innovation3

Steps to Success

So I [Cindi Rigsbee] learned from my own experience that as we work to motivate our own students and increase their engagement in the classroom and thus their learning, we must remember to:

• Establish an environment that celebrates success.

• Establish an environment that supports struggling students, enriches the high-flyers, and pushes those in the middle as well.

• Establish an environment that says “we’re a community of learners in here.”

This type of classroom culture can only be attained when the teacher makes an effort to really know the students—their strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, fears, and dreams. This assessment can be made as a result of surveys, journal entries, interviews, conferences, and informal conversations. Imagine that as a teaching strategy: just talking to the students to find out who they are!

As for me, I would call my dance teacher and let her know that I won’t be returning, but I can’t. She never told me her name.

A National Board-certified teacher in the area of English/Language Arts, Cindi Rigsbee has most recently served as a middle school literacy coach and district mentor to beginning teachers.

from: mwesch | January 24, 2011

This video was produced as a contribution to the EDUCAUSE book, The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited by Richard Katz and available as an e-Book at http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud or commercially at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967285399/ref=kinw_rke_... Produced in 2007 as a conversation starter in small groups. Released in 2011 as a conversation starter online.

Some what to say how Twitter and other Web 2.0 is a departure from the past. Margaret Atwood see Twitter as a logical development of humanity’s natural need to communicate.

BARCELONA, Spain — For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky-is-falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self-taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive.

Living a largely hand-to-mouth existence here on his part-time teacher’s salary, he sent one post after another into the Internet wilderness. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny-pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit-card-wielding Irish, Greeks and Spaniards who shared the euro with them.

But now that the European sovereign debt crisis is rattling world markets, driving the euro lower almost every day and raising doubts about the future of the monetary union, his voluminous musings have become a must-read for an influential and growing global audience, including policy makers in the White House.

What degree of influence does a blogger have when writing the truth? Does your answer apply equally well to the influence of student bloggers? Do your students know this?

Simulation of 18-Month Mission to Mars Begins Today

MOSCOW (AP) — An international team of researchers climbed into a set of windowless steel capsules Thursday to launch a 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars intended to help real space crews of the future cope with confinement, stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel.

The six-member, all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese will follow a tight regimen of experiments and exercise under video surveillance.

The Mars-500 experiment — conducted by the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems in cooperation with the European Space Agency and China’s space training center — aims to reproduce the conditions of space travel, with exception of weightlessness.

The researchers will communicate with the outside world via the Internet — delayed and occasionally disrupted to imitate the effects of space travel. They will eat canned food similar to that currently offered on the International Space Station and shower only once a week or so. Crew members will have two days off a week, except when emergencies are simulated, though they will still be in the capsules.

A real mission to Mars is decades away because of huge costs and massive technological challenges, particularly the task of creating a compact shield that will protect the crew from deadly space radiation. President Barack Obama said last month that he foresaw sending astronauts to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s.

The crew members said they were confident of success.

This project is turning out to be a rich example of collaboration using VoiceThread. Care to add how you use VT in edu?

I found this Free Technology for Teachers’ post via a tweet from MatthiasHeil, an English and religious education teacher from Germany according to his Twitter profile: http://twitter.com/MatthiasHeil/. Thanks, Matthias!