All Blog Posts Tagged 'classroom' (11)

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So your school came into a large donation or grant and handed a 12 year old a $400 toy with the hope that this academic year will be one of great achievement, enhanced learning and collaboration with their peers. Uh oh. What did we do? Middle school students lose things all the time, they are not the most careful of age…

I have not tried podcasting yet, and truthfully it is on my “to do list.” I have been participating in a project through our local CJE of Baltimore, making professional development screencasts for teachers. They are being made on many topics and I have chosen to make screencasts about technology in the classroom, for teacher PD.

When asked to make a podcast or vodcast for my Edtech 102B course, I decided to use the knowledge of screencasting I received from this CJE project and make a…

I am not new to blogging. A few years ago, I started a blog, of personal recollections about my parents, of blessed memory. It was really good for me because it kept their memories alive and as I wrote, it brought back more memories. 

Now I am attempting to think about blogging again. I am using a new platform, Wordpress, which was quite easy to set up. It didn't take me any more time than when I set up my last blog on Blogger. I think any teacher or student can easily use this…

I just reviewed a videocast session at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2011 conference in Philadelphia called The iPad Revolution: Innovative Learning in the Classroom. Woah am I blown away! Camilla Gagliolo of Arlington Public Schools showed many examples of students…

(Sigh)  I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon because I really like technology.  But all of the tools I tried for the this week's tech-course assignment seem so labor-intensive.  Which is fine, if there's a distinct payoff that makes them worthwhile.  I hate to say it but the amount of time that an individual instructor would need to invest in creating a video, or cartoons, or other media for instructional use seems disproportionate to the potential impact.  More than that, it diverts…

I recently viewed a colleague giving a lesson in a flipped model. He made a video of himself reading and explaining the Gemara. He then had a worksheet that the students needed to complete on the topic which was also done on computer. This was given first at home as homework and then reinforced the next day in class.

The lesson was absolutely remarkable and I thought the teacher did a masterful job. I have to say that I have never seen such diligence on the part of the students to…

I've now expanded my research for this course assignment beyond Khan Academy, and have learned that the term "flipped classroom" is not original to Khan.  It seems that around 2005 various people began advancing the notion of video lectures. Since every American educational idea gets product-branded before it gets a theory or articulated practice, it comes as no surprise that in those early days various names vied for preeminence, most notably "blended learning" and "reverse instruction."…

Check out this blog post, entitled 4 Ways to Maximize Your Flipped Classroom Videos. 

While some of the suggestions may seem obvious, I think it is important for us to recognize that the simple act of putting content in video form (or audio, for that matter), is not enough for it to be something that students will utilize and be excited…

This is one my favorite talks on the use of technology in education. I don't want to spoil the fun of watching it but, in a nutshell, Meyer, a weblogging high school math teacher, talks about how he approaches the challenge of motivating his students to think about math in a fresh, new way, and how he transforms them into "patient problem-solvers." In his introduciton, he says:

I teach high school math. I sell a…

A piece on the OpEd page of today's LA Times offered a somewhat jaundiced view of online learning.  While acknowledging its potential, especially for students who might have little or limited access to learning, the author points out that, at least as often constituted today, online learning may offer an insubstantial environment compared to a live classroom.  I actually think that he missed the most important point: part of the job of a teacher is to work with the student to tease out his…

I have had the pleasure of using google docs both as a student and as a teacher with amazing success. As a grad student this past summer we were divided into groups for our "Foundations of Jewish Education" course. Our job was to read three books and write a collaborative paper on them. I immediately started a google doc and emailed it to my colleagues. It was incredible how easy it was to start writing the paper in our google doc. I could draft a version for the intro and have another…