r.u.a.ware
Diana Laufenberg:
How to learn? From mistakes
Access to information has changed completely over the last decades; kind of makes one wonder why we go to school anymore, wouldn't you say? In General Adult Education, can we truly say that we offer students a rich enough learning experience to justify going to a specific location in order to learn? Diana Laufenberg presents, in this short TEDx address, how to make the trip to school, or a centre for that matter, even more worthwhile.
Diana Laufenberg is very generous of her ideas and thoughts. If you liked her presentation, I strongly suggest you visit her website/blog, especially the Learning Visually section of the Keynotes/Presentations tab - and follow her on Twitter @dlaufenberg (if you're okay with the fact that not all of her tweets are related to education).
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Pedagogical Quickie
Aiming Higher_Bloom and
Vygotsky In the Classroom
My friend and colleague Judith Cantin and I were working on the idea that Bloom's Taxonomy and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development could be put to concrete use in the classroom. As we worked on this, we came up with an idea that we hope you'll find worth exploring: targeted learning should fall in the ZPD, but the learning activity shouldn't. This activity should mobilize knowledge, skills or competencies from a higher level of Bloom's taxonomy, whenever possible.
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Everybody's entitled to my opinion ;o)
Evaluation is the tail that wags the dog
Imagine if laptops and tablets like the iPad along with an Internet connection were allowed in the exam room… How would that impact our evaluation practices? In my opinion, this is one of the things we need to help change the experience of learning in centres from the traditional approach to a true competency-based approach.
Many jump to the conclusion that some students would cheat on the test if technology was allowed in the exam room. As a matter of fact, this is quite true… The probability that students would cheat on a trivia-based/bottom-of-Bloom's test is probably very close to 100%. The true problem lies in the questions asked. If a Google search gives you a quick answer to an exam question, perhaps we shouldn't be asking that question for evaluation purposes. No one would do so in the real world. Who has a job where "googling" answers or submitting data to an app is sufficient to get a paycheck? If this is the information age, it's what you do with, how you interpret that information that is key to one's success, not the rote retrieval of information.
One must admit that many of the new end-of-course evaluations - evaluation situations, exams or "épreuves" - are not quite instep with a competency based approach to learning. It is very understandable. Change takes time. Those old exam writing habits are hard to shake. In education, as in many other domains, we tend to give importance to the easily measurable instead of measuring what's truly important. So many of the new exams look like the old ones, but they're now buried in text-heavy confusing contexts. This is not a competency-based approach to evaluation. What's the solution? Well, one of the elements of the solution is to let student-owned and school board-owned computers and tablets in the exam room… that'll force some change in the type of questions and tasks we ask of learners to demonstrate their level of competency. This will help get rid of the easily "googlable" questions for higher-order thinking skills oriented tasks.
But there's no magic here… poor exams can still be written even if technology is allowed in the exam room. Beyond the Definition of the Evaluation Domain, the end-of-course outcomes and technology, a fair and truly relevant exam can only be written by a creative up-to-date pedagogue. That could be you!
Let me know what you think @malalande on Twitter.
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This month
October 9
New Frontiers Ped Day
NOVA Career Centre
October 17, 18 & 19
PROCEDE Conference
Hôtel Mont St-Gabriel, Sainte-Adèle
October 26
AQIFGA autumn seminar
" L'accompagnement des élèves à besoins particuliers à la FGA "
Hôtel Gouverneur, Trois-Rivières
mid-October
Look for the
RECIT 2012-2013 Service Offer
It should arrive in your centre
by mid-October
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 Some Recent Tweets
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Marc-André Lalande @malalande |
Technology itself does not change teaching practices; a change of practice takes advantage of technology.
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Avi Spector @a_spector |
Food for thought: One teacher's take on some "do's and don'ts" for flipping the classroom.
Worth Following
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Jonathan Bergmann @jonbergmann |
lets have expectations of stds, but diversity of how they demonstrate their mastery of content... #21stedchat
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Tom Whitby @tomwhitby |
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Newsletters Archives 2012
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