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Category Archives: teachers

Connected learning reality check from the UK & US

28-Feb-13

By the sound of it, there are significant barriers to connected learning in UK schools too – maybe bigger ones. I’m referring to hurdles pointed out by Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics in a presentation she gave for the Connected Learning Research Network about “The Class,” her ethnographic study of the connected [...]

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EduCon 2.5 & helping kids learn in ‘a landscape with no maps’

30-Jan-13

As parents, we’re now beginning to accept this, I think: “We live in a world that is re-creating itself one life and one digital connection at a time … a landscape for which there are no maps,” as Krista Tippett said it in her introduction to a timely radio conversation with Seth Godin on American [...]

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We are all first responders, in a way

17-Dec-12

I couldn’t find the words to respond in writing to the deeply sad news from Newtown, Conn., right away, so was grateful for two thoughtful responses on Friday and Saturday – one from my friend, educator Jackie Gerstein, in Facebook and another in the form of an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor building on [...]

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Mining Minecraft, Part 2: Brilliance when students drive the learning

13-Dec-12

Guest post by Marianne Malmstrom At the Elisabeth Morrow School, we have been on a journey to help our students develop the essential skills of creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and citizenship. We turned to virtual worlds and MOGs because these are the same skills many young gamers practice through immersive play. Initially, we used [...]

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Mining Minecraft, Part 1: Little gamers’ digital play through a teacher’s eyes

12-Dec-12

Editor’s note: This week, my holiday gift to you, dear readers. Below you’ll find Part 1 of a three-part series of guest posts by teacher Marianne Malmstrom about what students learning in digital environments can teach all of us – parents, educators, risk prevention experts, and anybody else who works with young people. Editing this [...]

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A teacher’s view of teacher surveys about youth & tech

14-Nov-12

Monday’s post was about two surveys of US teachers about what technology’s doing to students’ academic performance. Today, a guest commentary from Marianne Malmstrom, who teaches grades 3-8 at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, N.J., after I asked her what she thought of the research and the New York Times’s coverage: “At least the [...]

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Teachers’ views on how tech’s changing students: Studies

12-Nov-12

For a new report, the Pew Internet Project surveyed and held focus groups with more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers in the Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) communities and found that 77% feel “the Internet and digital search tools have had a ‘mostly positive’ impact on their students’ research habits, [...]

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All kinds of learning all at once with ‘BYOT’

26-Sep-12

This article was originally published July 5, 2012, then my service’s server crashed, losing months of data. So reposting 9/25/12. With their bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) program, teachers in the Forsyth County (Ga.) School District are “learning along with our students how their devices work for their learning,” Tim Clark, the district’s instructional technology coordinator, told me [...]

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Why we mustn’t have a participation gap: 2 students’ experiences

24-Aug-12

The other day, two school librarians posted an insightful article about two students – Jessica, just starting her junior of high school, and Michael, who just graduated – who stand on opposite sides of the “participation gap,” Prof. Henry Jenkins’s term for the digital divide of participatory media and today’s networked world. They describe what [...]

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Prensky’s thoughts for 21st-century teachers

10-Aug-12

Marc Prensky, who coined the term “digital natives” and a few years ago moved on to write about digital wisdom, called on educators to show the courage to do what “they know is right” and wisely embrace the technology that will increasingly help all of us, including students, solve the world’s complex problems. This was [...]

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