Gaining Insights into Online Teacher Training through Essential Questions

by Justin Scoggin, Hybrid Pedagogy

My favorite pedagogical tool is the essential question. Briefly, these attempt to focus student attention on the broader implications and deeper meanings behind content. I had been using them in my own quaint way before reading Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe, and that reading both confirmed my intuition and pushed my use of this strategy to a higher level.

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Essential_Questions.html#unique-entry-id-176

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/xp3sI677YRg/

Obama Says Congress Must Keep Education as U.S. Budget Priority

By Juliann Francis, Business Week

President Barack Obama warned that other nations are pulling ahead of the U.S. in global economic competition as he campaigned for his budget goals at a high school and a Democratic fundraising event in New York. The president urged Congress to pass a budget that sets the “right priorities” by putting money into education and other programs that will help advance economic growth. The U.S. needs “some political courage in Washington,” Obama told students, faculty and elected officials at Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn. “We need to work together to grow the economy, not shrink it”

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-10-25/obama-says-congress-must-keep-priority-on-education-in-budget

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/iIzeBBLfF4w/

When Students Can’t Compute

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

As college courses migrate toward a variety of tech-enabled models–blended, flipped, online, and MOOC–students who lack basic computer skills pose significant challenges for instructors and institutions alike. How do you teach a class of students whose tech skills–and access to the technology itself–differ so widely? How do you keep students enrolled who are struggling to master the platform, let alone the course materials?

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/10/23/when-students-cant-compute.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/ZfBx2ks-JT4/

How Digital Learning Is Becoming The Fourth Literacy

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Reading. Writing. Math. Those are the big ones, right? Up until recently, a lot of people would have probably said that was correct. But since it is 2013 and so much of our lives happen online, digital literacy is being added to the list. Not that this should come as any sort of surprise to most of us, since most teachers spend vast amounts of time in classrooms surrounded by technology. Technology that both teachers and students need to be literate in. The handy infographic below (see URL) takes a look at digital learning as the ‘fourth literacy’, which I found interesting.

http://www.edudemic.com/digital-learning-literacy/

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Curious wants to turn teachers into the web’s next wave of entrepreneurs

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOm

When Curious launched this spring, its focus was offering lifelong learners a marketplace of bite-sized lessons on everything from beer brewing and salsa dancing to calculus and coding. Now, it’s upping its attention on the other side of the learning equation: teachers. For the past few months, in an effort to ensure quality classes, the site has recruited its teachers and given them in-house support to create their classes. On Friday, the company said it had opened up its service so that teachers anywhere can create classes of their own. “We think there are thousands of things to teach and ways to teach and you’ll never be able to build all the content yourself,” said CEO and founder Justin Kitch. “This is all in the name of helping teachers become entrepreneurs.”

http://gigaom.com/2013/10/25/lifelong-learning-startup-curious-wants-to-turn-teachers-into-the-webs-next-wave-of-entrepreneurs/

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Obama visits cutting-edge NYC school that has partnership with IBM, tells Congress to invest

By JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press

President Barack Obama visited a cutting-edge vocational school on Friday, praising it as a model of public-private partnership and challenging Congress to invest in similar schools. Obama met with students at Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, which was born out of cooperation among the city’s Department of Education, the City University of New York and IBM. “Everybody is pulling together to make sure a high school education puts people on a good path to a good job,” said Obama, who praised the school as a “ticket to the middle class.” Students attend the Brooklyn school from grades 9 to 14, meaning they do two years of college work in addition to the four years of high school. Their coursework has a heavy emphasis on computer science.

http://www.tribtown.com/view/story/57a3c36f2e0b41bba3ffd3535c63801e/NY–Technology-School-NYC

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