Category: events

Ten years ago I joined 25 other pioneers in a grand experiment in online education. I was accepted into the first cadre of the Pepperdine Graduate School of Education and Psychology’s fully online Masters in Educational Technology (OMET) program. What seems so commonplace now was almost unheard of then.

In the past ten years, online classes have become mainstream, but I believe that the experience I had is still exemplary. It modeled community of practice, collaboration, communication, and constructivist pedagogy. We used primitive tools, but we really used them well!

The Pepperdine OMET program is this years recipient of the highest honor of the United States Distance Learning Association, the Platinum Award for Best Practices for Online Distance Learning Programming from a national field of entrants. It’s well deserved!

The education I got from this program gave me the vocabulary and the academic grounding that helped me put my vague thoughts about education into practice. The books I read, the lessons I learned, and the colleagues I met still impact what I do everyday. I owe any ability to articulate coherent thoughts about learning to this program.

If you are attending NECC in Atlanta this year, there will be celebration of this 10th anniversary of OMET and this well-deserved award. Hope you can join us there!

Sylvia

The National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta, Georgia, is about 4 weeks away (June 25-28) and things are getting exciting! For Generation YES, this is “the big one” — the conference that we really go all out for. We even have a yearly “theme” for our booth. For most conferences, we don’t really do much decorating, but for NECC, well, we try. Of course, for us, that means imagination over money! But that’s always more fun, isn’t it?

Last year was our tenth anniversary, so we went to the party store and bought party favors and decorations with a Happy 10th Birthday! theme. That was fun (and cheap!) The Generation YES students are always the best decoration, after all.

This year we had a tougher time, but finally, Megan’s southern picnic idea won the day. We plan to buy a roll of astroturf (cheaper than renting conference carpet) and find a picnic table to use as a meeting table (cheaper than renting conference tables – see a pattern here?) We’ll be back at the party store looking for red checked tablecloths and picnic accessories for decor. We want to use part of our booth to set up a “drive-in” theater, with blankets on the grass and a film projector showing some great student projects, videos, and other movies.

And of course, students will be there to “walk the talk” of student empowerment and ownership of their learning experience.

The Constructivist Celebration pre-conference event is completely sold-out, so on Sunday, we will be playing in the Atlanta Botanical Garden with almost 100 constructivist educators and our partners from the Constructivist Consortium. We have students from nearby Barber Middle School in Cobb County coming to help out and show off the technology skills they’ve learned in their TechYES class this year. Tech4Learning, one of our Constructivist Consortium partners, has already sent Barber Middle School packs of their software so that the students could practice ahead of time.

At NECC, we have a full round of events, panels, sessions and of course, time spent in our booth, talking to people about student empowerment through technology. I’ll put up another post with the full schedule next week.

During the conference, the Constructivist Consortium will be giving away some amazing prizes–more on that later as well, this post is getting too long!

We love meeting old friends and new, and NECC is always a great place to do just that. Hope to see you in HOT-lanta, as they say, so come by and chill out with us at the Generation YES picnic!

Join colleagues in a daylong celebration of creativity, computing & constructivist learning at the beautiful Atlanta Botanical Garden on June 24th, 2007. This is the day before the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta, GA starts.

The Constructivist Celebration is the inaugural event for the new Constructivist Consortium, an industry cooperative designed to showcase software and curriculum products that support creativity, constructivist learning, and student empowerment.

Peter Reynolds and Gary Stager kick the day off with an inspirational keynote address. Then it’s your turn to jump into exciting hands-on projects led by some of the nation’s finest ed tech leaders. The day ends with an opportunity to share your creations and a panel discussion, Sustaining Constructivist Learning, featuring leaders of LCSI, Generation YES, Schoolkit, Tech4Learning, and Fablevision.

In addition to a day full of learning adventures, your registration includes a southern barbecue lunch and a fabulous collection of materials.

• LCSI will provide each participant with a single-user license copy of MicroWorlds EX & MicroWorlds Jr.
• Tech4Learning will provide each participant with a single-user licensed copy of Frames, Pixie, ImageBlender, WebBlender & Twist.
• Materials from other members of the consortium will also be available.

We have invited the TechYES students and teacher from nearby Barber Middle School to participate as well.

The Constructivist Celebration @ NECC
June 24, 2007, 9:00 – 4:00 PM
Atlanta Botanical Garden
Atlanta, Georgia

All for only $25!

Find out more and register today at:

http://www.constructivistconsortium.org

Register today! Space is extremely limited!

(posted with permission of Don Mesibov, The Institute for Learner Centered Education)

The Foundation
Underlying classroom practices

1. Safe and nurturing environment – do you create a classroom environment where students feel free to think critically and express their views without fear?
2. Public speaking – do you structure lessons that require and nurture public speaking, in pairs and small groups as well as in front of the entire class?
3. Opportunities for success – do you provide every student with frequent opportunities to experience “success”?
4. Validation of student work and responses – do you let each student know when his or her efforts are praiseworthy?

The Exploratory Phase
The beginning of the lesson or unit

5. Grab attention – do you begin class in a manner likely to encourage students to look forward to what comes next?
6. Prepare students to engage – do you create activities that focus student thinking, excite their imaginations, and prepare them to meet and exceed the learning standards.
7. Assess and access prior knowledge – do you design activities that will help students (and you) to access and assess their prior knowledge, interests, and needs?

The Discovery Phase
The part of the lesson in which students learn and demonstrate they are meeting the learning objectives of the lesson

8. The learning objectives – do you clearly state the one, two, or three specific things you want your students to learn? Have you cast these specific objectives in terms of what your students will understand, relate to, perform or create? Are the objectives aligned with appropriate learning standards?
9. Authentic task – do you frame learning tasks that are as authentic as possible and that will allow students to demonstrate their skill with or understanding of the learning objective(s)?
10. Ownership – do you create learning tasks that enable students to feel pride and assume responsibility for their own learning?
11. Options – do you offer students optional ways to accomplish the learning task, and therefore reach the learning objectives(s)?
12. Multiple intelligences – do you offer students frequent opportunities to utilize their stronger intelligences (recognizing that there are going to be times when they will also have to rely on their weaker ones)?
13. Appropriate resources – do you make sure that the resources necessary to accomplish the assigned student-centered activities are available, or can be made available, to students?
14. Interventions – do you look for opportunities (teachable moments) to intervene either in response to student questions or in reaction to student work, by “working the room” while students are engaged in an activity?
15. Cognitively rich questions – do you seize every opportunity: to intervene in student work with questions that require students to think critically; to phrase task questions to require critical thinking; and to require students to create their own cognitively rich questions that create disequilibrium?
16. Reflection – do you, during a learning experience, create opportunities for students to think about their thinking, to assess their progress and their decisions thus far? Do you, at the end of each day’s lesson, provide students with a brief closure activity that elicits evidence of something students have learned as a result of the lesson?
17. Assessment measures – do you utilize multiple forms of assessment to judge student performance, including effective use of rubrics? Is instructional improvement the primary reason you assess students? Is teacher observation structured to be the most meaningful form of assessment?

Copyright (c) 2005, Institute for Learner Centered Education.

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The Institute of Learner Centered Education website offers a number of valuable resources for the constructivist educator, including definitions, resources for applying standards-based constructivism to lessons, a journal, and an email newsletter that always includes thoughtful information like these 17 Intentions. A nice opportunity for constructivist educators is the Institute’s annual summer conference (July 23 – 27) at Grand Island, New York, within sight of Niagara Falls. This unique conference models constructivist teaching and learning — no talking heads here! Visit The Institute for Learner Centered Education for information.