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Dominant logic often isolates higher learning research from the teachers who need to apply it. There are pay walls that keep average everyday teachers like me from nosing around in matters reserved for ivory towers. It sort of ticks me off sometimes. Why can't ivory tower people "adopt" classroom practitioners (like me and many others) who really "get into" reading research and applying it in our classroom so we can actually access the material we need to read? You would think that people would want "real" teachers to read the research on learning and teaching. Instead we often get insulted for not knowing it or using it when we don't have access in the first place. No entry allowed Today I was perusing around research around what makes learning meaningful to students and came across this article " Phases of Meaningful Learning " but have to be a "member" or pay a one time $25 to access the article. Well it may just b...

English: A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Research news and information I've been reading lately. Professional Development Adds Up for Maine's Math Teachers | Edutopia "Professional development is the essential vitamin for boosting learning with laptops, according to researchers studying Maine's one-to-one program. David Silvernail, director of the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation, said a two-year randomized control trial of middle school math teachers was "successful on all fronts." Researchers examined the impact of high quality, ongoing professional development that included face-to-face and online workshops, peer coaching and mentoring, and site visits." tags: research 1:1 laptop education Change Magazine - September-October 2010 It i...

Pavement rubber band (Photo credit: nicolasnova ) When surveying writers, I always scrutinize their resume to see if the person is a paper or a pavement kind of person. A paper person has read a lot of paper and perhaps written a lot of paper. He knows the theories and how things should work.She read a lot of studies and may know a lot of people. There is certainly a place for paper. A pavement person hits the pavement every day. She is doing it. He speaks from experiences that are real and that happened yesterday or today. She is very practical. I think that the most successful educators are paper and pavement. I know college professors who are always talking to teachers. Who are looking at research studies for practical applications. These professors care about their own teaching practice as well and are on the pavement teaching in their own class. Paper Tigers can devour learning When we have to be afraid is when paper rules the day. We have too much of this. WE literal...

Google's nGram viewer lets you search over 5 million books for the instances of words. Imagine it as a search engine into the uses of words since 1800. To better understand it, view the Tedx Boston talk " A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words " by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. It is quite interesting and still a big imperfect as the uses of words change so dramatically. You can see that in this search (shown in the chart below) I did for the words school, teacher, and principal. Do we now call principals administrators instead? If we do, then administrator is used in many professions and the results won't just show schools. Comparing Teacher, Principal, and School and the use of these words in books. I also find it fascinating in the chart belowwhere I searched for educational technology, project based learning, differentiated instruction, classroom management, class size. Here we can see that as we talked about class size in ...

Free Tools Highlights of this conversation to me were the conversation on the free tools Microsoft has rolled out for teachers. Things like AutoCollage ,   PhotoSynth , World Wide Telescope , Mouse Mischief ,   SongSmith , and more including the Microsoft Free Tools Guide . There are some really handy, stable offline alternatives that you can install on your computers at school where you have bandwidth issues or just like the stability of having  a program installed on your machine. Skydrive We talked about what Skydrive really means for students (you no longer have to open up that MLA paper into a Google Doc or other tool and lose all your formatting but can use skydrive and open the file on any computer with Microsoft Word or in the free online Microsoft Word editing tool.)  I've found that the only programs that can handle MLA papers are offline word processors so this is amazing news for teachers who have students write term papers! Skydrive also gives us...

This new paper from BECTA (in the UK), " Evidence on the impact of technology on learning and educational outcomes " says: Schools that take a systematic and planned approach to using technology to support learning achieve better outcomes with technology than other schools. These ‘e-mature’ schools have a well-developed vision for learning and lead and manage their use of technology in support of this. So, I challenge you to read this paper today and ask yourself: Is my school e-mature or e-immature? The spastic, stop and go, misinformed, knee jerk type planning that many of us have come through should become a thing of the past as we move to planned, systemic, overall plans for our entire schools. It is never about just ONE teacher. Although one teacher can open eyes and show it can be done - it is about overall systemic change. Sometimes people point to me and say "but you're only one teacher, what is the rest of your school doing?" Well, my schoo...

Fascinating reading about how some countries just don't have the gender gap in math that we see. Of interest to me, however, would not be the gap but also the aggregate -- are these countries where there is no gap also at the top of mathematics performance? Also, there is a self-perpetuating bit of it. My husband and I both went to an engineering college (Georgia Tech) and love math. Algebra is one of the great subject loves of my life. (I know I'm a geek.) So, is it any wonder that my daughter is the top in the standardized test scores? No. I do find it interesting that she wasn't the top of the scores in class, however. This article in the Boston Globe says "boys outperform girls on a math test given to children worldwide, but the gender gap is less pronounced in countries where women and men have similar rights and opportunities, according to a study published Thursday. "In more gender-neutral societies, girls are as good as boys in mathematics," st...