Since Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published their signature book, Understanding by Design, the idea of planning “with the end in mind” has become an important part of educational parlance. There are few endeavors where this advice is more important than Project-Based Learning.
Because a project, by definition, has a prescribed outcome, it’s tempting to focus on the material objective rather than the accompanying learning. Regardless of the nature of the project, the important questions are:
Small children learn by asking questions and testing the answers they receive. This tendency forms the roots of critical thinking. Unfortunately, question-generation eventually takes a backseat to receiving and storing information both at home and at school as children mature. In a traditional classroom, questions are the provenance of the teacher. In a project-based learning classroom, however, questions drive the entire learning process.
In my last post, I covered the importance of satisfying students’ curiosity about why they “have to learn” various skills, facts and processes by connecting curriculum to real world applications. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is one important approach that accomplishes this task and far more.
Fake news sites. Post-truth politics. Media fragmentation. In the digital age, it’s arguably more important than ever for students to develop new literacy skills. These skills are critical for students to be successful not only in college and in future careers but also in civic and economic life.
According the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE): “To become a successful student, responsible citizen, productive worker, or competent and conscientious consumer, individuals need to develop expertise with the increasingly sophisticated information and entertainment media that address us on a multi-sensory level, affecting the way we think, feel, and behave.”
This week students at every level from kindergarten to college have returned to school. But, hitting the proverbial books may no longer hold true as teachers and professors increasingly shelve print materials and transition to digital content.
Students must learn how to derive meaningful information from digital content and develop 21st century skills to be prepared for the demands of college and careers in the future. Concept mapping is one method students can use to ensure they are gaining deeper understanding of online material and exercising higher order thinking.
This month we launched our online concept mapping environment for individual users, becoming the first concept-mapping tool that integrates seamlessly with a wide range of digital resources. No other products on the market offer semantic analysis of digital content to aid learning and ease-of-use nor present resources side-by-side the mapping canvas. The timing of our kick-off couldn’t have been better.
While we were embarking on a historic journey in edtech, another momentous occasion began in August in Brazil.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
The skies are blue, the temperatures are edging up and summer is poised on the horizon: it’s that great time of year when we take down our bulletin boards and break out our (metaphoric) surfboards. There’s nothing better than those first days of vacation when our minds drain of the agendas and administrivia of the classroom, and it’s okay to pick up a book with a plot instead of a matrix of standards.
That feeling doesn’t last forever, though. After about three weeks, I get bitten by the teaching bug again. I remember the faces of all those students who never quite engaged, who might have excelled but didn’t, and I start wondering what I can do in the coming fall to address their needs. That’s when I do a different kind of summer reading—titles from the annals of pedagogy. My favorite kind of education book is passionate, based on experience in the trenches and reflective of what the writers believe about learning, not the “how to” books of which there are so many. Here are a few of my favorites:
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
Years ago, when I first entered the classroom, I thought I knew my subject area and I thought I knew how to teach. You won’t be surprised to learn that, while my head was stuffed with facts and learning strategies, I really knew nothing about either area. Dewey teaches that we learn by doing and that is nowhere more true than in the field of teaching. Further, all my training, all the demands of my job and the expectations of my administrators, parents and students were defined by curriculum. Nobody said much about learning, let alone thinking.
Later, in graduate school, I discovered the work of cognitive psychologist, Vera John-Steiner, and her works became seminal to my own ideas about the role of thinking in education. John-Steiner’s first contribution to the field, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, centered on the cognitive habits of geniuses from science, art, writing, music—all of the humanities—based on a close analysis of their journals, personal accounts and conversations. Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, Diego Rivera—over 50 geniuses account for their creative visions. Her investigation is accompanied by her own insights on the nature of thinking. She writes, “Thought is embedded in the structure of the mind. One way to think of this structure is to view it as formed by networks of interlocking concepts of highly condensed and organized clusters of representations.”
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
A good friend of mine, Tim Gillespie, once said, “Anytime you do something for students that they could do for themselves, you are 1) working too hard, and 2) stealing from them an opportunity for learning.” I’ve carried this notion with me and rediscovered every year just how capable and creative my students can be.
Ideaphora is guided by the mission to help students build critical thinking skills and lasting knowledge from the digital content they are increasingly exposed to in and out of school by offering a first-of-its-kind concept mapping and learning environment. The strength of learners' knowledge maps depends on the quality of the content they use as sources to create connections among concepts. To that end, Ideaphora is seeking the best open education resources (OER) to provide a robust library of materials that educators and students can use in building their knowledge maps. We want to hear from you!