Crucial Thought Rss

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Chris selected as K12OnlineConference keynote speaker Each year the K12OnlineConference provides tremendous professional development for free, and entirely online. This year, they have selected me as one of their keynote speakers. I am thrilled to have been chosen and look forward to participating in the conversation. Read the full post announcing all the keynote speakers here.

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Two quick links on Cognitive Load Theory I've been fielding lots of questions lately about Cognitive Load Theory. Here are two quick links that may be useful. First is an article talking about the practical implications of CLT on the design of learning. The second are some "recent" (as of 2003) developments regarding CLT. Happy reading! Update: I clarified the second...

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Practical advice on kids and Android app development After hearing about my students' success developing an Android app, I've gotten several emails asking for more details as to how I practically worked with my kids. Here are some pointers that I offered to the first person that emailed me, perhaps they are of some use to you. Please note that your mileage may vary. It's ok to not be...

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Publishing an App Inventor app to the Android Market As I mentioned earlier, my students and I published an Android app to the Android Market. See those links for more information on the background. This post is decidedly technical. First, once we finished the coding process, we packaged the app for to download to the computer. This is an option in App Inventor. This downloaded an .apk file....

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Designing and publishing an Android app with kids This post is designed to provide some context around how/why we decided to build this app. The more technical details of the code and how we published it will come in a future post. My students and I recently completed and published an Android app, and here's how we did it. First, the genesis for this goes back to a question I asked...

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Learning without Borders – revamped questions

Category : General

Thanks for the feedback thus far, keep it coming!

As per a great suggestion, I revamped question 2 to be a bit more friendly in general. For one, it didn’t allow much answering from students inside the western culture so mentioned.

So here is the revamped version and a choice depending on where students are located…

  • How is culture being affected by the United States of America? (for schools outside the USA)
  • How is culture being affected by other countries (choose a country or region)? (for schools inside the USA)

Next question, should I add the word your?

As in, How is your culture being affected?

Or is that far too relative, should it be, How is your region’s culture being affected?

Curious. A good question is worth so much, isn’t it? Yay UbD!

Comments (2)

I like the adjustments you have made. Yes, “your” is tricky because it is so relative. To adequately answer it requires defining the term per individual (my culture as a ________ teen, American, ethnicity within America, male, female, etc).

I like “How is your region’s culture being affected?” because that helps define the term up front and shows students that their own, local culture is being impacted by larger pressures just as other countries are.

What about changing the maybe your to OUR- be inclusive.

How is OUR culture being affected by other countries (choose a country or region)? (for schools inside the USA)

I don’t know what age group you teach but I did a similar thing for my 8-9 year olds some time ago and they found it very difficult to identify what their culture was. You really need something to relate it to- if you have only ever lived inside your own culture it is hard to qualify what you do that is just yours an not other cultures.

Children needed to understand that McDonalds and Burger King were not actually New Zealand icons before they could identify some of the things that were part of OUR culture!!!!




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