Education 2.0 & 3.0

Students must understand how to recognize reputable information and how to identify credible, high-quality journalism. Bias is everywhere, and it’s necessary for young people today to identif…

"A problem with online teaching is that students have to sit through a long lecture-sort of presentation–if you’re trying to replicate your classroom teaching. Some good advice I see over and over regarding teaching online is DON’T try to replicate your physical classroom. Instead, teach using online’s strengths. A good way to do that is with a flipped classroom."

The Rice University-based publisher OpenStax announced Thursday that it will provide free teaching resources through the end of the spring semester to support faculty transitioning to online course delivery in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Firstly, the Californian association for information literacy, LILi, has set up a page for sharing resources about teaching IL online. "Inspired by CCC COVID-19 Website Google Doc, Lifelong Information Literacy (LILi) created this blog post to collect online instruction information from all libraries in California. Please share in the form or comment below for discussions. The LILi Web Committee will summarize important information and resources in this blog as the situation evolves." This is at https://lili.libguides.com/lion/COVID-19

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here.

You might also be interested in THE BEST RESOURCES ON CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION IN 2019 – PART TWO.

Here are this week’s picks:

A collection of classroom resources for teachers and school leaders; easy to download. Currently read by over 8.5 million people across the world

When students can distill course topics into the essential information, translate that for a general audience, and then post that information in a public place – that feels good. Instructors who use our tools to assign students to create or expand Wikipedia articles often tell us about the confidence and empowerment that their students find in the exercise. Students get to be the expert. And sometimes they are the best ones to translate complex academic topics for a general audience because they remember what it was like to learn it for the first time.

When it comes to locating educational content for a PC-powered VR headset like a Vive, Rift or WMR, it can be a little tricky for three main reasons:
1. There are multiple app stores to find content and some of the content can only be found in certain app stores.

2. Not all the stores have an easy to find Education section.

3. Some content which would be great in the classroom isn’t actually tagged as educational.

Look at the reference list for your latest few articles or presentations. How many of the people you are citing are people like you, how many people different from you? How many are dominant (white, male, straight, you name it) and how many are marginal in some way? If you’re active there, look at your recent Twitter interactions, how diverse are those? Now look at your blogroll, the authors you follow regularly (if you don’t read blogs). How diverse are they? Why does this matter?

Among other pedagogies like BYOD, 1:1 and many such, Flipped Learning turns out to balancing the essence of traditional teaching intact, keeping values and human touch alive to the modern and mandatory introduction of technology in place.  

Commonly explained as a pedagogical model, Flipped Classrooms are those in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.

The Edvocate and The Tech Edvocate are proud to announce the launch of our new site, Pedagogue, a social media network where educators can learn and grow. It’s a safe space where they can share advice, strategies, tools, hacks, resources, etc., and work together to improve their teaching skills and the academic performance of the students in their charge.

"There are so many ways to use Canva to create and design resources for the classroom. Here is a list of 25+ ways teachers are already using Canva to make design as easy as drag and drop...."

Below is a chart we have been working on during the last few weeks. It features a number of key websites and online resources arranged into different categories.  We did not cover all school subjects but we will be adding more resources to the list in the future.  Our purpose is to provide teachers and educators (and students) with a repository of EdTech websites that can potentially help them with the teaching of their content areas. The great thing about this work is that it is curated by teachers for teachers. 

I have an extensive collection of materials at The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More.

Yesterday, I learned through Alexander Russo of an excellent addition to the list: Poynter, the very respected journalism organization, has created an online collection called UnNews: An index of unreliable news websites.

Real learning happens when learning “sticks.”

Employing solid learning retention activities with your learners means using tools you can call on anytime to help students remember learning. The learning retention activities offered in the TeachThought article 15 Reflection Strategies To Help Students Retain What You Just Taught Them are among the simplest and the best for every teacher to use. Each one encourages the natural reflection process that helps our students absorb learning effectively.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

Resources for Teachers - Tools, Information and Resources to Help Teachers Increase Student Learning