What if every student (and educator) was a good online researcher? I know, you don't have the time to teach information fluency skills. What if you could get a significant advance is skills with just a 2 -3 hour time commitment?
Here's a great Prezi 'fly by" of the new Information Investigator 3.1 online self paced class. Watch the presentation carefully to find the link to a free code to take the class for evaluation purposes.
Search Story: Using the Internet to find information that changes lives. Zack Matere uses a village bulletin board to tack up vital knowledge he gets from the net. Real change, now.
Erik-Jan, a philosophy scholar in the Netherlands, has spent 20 years studying René Descartes. In 2010, his search to understand Descartes' correspondences led him to something that had been missing for over 300 years
But the body of research reveals that staff-development costs, including central-office and local staff, hours of teacher time, stipends, salary increases, substitutes, facilities, instructors, and material expenditures hover in the range of $8,000 to $16,000 per teacher, per year, especially in larger districts. Most districts have no idea they spend that much on staff development. Sadly though, most administrators agree their professional-development outlay has no correlation with student-achievement results.
The only effective way to scale professional development is to leverage online learning. Online professional development can deliver dozens of hours to teachers within eight weeks and includes collaborative learning environments supported effectively by coaching, modeling, mentoring, observation, and feedback. Online professional development works because it reduces travel costs and coordination, minimizes time out of the classroom, and allows educators to learn at their own pace. In fact, research suggests that online learning happens faster than face-to-face learning, with increased retention of the material.
Online professional development engages educators in high-quality learning by adhering to best practices in adult learning. It promotes differentiated coursework while enabling teachers to engage collaboratively with colleagues who share their learning needs. By delivering effective, differentiated online professional development, districts leverage the powerful advantages of technology and the online-learning environment. Districts delivering online professional development realize cost savings, scale critical instructional practices, differentiate teacher learning, advance strategic human-capital management, maintain intentional fidelity, and transform teaching.
The $10,000-per-teacher cost could be justified if a significant change in teacher practice or student achievement were the result. But most professional development today lacks alignment to student-achievement needs, fidelity of implementation, and scale or reach. Professional-development days are historically spread throughout the year and delivered by internal resources through one-day trainings with little or no follow-up. In most cases, the inch-deep and train-the-trainer approaches to professional development won’t transform practice.
"You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians."
~~ Monty Python ~~
Special thanks to Librarian David Wee of Harvard-Westlake Middle School for the initial quotation that triggered this post.
Now I realize why he's going ape during the first week of school!
“Let’s google dinosaurs.” Sound familiar? Searching the Web is so commonplace that even young children know what it means to “google.” But when your children really need to do research for a report – or dive deeper into a subject they’re interested in – it helps to know some strategies for improving their results.
Effective online searching can make a huge difference in the quality and relevance of the content your children find on the Internet. But it takes a bit of know-how to improve the chances of getting back the information they’re looking for. You can help your child search smarter – and waste less time – by explaining how to search like a pro.
So much more to learn, so much more to teach. The evolution of the librarian and the library.
Joyce Kasman Valenza loves her work as the librarian at Springfield
Township High School (PA)! For ten years, she was the techlife@school
columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joyce is the author of Power
Tools, Power Research Tools and Power Tools Recharged for ALA Editions.
(PowerTools Remixed is currently in progress.) Joyce is a Milken
Educator, an American Memory Fellow, and a member of the Library of
Congress Teacher with Primary Sources cohort. Her Virtual Library won
the IASL School Library Web Page of the Year Award for 2001. She has won
her state's PSLA Outstanding Program (2005) and Outstanding Contributor
(2009) Awards. Joyce is active in ALA, AASL, YALSA, and ISTE and
contributes to VOYA, Technology and Learning, LMC and School Library
Journal. Joyce speaks internationally about issues relating to libraries
and thoughtful use of educational technology. She considers herself a
mother and founder of the school library Geek Tribe,
SchoolLibraryWebsites, New Tools Workshop, TLNing, TL Virtual Café, TL
Ning, Pathfinder Swap, School Library Websites, and TLGuide.
TEDx is a program of local,
self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like
experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to
spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local,
self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently
organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for
the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.*
(*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
One school districts work aligning information fluency with the new Common Core Learning Standards. Lots of work done here. Are you facing a similar project?
Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold – over a day, a week, a month or more – reflecting the event’s actual duration."
Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold – over a day, a week, a month or more – reflecting the event’s actual duration."
This special report, another installment in Education Week's series on virtual education, examines the growing e-learning opportunities for students with disabilities, English-language learners, gifted and talented students, and those at risk of failing in school. It shows the barriers that exist for greater participation among special populations, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. It also looks at the funding tactics schools are using to build virtual education programs for special populations and the evolving professional-development needs for these efforts.
Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender. Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.
How can we best use limited resources to support learning and familiarize students with technology?
get creative with lesson structure
Take advantage of any time that your students have access to a computer lab with multiple computers.
Relieve yourself from the pressure of knowing all the ins and outs of every tool. Instead, empower your students by challenging them to become experts who teach one another (and you!) how to use new programs.
Small groups of students engage in dialogue on a particular topic, then a member uses a digital tool to report on the group's consensus.
Students assist one another in creating digital products that represent or reflect their new learning. It’s a great way to spread technological skills in a one-computer classroom.
Group Consensus Method
"Pass it On" Buddy Method
Rotating Scribe Method
Each day, one student uses technology to record the lesson for other students.
Whole Class Method
Teachers in one-computer classrooms often invite large groups of students to gather around the computer. Here are a few suggestions for making the most of these activities
When we are faced with limited resources, it is tempting to throw up our hands and say, "I just don't have what I need to do this!" However, do not underestimate your ability to make it work.
He leads off the book with a discussion of the effect of Google’s “personalization” feature on the ranking of search results. This feature uses 54 signals (what browser version you’re using, your prior searches, geographic location, and so on) to customize search results for each user.
“increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”
Bottom line: Holy moley, Google does filter the news. You really need to go beyond the first few search results if you want to get a relatively well-rounded view of the news.
While it is fairly common knowledge, at least among info pros, that Google search results vary widely from one searcher to another, I had assumed that I would see far less variation in Google News searching.
Because of the proliferation of new technologies, the younger generation today is outgrowing traditional forms of education – remember pencils, chalkboards, textbooks and graphing calculators? Whether we are in the car, on the train, at work, or in a classroom, mobile technology in particular is giving us the ability to learn on-the-go. See the infographic below to learn why we are wired for mobile learning, and how we can use mobile technologies to educate ourselves.
As a promoter of information fluency, I'd argue that it is a 21st century foundation skill for all core academic subjects.
To be information fluent means a student can independently research and evaluate digital information relevant to any topic, the common core academic subjects, as well as media studies and consumer issues.
Common Core has been critical of the idea that our children’s education should be organized around a set of so-called “21st century skills” instead of core academic subjects such as history, science, and the arts.
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