Latest “Look to Learns”

One of the more popular things I do is post “Look to Learn” activities. These are a combination of Thinking Routines with rich media.  The main idea of Thinking Routines is:

… it’s not enough for students to learn “critical thinking strategies,” but research from the Visible Thinking group at Harvard’s Project Zero has found that students also need to develop the disposition to engage in such a process. One approach is to promote a culture of questioning and thinking in the daily life of the classroom.

What I like to do is apply these great Thinking Routines to rich media stimulus.  I do this using a Tumblr Web site.  Below is a screengrab of the latest posts.  Enjoy! And let me know how students like them!

L2L_April-May2017

Integrating 5 Great Pedagogies

I recently did a Webinar on this topic.  Which is a bit absurd, really, because each deserves not only its own Webinar, but a full course to do justice to the ideas, models and research. But the point of the Webinar was to stimulate thinking in a couple areas:

  1. to see that a shift toward Intrinsic Motivation IS possible and robustly supported by rich pedagogies, and
  2. these pedagogies, when used in harmony, actually create synergies that maximise their benefits.

So the purpose of this post is to provide links to resources that people can pursue to learn more about each of the pedagogies.  As the graphic below suggests, there are LOTS more than 5 great pedagogies and many more than are shown here.  My goal was to choose a reasonable number and play with how they can be integrated.  You can access a recording of the Webinar if you are interested.

pedagogies

Self Determination Theory – Intrinsic Motivation

Positive Psychology – Personal Meaning, Flow & Grit

Web sites & Resources

Books

Understanding by Design™ – Deep Learning

Using backward design, does your school have a continuum of rich performance tasks that validate the vision and prompt interdisciplinary demonstrations of students’ understandings that require their transfer to new contexts?

Web sites & Resources

Books

Cultures of Thinking – Thinking Routines

Web sites & Resources

Books

SOLE – Self-Organised Learning Environments

Websites & Resources

Videos

The Purpose of Schooling?

See Think Wonder

1. What do you see?

2. What do you think is going on?

3. What does it make you wonder?

Use this EtherPad to brainstorm on these questions.

Add your opinions to this pad

Go to the CCFPilot?

Learning Environment

Where’s your best place to learn?

Connect – Extend – Challenge

1. How are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already knew?

2. What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?

3. What is still challenging or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?

SCIL Building tour – Stephen Harris from SCIL on Vimeo.

Gender Matters

Look to learn: Learn to look – the first step for nurturing lifelong learners.

I’ll be presenting a short break-out session at the two conference presented by Critical Agendas and The Crowther Centre:

Web 2.0’s rich digital media can be used to engage students in a lifelong spirit of inquiry. The trick is linking compelling media like videos, podcasts, cartoons and photojournalism with Looking Prompts that scaffold an appetite for critical and creative thinking. Furthermore the strategy readily advances gender-specific learning.

To support this session, download the overview handout and the following links will be useful.

Look to Learn Intro Presentation

Sample Look to Learn Activities

Gender

BoysEd

GirlsEd

Leveraging Web 2.0

Background on Visible Thinking

Harvard’s Project Zero

Ron Richhart

 

Women in the 50s

See – Think – Wonder

What gender assumptions did you see?
What do you think were the consequences for women?
What does it make you Wonder?

Recent Look to Learn Posts on Rebellion & Conformity

I’m working with some Year 11 English students who are studying Rebel Without a Cause and The Catcher in the Rye.  I have created a WebQuest called Fit In, Break Out or Break Down that explores the culture of 1950s America.  You are free to use this.

I have also combed through recent Look to Learn posts I’ve made that show examples of Conformity and Rebellion.  They are linked below.  Individually, many are great.  Taken collectively, the sparks are amazing and rich!

Take a look and add your comments about specific examples in space provided below.

Tumblr: New home for Look to Learn

From “All Rights Reserved” to “ReBlog?”

Background

When I first heard about Tumblr, I had little interest because I thought, “why do I need a more limited version of WordPress (of which I am a long time fan and user)?  Read this as “slow to get” emerging technologies or cautious in frittering away my and other educators’ limited time.  I’m hardly a “bandwagon” figure in the Ed Tech arena and am often a voice in the wilderness or ICT Cassandra sitting in my little Australian corner of the world (see The New WWW – Whatever, Whenever, Wherever).  But when I see a new tool or platform make teachers’ jobs easier and their students’ learning better – I can get pretty vociferous.  And now I “get” Tumblr – so WATCH OUT!

To get started use the detailed Tumblr Tutorial, but read on to see why this is so great.

