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Facebook Surpasses 175 Million Users, Continuing to Grow by 600k Users/Day
Facebook has hit the 175,000,000 active user mark, just 5 weeks after it hit 150 million users in January. At this rate, Facebook has been growing by well over 600,000 users per day over the last several weeks, continuing the company’s torrid growth pace.
Publications: SRN LEADS
Every year, nine in 10 of the nation’s three million teachers participate in professional development designed to improve their content knowledge, transform their teaching, and help them respond to student needs. These activities, which can include workshops, study groups, mentoring, classroom observations, and numerous other formal and informal learning experiences, have mixed results in how they effect student achievement.
Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement.
A comprehensive new report released today by researchers from Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) finds that while the United States is making progress in providing support and mentoring for new teachers and focusing on bolstering content knowledge, the type of support and on-the-job training most teachers receive is episodic, often fragmented, and disconnected from real problems of practice.
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Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement.
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“Most states and districts are still not providing the kind of professional learning that research suggests improves teaching practice and student outcomes,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Stanford University, who wrote the report along with a team of researchers from Stanford’s School Redesign Network. “The research tells us that teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.
Video games are good for children - EU report | Technology | The Guardian
Children who spend hours every day on their Playstation or Xbox video consoles may not be rotting their brains, as many parents fear. A report from the European parliament concluded yesterday that computer games are good for children and teach them essential life skills.
Contrary to fears about the violent reputation of some games, there is no firm proof that playing them has an automatic negative impact on children's behaviour, for example by causing aggression, said the report from the committee on the internal market and consumer protection.
Instead, "video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society."
Parents | FreshBrain
The premise behind FreshBrain is that we need to enhance the technology education that our students are receiving today by providing a progressive environment where they can learn by doing. Few students today are getting the full educational experience - especially as it relates to technology. They are typically being provided a strong traditional academic education, and although most schools have some form of technology curriculum, they are not getting enough of an opportunity to explore, create and find their passion.
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
If access to higher education is a necessary element in expanding economic prosperity and improving the quality of life, then we need to address the problem of the growing global demand for education, as identified by Sir John Daniel.3 Compounding this challenge of demand from college-age students is the fact that the world is changing at an ever-faster pace. Few of us today will have a fixed, single career; instead, we are likely to follow a trajectory that encompasses multiple careers. As we move from career to career, much of what we will need to know will not be what we learned in school decades earlier. We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook...Safely - NYTimes.com
It's still up for debate how much personal information you should share with others on your Facebook profile. Some people would argue that the time for us to hide behind our masks is over. If we're professional, good employees at work and good sons and daughters at home, it shouldn't matter so much if a friend tags us in a photo which shows us tipping back beers at the weekend party. The fact is, everyone has a personal life and it shouldn't matter who sees it.
The End of Online Anonymity - ReadWriteWeb
It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.
On tomorrow's web, we're no longer going to be anonymous. In fact, one can argue that we're no longer anonymous today, but that's not entirely true. We're still hearing of people hijacking people's names and brands on social networking sites like Twitter, for example, and any MySpace search for a famous celebrity will return hundreds of results purporting to be the "official" page for that person. But those days of "faking it" may be fading fast.
Twitter / Howard Rheingold: @yannleroux Understanding ...
Understanding how activities online can be used against us: important literacy that isn't really taught. Parents don't know how
Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete - NYTimes.com
As social networking becomes ubiquitous, people with an otherwise steady grip on social etiquette find themselves flummoxed by questions about “unfriending” people: how to do it, when to do it and how to get away with it quietly.
“If someone with more than 1,000 friends unfriends me, I get offended,” said Greg Atwan, an author of “The Facebook Book,” a satirical guide. “But if someone only has 100 friends, you understand they’re trying to limit it to their intimates.”
Mr. Atwan, a recent graduate of Harvard (where Facebook got its start), recommends culling your friend list once a year to remove total strangers and other hangers-on. Keeping your numbers down gives you more leeway to be selective about whom you approve in the first place, he said.
The Unforeseen Consequences of the Social Web - ReadWriteWeb
With the extraordinary growth of the Internet and the interlinking of information that the social Web has brought with it, it's time to examine the footprints we leave on the Web as we move into the future that promises to "throttle the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs,'" as described so eloquently by Jason Calacanis.
Cheating Goes Digital | Edutopia
So, what's an alert teacher to do? First off, empower yourself by visiting Teachopolis.org, a Web site created by Robert Bramucci, vice chancellor of technology and learning services for southern California's South Orange Community College District. There, in the Halls of Justice section, Bramucci has compiled hundreds of common cheating techniques prevalent across the Web.
