Rebecca McLelland-Crawley: Creating an authentic learning experience through digital technology

The following guest blog post comes from Rebecca McLelland-Crawley of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She is the K-12 Science Supervisor at West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District.

Ms.McLelland-Crawley is one in a group of experts who will be blogging for High School Soup every Thursday as part of the Alliance for Excellent Education's Project 24 series. Learn more about Project 24 and how your school district can get involved and connected with the resources needed to plan for progress in a digital transformation here.

Consider my request.

Close your eyes and follow a hypothetical middle school or high school student for her entire school day. How many minutes is she sitting down? How often is she in a group discussing a misconception versus simply hearing her responses are incorrect? Was she allowed to connect to the Internet to research why her response was incorrect? How many times was she told that she can be a digital detective, a blogger, or a software engineer?

I envision a different kind of classroom with very different pedagogical ideas. I dream of a classroom where children are empowered to succeed leveraging technology in a way that maximizes the learning experience for all stakeholders in the community. Read Entire Post

Flipped learning: The "Good Teaching" method

The following blog post comes from Kari M. Arfstrom, the executive director of the Flipped Learning Network, which is an alliance partner of Digital Learning Day. Learn more about Digital Learning Day at http://www.digitallearningday.org.

With Digital Learning Day fast approaching, I want to share some of the similarities between the tenets of Digital Learning and Flipped Learning. Both encompass instructional practices that strengthen a student's learning experience guided by a professional educator who is effectively using technology to enhance the pedagogy.

Like Flipped Learning, Digital Learning is personal, flexible, and can positively affect teaching practices by using technology to time shift the direct instruction based on the students’ needs. Such environments enable anytime, anywhere learning based on competency and mastery with professional educators who are guiding the way for each student to succeed. This is good teaching.

Flipped Learning is a fast growing technique embraced by teachers of all grade levels and subjects. Flipped Learning involves two different kinds of “flip.”  First, the responsibility of student learning is being flipped with the active transfer of ownership of content from the professional educator to the student. Educators act as guides to learning while students become more actively involved in their own learning process. In a flipped classroom, teachers talk with their students, not at them.

Second, the delivery process is shifted or flipped where direct instruction is moved outside of the classroom using technology, and classroom time is allocated to maximizing face-to-face interactions between teacher and students. The in-school learning environment is devoted to actively working on assignments, experiments, and other higher-order learning skills, in large or small groups, or one-on-one individualized learning.
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Afternoon Announcements: June 7, 2012

Today's announcements focus on (1) the economic impact of one high school class in Florida; (2) end-of-course exams in Houston; (3) a new summer online learning program in Florida that costs the same as the old program, but provides access to 50,000 more students than the old model; (4) the pros and cons of "flipping" a classroom; and (5) lessons that the U.S. could learn from the best-performing nations on preparing teachers to teach in the twenty-first century. Enjoy!

Citing data from the Alliance for Excellent Education's economic model, the Gulf Breeze News writes that the 360 graduates from the Gulf Breeze High School Class of 2012 are expected to earn as much as $4.3 million more in an average year compared to their likely earnings had they not earned a high school diploma. The spending and investments made by these graduates, combined, will likely be enough to support as many as 30 new jobs in the state and increase the gross regional product by as much as $4.5 million by the time they reach their career midpoints.

The Houston Chronicle examines Texas’s new end-of-course exams and discovers that high school students can pass most of these exams by answering fewer than half of the questions correctly. In the article, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said the decision was made to phase in the standards, starting low and increasing them through 2016 because students need time to adjust to the much more difficult questions. Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier, who is also a prominent business leader, disagreed with the approach and said the lower bar would give students, teachers and the public a skewed picture of schools’ performance.

 

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Afternoon Announcements: June 4, 2012

Hello and happy Monday! Neck-deep in TPS reports and playing catch-up? Let’s see if we can lighten that load for you by providing you with a short list of stories from this weekend and today that deserve your attention.

First, The Washington Post offers up this feature on “flipped” classrooms where students do their reading (or watch teacher-prepared lessons) at home and do their “homework” in class. This type of classroom set-up has found success with some students who do better having a teacher and classmates around to assist with applications of lesson concepts. Overall, if you haven’t heard of flipped classrooms yet (and we hope you have), then this article is a good primer.

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