Suppl_eMINTS

From the Edu-Blogosphere

I realize many of you do not want to think about next year at this very moment. I also realize that many of you can’t help but to think about next year. So, with these things in-mind, I thought I’d share some things that have crossed my Google Reader and Twitter feed.

David Warlick asked his readers, “When you return to your classroom (or other edu-workplace), what do you wish will be there that wasn’t there this school year?” Folks then posted their wishes on Twitter with the hashtag #classwish. I wished for online presentation software could be collaborative and had non-linear possibilities. Today, Warlick compiled his results.

How would you answer David Warlick’s question? What do you wish for next year that wasn’t there this year? Really think outside the school box on this one. Who knows, we might be able to make it happen. I found the presentation software I was looking for in Zoho.

Over at Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson writes about a Time article in which the future of work is pondered. The article states, among other things, “We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values–and women will increasingly be at the controls.” Richardson then wonders…

Which would seem to me to suggest that we need to create a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative learning experience for my kids, right? If as the article states fully 40% of the US workforce is predicted to be independent contractors by 2019, shouldn’t we be rethinking what it means to prepare them for that?

How do these ideas change what you do in your classroom? My hope is that what we do in eMINTS supports this shift in education and the workplace. What do you think?

In conjuntion with the news that California (read “Cal-ee-fornia”) is dumping the textbook in favor of internet sources, I stumbled upon the blog TeachPaperless. While it claims to mainly provide educators with ideas for going paperless, the blog also gives its readers president for going tree-friendly in their classrooms. Even if you don’t care for the political slant, it’s an interesting read.

In my personal network, a friend who teaches high school English in Lincoln, NE mentions on his blog that his team of teachers is meeting to deal with plagiarism. It seems that several students have figured out how to copy and paste content from online sources onto their own papers, trying to pass the work off as their own. Have you considered this possibility in your own class? Do you have a plagiarism policy? Are you aware of ways to teach about and discover plagiarized work?

My partner sees this a lot as an English professor at the university. It’s easiest to deal with plagiarism when papers are turned in electronically. She copies the suspect content, pastes it into a Google search box, and up pops the original work. Sometimes it’s that easy; sometimes she has to search for a while.

As far as teaching about plagiarism, I have a few resources that may help:

• For you Wikipedia fans out there, there is a page with specific directions for citing the online encyclopedia of the people. Besides citation instructions, the page also offers advice such as “As with any source, especially one of unknown authorship, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible.”
• Plagiarism.com does the Google searching for you. Just enter the offending text in the box and hit “search”. You can even set up a Google alert as soon as the same text pops up anywhere on the Internet.
• The Citation Machine takes the guessing out as it will help your students generate citations for the work they ethically use within their writing.
• Excellent guides for teaching plagiarism can be found from Colorado State University, Web English Teacher, and Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Look for me to continue updating this blog about once a week this summer with more ideas to get your next year with eMINTS off to a great start!

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How We Teach Technology

I often read David Warlick’s 2¢ Worth blog in between planning, scheduling, and going on classroom visits. The other day, Warlick posted on the topic of methods for learning technology versus approaches. Teaching students the method of using technology is like giving them the steps in which to complete a task. On the other hand, students use technology every day by employing an approach that encourages them to test things out, explore, use some basic patterns found in other types of software, etc.

Warlick contends (or the guy he cites, Garr Reynolds) that by teaching systematic processes to our students, we limit their creativity and motivation for using technology. I couldn’t agree more. This is why I often avoid step-by-step instructions when introducing new software. I have found that most of the teachers I work with learn the software better when they work through it. If I can facilitate that learning through experience, then my teachers are more likely to make their own connections with the software.

This all goes along with eMINTS’ promotion of inquiry-based teaching methods. Your students are naturally inquisitive enough to figure out their own ways to make the technology work for them. We just have to facilitate that learning by providing experiences that encourage exploration.

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Since I’m into citing other people’s work today, another daily read for me is Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed. Richardson ,like many in the ed-tech world, loves the work of Clay Shirky, an expert in the networks of Web 2.0. Anyway, Richardson quoted Shirky for his “quote of the day”…

I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up.

Teachers who have signed on for eMINTS training are not sitting back while the rest of the world moves ahead. You have chosen to update your skill set and to prepare students with 21st century skills. Good for you for making such a commitment to your students.