, it is a critically important information literacy skill that we must be teaching our students. If they are to become life-long learners, they need to learn how to work together in digital environments and to effectively collaborate with others. If you value this type of literacy – like the Harvard Business Review describes – here are a few simple ways to begin this important journey with your students.
Flickr CC photo by James Cridland

Google Apps for Education Teacher Documented Workflows
These are examples of individual workflows within a set environment. These are often the result of unsuccessful experimentation. The idea is for teachers to take what works for them and modify others to fit their environment and their classroom practice.

Turning Education Upside Down
Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over. Havana High School outside of Peoria, Ill., is flipping, too, after the school superintendent visited Clintondale. The principal of Clintondale says that some 200 school officials have visited.

What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World
My generation, and the many generations before mine, have thought about knowledge as being the collected set of trusted content, typically expressed in libraries full of books. . . .Yet, for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument. That social activity -- collaborative and contentious, often at the same time -- is a more accurate reflection of our condition as imperfect social creatures trying to understand a world that is too big and too complex for even the biggest-headed expert.

PD Roadblocks: Control, Compliance, and Permission.
Any course, or workshop that a teacher has ever wanted to take for academics, or for professional development was either controlled, or in some way approved by someone in authority. . . .Someone other than the learner directs the learning in this model, because it was designed around control, compliance, and permission. It would be a big plus if the needs of the learner aligned with the needs of the director, and I imagine that sometimes it does. However, that would probably be more coincidental than a planned outcome.




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