Thing-23

From Blogs, RSS, Flickr and photos, online video, widgets, tagging, Delicious, Google Docs, Slideshare, Podcasting and Wikis this has been a great journey. It’s not always been easy but it has been so worth it! So often the technology is an add-on that teachers don’t have time to include. But here’s what’s emerged as the connector that 23 things encompasses and why we need to include this as part and parcel of what we do. It’s all about the 4 Teaching and Learning principles from the Michigan Curriculum Framework;

1. Higher-Order Thinking: Instruction involves
students in manipulating information and ideas by
synthesizing, generalizing, explaining or arriving at
conclusions that produce new meaning and
understandings for them.
2. Deep Knowledge: Instruction addresses central
ideas of a topic or discipline with enough
thoroughness to explore connections and
relationships and to produce relatively complex
understanding.
3. Substantive Conversation: Students engage in
extended conversational exchanges with the teacher
and/or peers about subject matter in a way that
builds an improved and shared understanding of
ideas or topics.
4. Connections to the World Beyond the Classroom:
Students make connections between substantive
knowledge and either public problems or personal
experiences.

I have developed higher order thinking, some deep knowledge, had substantive conversations, connected, and learned about Web 2.0 tools and beyond. Thanks for all you’ve done to organize the course in such an engaging and thought provoking way.