Some education experts, such as Howard Seeman, author of Preventing Classroom Discipline Problems: A Classroom Management Handbook, recommend that teachers do away with multiple-choice and true/false questions in favor of short essay responses. And some schools are cutting to the root of the problem by incorporating ethical and moral teachings into the curriculum.
The Profit Motive Behind The Sexualization Of 'Tween Girls
At Abercrombie & Fitch, little girls were sold thong underwear tagged with the phrases "eye candy" and "wink wink." In Britain, preschoolers could learn to strip with their very own Peekaboo Pole-Dancing Kits, complete with kiddie garter belts and play money. And 'tween readers of the magazine Seventeen discovered "405 ways to look hot" like Paris Hilton.
This kind of sexualization of 'tween girls - defined as those between the ages of 8 and 12 - in pop culture and advertising is a growing problem fueled by marketers' efforts to create cradle-to-grave consumers, a University of Iowa journalism professor argues in her new book.
EDUCAUSE’s Top 5 Teaching and Learning Challenges at bavatuesdays
The difference at UMW is, however, that they teach at a school that has invested in a staff of instructional technologists who are encouraged to innovate and proselytize these technologies to the community. All of these projects, and many more, were born from real relationships and conversations between people premised as much on ideas, bad jokes, and re-conceptualizations, as they were on new technologies and possibilities. And while these projects could have happened here in isolation, they didn’t. And they didn’t because they worked in collaboration with a group that both collects and promotes the work happening all over campus, a veritable propaganda machine that features what’s happening in a wide variety of classes in an attempt to make the great stuff happening all over campus both more visible and more imposing :) The tools we promote also allow us to promote good teaching and learning across the disciplines, and frame a community of innovation. Technology is key to this in many ways, but it is in the thinking it together—not the further isolation of another un-inspired LMS ruled over by a zombie-like IT schlep—that makes UMW so god damned badass.
Bridging Differences: Murray et al
Suppose we could redesign it all? Would we “incarcerate” 11- to 14-year-olds in 400 square-foot rooms, and demand they sit still for 45 minutes followed by 45 minutes, followed by…and expect much of what happens within those classes to “stick”? Or try to
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Suppose we could redesign it all? Would we “incarcerate” 11- to 14-year-olds in 400 square-foot rooms, and demand they sit still for 45 minutes followed by 45 minutes, followed by…and expect much of what happens within those classes to “stick”? Or try to frighten them into remembering, coax them with external rewards, shame them, and/or honor them. Or narrow our sights to a few high-stakes tests? (Or add more tests with stiffer penalties and rewards—and decide to start at age 3 and add hours to the school day?)
What is it we think young people entering the polling booth or the job market are actually missing? What might we design to prepare them for such roles? Not to mention the roles of friend or family member? And is 17 years of schooling/schooling/schooling an answer to these rarely asked questions? My old friend John Gatto—enemy of all required schooling—looks wiser and wiser.
Teaching and Learning Unleashed with Web 2.0 and Open Educational Resources | EDUCAUSE
Gwyn’s story illustrates how Web 2.0 and OER are creating an abundance of resources and emergent structures that enable a rich environment to support individual, personalized learning:
* an environment organized by the learner to define and achieve th
AT LAST: TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE EDUCATION
Fourth, the web-based social networks in which the children now participate pose a new challenge. The educational system must join them, because it cannot fight them. So the question is not any more: "Will there be a revolution in education?" But "Will th
Living in Dialogue: Doug Christensen: He Fought the Law...
How can one be dodging accountability when standardized measures do not align to standards? When they do not align to intellectual skills like problem solving, thinking skills, application skills, .........creativity, analysis, synthesis.......?
Standard
A Broader Definition of Merit - The Trouble With College Entry Exams
These and related problems are the subject of an eye-opening report from a commission convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The commission, led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard
Cell phones as learning tools « EducationPR
Teacher and technology advocate Liz Kolb says it’s self-defeating for schools to spend time, energy, and money creating policies to fight cell phones. Quite the opposite. In this book she details many ways to integrate these devices as tools for knowledge
Op-Ed Contributors - Transitions - Should the Obama Generation Drop Out? - NYTimes.com
I am not discounting the merits of a liberal education. Students at every level should be encouraged to explore subjects that will not be part of their vocation. It would be even better if more colleges required a rigorous core curriculum for students who
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