A bit of background in case you’re even slower than me.  In a New York Times article Tumblr’s “media evangelist,” Mark Coatney, describes it as “a space in between Twitter and Facebook”  because it promotes minimal-click uploading and sharing of images, videos, audio clips and quotes in addition to Twitter’s short text bursts.  Like Twitter, Tumblr users also “Follow” other “tumblrs” which appear in the familiar “follow quilt” of icons in a member’s sidebar.  Like Facebook, Tumblr also promotes social networking.  Neither of these are a really big deal to me.  Here’s what is: Perhaps fear of missing out on “the next big thing” – and Tumblr’s popularity with the sought-after youth market – has prompted many media giants to post all or some of their content on their own Tumblr accounts. Big Media seems to go through split personality swings of protecting their content and joining in the Web sharing fun: at present, many major media players who publish significant images on their main “All Rights Reserved” Web sites also have Tumblr sites that share the same images.  At present this list includes Reuters, Time / Life, Newsweek, Aljazeera, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio and The New Yorker (see the more extensive list below).  Why this is important to us – developers of learning?  In a word, “Reblog.”  When you are logged in to Tumblr and view content from another Tumblr site, all you have to do to transfer the content of the post to your site is click the “Reblog” icon in the top right corner (as seen on this screen grab from the Time Magazine Tumblr site).  This immediately opens your Tumblr dashboard, embeds the content, links back to the original source and enables you to add further text.  For me this means a Looking Prompt in order to turn plain old engaging rich media into a creative thinking activity that can shift the entire culture of a classroom, school and student’s life of learning.   To make this process even easier, I have created a Look to Learn Tumblr site as well as the Sample Prompts page from which you can copy / paste / edit some Thinking Routines straight into your reblog. While copying prompts or visiting the Look to Learn Tumblr site for posts to reblog, also explore the “Follow Quilt” for content providers you might be interested in.  The benefit of following is that each time you go to your Tumblr site, you’re welcomed with the latest content from those you follow.  At the first instance, it makes sense to follow the Look to Learn Tumblr site because it shares everything I’ve considered valuable from those I follow and to which I’ve appended an appropriate prompt.  This way, a steady stream of potential activities arrives directly to you for use in your classroom and that you can share with colleagues in your school and professional online network.  This is a perfect example of how – in the Digital Era – we can work smarter and simultaneously help students become smarter.

In summary, every so often a new tool comes along that positively changes how we can “work the Web for education.”  Before that tool we could do the work, but it took a few clicks too many to really make it part of our daily lives.  Tumblr is such a tool because with it we now have one platform that easily sources content, posts it and enables sharing and community.  Previously, this required email or RSS feeds, a blog and a social network.  For the keen among us, working across these three platforms was no barrier because we knew the real challenges we faced before even they existed when we had to scan images, write in HTML and disseminate through email lists.  What’s great about Tumblr is that it erases the obstacles so that all every teacher can not only participate, but create!

What about WordPress?

The incredible wealth of great content and the ease with which you can both discover and create new posts may make some consider switching to Tumblr as the preferred platform.  For me, no.  There’s a lot more I like to do with a Web space (see ClassPortals and WebQuests to name 2), but the advantages offered by Tumblr have prompted me to switch to it as the medium for the main Look to Learn Web site.  In just the past week I’ve increased my creation of new “L2L”s tenfold so the decision was easy.  I look forward to sharing this approach with participants in upcoming workshops.

Tumblr Archives (all of which allow Reblogging)

The list below are my favorite “Big Media” content providers with Tumblr accounts.  This means that every one of them allows – even encourages you – to embed their content in your own Tumblr stream.  Amazing how quickly things can change from “All Rights Reserved” to “Reblog.”

For Content on Current Events & What’s Buzzing Virally

The first link for each site goes to the account’s “archive” page that lets you see a thumbnail of their recent posts.  This way you can tell if you find the content valuable.  If you do, go to the “stream” and “Follow” the site once you are logged-in to your own Tumblr account.

For Fun

We’ll chat about how Pinterest figures in shortly.

As always, let me know what you think.

 

Global Rich List

Go to the Global Rich List Web site.

Choose a currency (Canadian dollar might be closest to the Australian dollar).

Enter the amount you or  a friend might earn from a part-time job (for example someone working at a fastfood restaurant (one day / week might earn $35 / week x 52 = $1820 per year).

Try putting in the average income for a typical Australian: $64,641 per annum in 2010. (According to the Bureau of Statistics.)

CLAIM-SUPPORT-QUESTION

  1. Make a claim about the topic
  2. Identify support for your claim
  3. Ask a question related to your claim

E-Waste Story

Here’s an explanation of up e-waste from The Story of Stuff

What could you do?

See – Think – Wonder

  1. What did you see?
  2. What did  you think about it?
  3. What did it make you wonder about?  What could you and your friends do?
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