Textbooks are symbols of centuries-old education. They're often outdated as soon as they hit students' desks. Acting "by the textbook" implies compliance and a lack of creativity. It's time to ditch those textbooks--and those textbook assumptions about learning In Ditch That Textbook, teacher and blogger Matt Miller encourages educators to throw out meaningless, pedestrian teaching and learning practices. He empowers them to evolve and improve on old, standard, teaching methods. Ditch That Textbook is a support system, toolbox, and manifesto to help educators free their teaching and revolutionize their classrooms.
9 grade levels. 17 topics. 46 lessons. 46 projects. A year-long curriculum that covers everything you need to discuss on internet safety and efficiency. Digital Citizenship–probably one of the most important topics students will learn between kindergarten and 8th and too often, teachers are thrown into it without a roadmap. Well, here it is–your guide to what our children must know at what age to thrive in the community called the internet. It’s a roadmap for blending all pieces into a cohesive, effective student-directed cyber-learning experience that accomplishes ISTE’s general goals
Writings by a thinker—a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a cybernetician, and a poet—whose ideas about mind and brain were far ahead of his time. Warren S. McCulloch was an original thinker, in many respects far ahead of his time. McCulloch, who was a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician, and a poet, termed his work “experimental epistemology.” He said, “There is one answer, only one, toward which I've groped for thirty years: to find out how brains work.” Embodiments of Mind, first published more than fifty years ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to recent developments in neuroscience and neural networks. It includes two classic papers coauthored with Walter Pitts, one of which applies Boolean algebra to neurons considered as gates, and the other of which shows the kind of nervous circuitry that could be used in perceiving universals. These first models are part of the basis of artificial intelligence. Chapters range from “What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number,” and “Why the Mind Is in the Head,” to “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain” (with Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, and Walter Pitts), “Machines that Think and Want,” and “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (with Walter Pitts). Embodiments of Mind concludes with a selection of McCulloch's poems and sonnets. This reissued edition offers a new foreword and a biographical essay by McCulloch's one-time research assistant, the neuroscientist and computer scientist Michael Arbib.
Whether you've just figured out the double click or you're ready to become a power user, I Have Computers in My ClassroomNow What? will take you into classrooms where teachers like you share effective ideas for making digital technology part of your teaching every day in amazing, doable ways. In I Have Computers in My ClassroomNow What? Bob Johnstone takes you on a tour of the schools, classrooms, and minds of teachers who have successfully incorporated computers into a host of learning situations across the content areas. Through Johnstone's extensive interviews with practicing teachers, you'll find out how programs common to many computerssuch as Word, Excel, and PowerPointcan teach students powerful concepts about print, publication, and presentation while they're doing math or language arts. You'll also find out how using video cameras can build writing and speaking skills as well as science content knowledge, and you'll see what great opportunities the Internet provides for authentic inquiry. Johnstone both distills the wisdom of teaching veterans and also lets them share directly with you, teacher to teacher, about why it's worth it to use technology, as well as what works, what doesn't, and how technology can support not only instruction, but also planning. Complete with handy hints, solutions to commonly encountered problems, and even a glossary of "Nerd Words," I Have Computers in My ClassroomNow What? is the slim, practical guide to demystifying technology in the classroom that you've been waiting for.
Theology is inherently theatrical, rooted in God's performance on the world stage and oriented toward faith seeking performative understanding in the theatre of everyday life. Following Hans Urs von Balthasar's magisterial, five-volume Theo-Drama, a growing number of theologians and pastors have been engaging more widely with theatre and drama, producing what has been recognized as a "theatrical turn" in theology. This volume includes thirteen essays from theologians and pastors who have contributed in distinct ways to this theatrical turn and who desire to deepen interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and theatre. The result is an unprecedented collection of essays that embodies and advances theatrical theology for the purpose of enriching theological reflection and edifying the church.
The Smart Classroom Management Way is a collection of the very best writing from ten years of Smart Classroom Management (SCM). It isn't, however, simply a random mix of popular articles. It's a comprehensive work that encompasses every principle, theme, and methodology of the SCM approach. The book is laid out across six major areas of classroom management and includes the most pressing issues, problems, and concerns shared by all teachers. The underlying SCM themes of accountability, maturity, independence, personal responsibility, and intrinsic motivation are all there and weave their way throughout the entirety of the book. Together, they form a simple, unique, and sometimes contrarian approach to classroom management that anyone can do. Whether you're an elementary, middle, or high school teacher, The Smart Classroom Management Way will give you the strategies, skills, and know-how to turn any group of students into the motivated, well-behaved class you love teaching.
Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace. But just how valid is this argument? In Oversold and Underused, one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively. Cuban points out that historical and organizational economic contexts influence how teachers use technical innovations. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.
Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: "With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice. "For forty years, Larry Cuban has been a voice of thoughtful analysis amid the overwrought rhetoric of American education reform. His distinctive contribution--updated, deepened, and extended in this book--has been to focus our attention on the persistent gap between the misconceptions of policy elites and the realities of daily practice in the classroom. One hopes that the next generation of American educators will learn the essential lessons of Cuban's analysis more deeply than the current generation. Young people considering a career in education should hold the lessons of this book close to their hearts." -- Richard F. Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership, Harvard Graduate School of Education "Larry Cuban's well-written book convincingly demonstrates why current education reforms don't work, can't work, and won't work." -- Diane Ravitch, research professor of education, New York University "Anyone with a deep interest in public schools should read Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice. Cuban takes the reader through the history of earnest efforts to improve our schools--through technology, structural reforms, and accountability systems--and shows why they have met with mixed and often disappointing results. His recommendations for us are both cautionary and hopeful, and always respectful of the dilemmas that teachers face each day they walk through the classroom door." -- Gary Yee, board director, District Four, Oakland Unified School District, and retired vice chancellor, Educational Services, Peralta Community College District Larry Cuban is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.
