Tag Archives: Authentic learning

Small-group Gaming, Part 2: Baby Mario Steps

This Monday we dedicated a station to analyzing our data from last week’s small-group gaming.

Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more [...]

Small-group Gaming, Part 1: Rewarding Collaboration

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with [...]

Match Classroom Technology to Good

[Author's note: I love Foyble.com and its potential to add relevance and voice to students' community service. I greatly appreciate the opportunities I have to work with Foyble.com, but I am in no way compensated by the site.]
Monday night I Skyped with Brian Foy (@Foyble_org), a co-founder of Foyble.com, and Jack King (@drjackking), founder [...]

It Is Decidely So

My sources say these predictions for 2010 are pretty sound.  Network macronodes will ditch the hubs and spokes and explode into clouds as learners carry new learning with them from opportunity to opportunity.

Social reading
I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed [...]

Grading Is Easy; Teaching Is Hard

Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in [...]

Tweet Down the Wall

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, [...]

CUT TO MOOSE

When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.

However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of [...]

The Asking of New Questions

Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.

It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.
Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against [...]

Learning the Way it Works for Me, Part 1

[Editor's note: Guest blogger Damani Harrison, gifted musician and mentor, joins Classroots.org for a series of posts sharing his take on authentic engagement in teaching and learning.  Damani works for the Music Resource Center, "a state-of-the-art facility where teens can learn the latest technology in the music industry and study and participate in every phase [...]

The Standard is Authenticity

Over at Twitter recently, @mctownsley pointed toward an earlier post at Edumacation about the tension between standards-based assessment and traditional grading.

Assessments, like any kind of data-based research, can be used by many people in many different ways.

One teacher might pump her fist in the air after seeing that 95% of her students passed this year’s reading [...]