Serendipity35

I read an article recently on the InsideHigherEd site about preparing graduate students to teach in colleges. It's not new to hear a call for better preparation in graduate education for those students who wish to pursue that path. Students who are better trained to teach seems like a no-brainer, but it has never been a priority.

The article says that may be changing. Maybe it's because tenure-track positions are becoming much harder to find. Fewer jobs means more competition. In many colleges, adjuncts are teaching the majority of course sections, and that squeezes the opportunities even tighter.

Conducting research and obtaining grant money have long been the most important things for promotion and tenure at top-tier universities. To say that students who will continue in academia should be effective in the classroom is still radical. If those students plan to seek employment at a liberal arts or community college, the need for that teacher training is much greater.

Teaching certificate programs are actually showing up at some institutions. The Graduate Student Instructor Teaching and Resource Center at the University of California at Berkeley is conducting a survey of the 70 or so institutions that already offer such a program as UC plans its own program. Though their survey results are still preliminary, it shows that at those colleges the number of students working towards a teaching certificate will increase by about 10% this year.

At MIT, 90 doctoral students signed up when the program was first offered two years ago by the Teaching and Learning Laboratory. This year, 140 graduate students are working towards teaching certificates.

Is this trend because of an increased commitment to preparing graduate students for teaching? Is it the formalization of a philosophy that already existed at many universities? I hope so. Is there a "false dichotomy between teaching and research" as is suggested in the article? No, there's a real dichotomy and research still trumps teaching on those promotion and tenure committees.

Advanced Micro Devices and Microsoft were among the co-sponsors who showed up at the White House recently to join President Obama as he launched the National STEM Video Game Challenge.

It is in two parts. One competition allows students grades five through eight to compete for a cash prizes, plus tech gear from AMD and Microsoft. They must design an original video game to win.

Another competition is geared for college-age contestants. A cash prize of $25,000 awaits the creator of the top technology with "high potential to reach underserved communities" such as games built for basic mobile phones that address urgent educational needs among at-risk youth.

The Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision Awards Program competition is now in its 19th year. The program addresses many of the concerns addressed by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) programs across the country.

The ExploraVision program, sponsored by Toshiba and administered by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), challenges teams of 2-4 students to research scientific principles and current technologies as the basis for designing innovative technologies that could exist in 20 years.

Students on the four first-place ExploraVision winning teams will each receive a $10,000 U.S. Series EE Savings Bond valued at maturity. Students on second-place teams will each receive a $5,000 bond valued at maturity.

Teachers can learn more about ExploraVision and how to use it as a tool in the classroom through a series of Web Seminars at the NSTA Learning Center  starting Wednesday, September 15, 2010.

For more information visit http://www.exploravision.org

I didn't make it to ISTE 2010, but I have been following some of the tweets and posts on it. One group that I have been following for awhile is the Flat Classroom Project.

They are doing a session at ISTE called "Seven Steps to Flatten Your Classroom" about the steps to connect your classroom locally and globally to create meaningful and authentic learning communities using Web 2.0 tools and emerging technologies. They have a Ning Discussion online too.

The Flat Classroom Projects have picked up a number of education awards and connected thousands of students, educators and education leaders around the world. They are structured on a pedagogy that embraces emerging technologies to harness the energy of creative learning.

The presentation shares this seven step pedagogy:

STEP 1 - Connection: Connect yourself, connect your administration, connect your students locally and then globally (taxonomy of global connection)

STEP 2 - Communication: Synchronous and asynchronous approaches - The flat classroom using educational networking as a unifying asynchronous communication tool. In conjunction with collaboration tools such as a wiki and along with teacher cooperation and organization skills classrooms can communicate effectively and develop ongoing relationships. The classrooms may then cooperate with objectives, projects, and assignments created on these common platforms. However, the effective flat classroom structure has both synchronous and asynchronous communication methods.

STEP 3 - Citizenship: Digital citizenship - how to be a Digiteacher - Digital Citizenship education starts at a young age as we cover all of the aspects of digital citizenship with elementary education including topics of access, safety, digital citizenship, etc. in walled gardens or by adopting a webkinz and moving towards open participation in educational spaces during the high school years.

STEP 4 - Contribution and Collaboration: How to measure and verify the quality of online participation using Web 2.0 tools. Collaboration obstacles and how to overcome these. How to involve the global community.

STEP 5 - Choices: Differentiating instruction with Technology

STEP 6 - Creation: Blooms Taxonomy & 21st Century Learning Objectives

STEP 7 - Celebration: Virtual global student presentations and summits

All of this started with reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat.

The folks behind the project:

Julie Lindsay, current E-Learning Coordinator at Beijing (BISS) International School, China. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, over the past 10 years she has been teaching and leading the use of technology in schools in Zambia, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Qatar and now China.

Vicki Davis is a teacher and the IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. Vicki co-created three award winning international wiki-centric projects, the Flat Classroom project, the Horizon project, and Digiteen. These projects have linked more than 500 students from both public and private schools in such countries as Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Spain, Qatar and the US. These collaborative projects harnessing the most powerful Web 2.0 tools available including wikis, blogs, digital storytelling, podcasts, social bookmarking, and more.