elearning_label_schools

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Using Computers in Class: An Introduction for Teachers

04 März 2013

This article provides an introduction to how teachers can successfully incorporate computers as teaching tools in their classroom. 21st C. students are often well-versed in this technology, and consider computers as necessary to learning as textbooks, notebooks, and pens. The same is not always true for their teachers. This resource points out several useful tools and instructions that can help teachers view computers not as a threat, but as an ally in the classroom. 

ICT in education, ICT, education and ICTs, computer-based educational tools, educational materials, ICT in schools
Verzeichnis

A Framework for Teachable Collaborative Problem Solving Skills

04 März 2013

 

Collaborative problem solving draws upon social and cognitive skills that can be analysed in classroom environments where they are both measurable and teachable. This paper provides a conceptual framework of collaborative problem solving that is informed by findings from fields of research as diverse as cognitive science, education, social psychology and psycholinguistics.
eSkills, new skills, Skills, Creativity
News

“Innovation in education is a global matter”

04 März 2013

We recently spoke with Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Education at Microsoft Corporation, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2013. Salcito works with education institutions to embrace technology to optimize learning environments and student achievement. 

 

What challenges does fomenting innovation in schools currently face?

 

At the moment, youth unemployment in some European Union member states exceeds 50%. The preparation of young people for the labor market has to be improved, especially since companies hire their workforce primarily on the basis of skills. Collaboration, communication, and leadership skills should be at the center of schools’ education. 

 

21st-century learning should be competency based, because becoming prepared for life and work is crucial, more important than content knowledge alone. The problem is that pupils today are awarded grades based on content knowledge. They often progress to the next level despite low grades in certain subject areas, which actually signals a lack of foundational knowledge they’ll need in the future. 

 

Proper assessment should therefore not be bound to specific timing, but to understanding—that’s the true measure of achievement. Furthermore, it should take into account the learning of concepts and overall progress, instead of focusing solely on content results.

 

The research project Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills (ATC21S)­ proposes ways of assessing 21st-century skills and encourages teaching and adopting those skills in the classroom. Ultimately, the best results are achieved when learning is personalized. 

 

What role should teachers play in this transformation?

 

The role of teachers is essential, but they need training and support in order to move toward increasingly teaching skills and competencies. Teachers should listen more, and provide individual assessment and mentoring to their pupils. To this end, various different resources are available, such as “Education Competencies”, designed to help educators and administrators.

 

Coming back to the topic of assessment, we are not welcoming educators and curriculum developers to innovate if we do not change the way we assess what learners know and what they are supposed to know. Global assessment models such as PISA should be improved in such a way that they incorporate new trends currently taking place in formal and especially informal learning.  

 

Who would you say are the innovators in the education field?

 

Innovators in the education field are mainly individuals. Innovative teachers who have created their own educational resources often do not want to share their content; they don’t think about scalability and believe that this content only works for them. It’s crucial to show them how they can be examples for others. Microsoft has therefore created a network of innovative teachers and a network of innovative schools.    

 

I would also like to briefly mention our entrepreneurship program for young people. The Youth Spark Hub is an online space to explore and access all the Microsoft programs and resources to help youth imagine and realize their full potential.

 

How do we transform innovative teaching with scalability?

 

I recommend the scalability toolkit developed by Christopher J. Dede, Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Innovation in education is a global matter, and everything teachers do has a directly global dimension.

change in higher education, Mobile, new skills, innovation
News

Call for Submissions - MOOCs and Beyond - Extended Deadline: April 8th

28 Februar 2013

eLearning Papers is currently welcoming submissions which address the challenges and future of Massive Open Online Courses, a trend in education that has skyrocketed since 2008. Issue 33, MOOCs and Beyond, seeks to both generate debate, and coalesce a variety of critical perspectives into a fruitful body of research. 

 

Educators today are confronted with several questions regarding MOOCs. These include: What role do they play in the undergraduate degree system? In particular, what threat do they pose to higher education as it currently operates? Also, what does the path towards proper accreditation for these classes look like?

On a broader level, MOOCs offer another site from which to explore the intersection between technology and pedagogy, in the effort to improve our understanding of how to support learning. How do MOOCs differ from face-to-face, or even on-line closed courses? What is particular about the MOOC learning experience, and what does that teach us?

 

Contributors are invited to present theoretical or empirical research, specifically regarding the following topics:

- Experiences speaking to the design, implementation or assessment of a MOOC.

- The impact of MOOCs within Higher Education.

- Learning analytics and MOOCs.

- Peer-to-peer learning and MOOCs.

- Analyses of the impact and reach of MOOCs – considering course completion, global recognition.

 

The guest editor for this edition is Yishay Mor.

 

Deadline: March 25th, 2013. Extended Deadline: April 8th, 2013.

Click here to read the complete Call for Papers. 

 

For further information and to submit your article, please contact the Laia Canals, the current chief editor, at editorialteam[at]elearningeuropa.info.

MOOCs
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Education Partner Network

28 Februar 2013

 

Innovators in the education field are mainly individuals. Innovative teachers who created their own educational resources often do not want to share their content; they don’t think about scalability and believe that this content only works for them. It’s crucial to show them how they can be examples for others. Microsoft has therefore created a network of innovative teachers and a network of innovative schools.     

computer-based educational tools, e-resources, elearning resources, online resources
Verzeichnis

Policy Frameworks for New Assessments

28 Februar 2013

The ultimate goal of the project is to move from small marginal pilot projects to implementing new forms of assessment within a coherent teaching and learning system. This paper focuses on the reform needed in school and government systems to achieve this shift.

Many nations around the world have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction, and assessments with the intention of better preparing all children for the higher educational demands of life and work in the 21st century. While large-scale testing systems in some countries emphasize multiple-choice items that evaluate recall and recognition of discrete facts, there is growing use of more sophisticated approaches in many countries. These approaches include not only more analytical selected response items but also open-ended items and curriculum-embedded tasks that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and communicate more extensively, both orally and in writing. A growing emphasis on project-based, inquiry-oriented learning has led to increasing prominence for school-based tasks in state and national systems, including research projects, science investigations, use of technology to access information and solve authentic problems, development of products, and presentations about these efforts.
 
This paper briefly describes the policy frameworks for assessment systems in Australia, Finland, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with special attention to identifying where assessment of 21st century skills has been or may be developed in assessment systems that report information at the national or state, as well as local, levels. Identifying the role of 21st century skills within these assessment systems serves two purposes. First, this process furthers knowledge about distinct approaches to the integration of 21st century skills in countries with different educational governance systems. Second, it provides information about how assessment systems work within the broader policy landscape of each country that determines student learning opportunities through the construction of policies governing teacher education and development, as well as curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
 
new skills, Skills, eSkills, change in higher education, policy recommendations
Verzeichnis

New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building

28 Februar 2013

This paper looks at innovative ways to improve the development of 21st-century skills in students both individually and in groups, considering both formal and informal learning opportunities.

In this paper we review literature on knowledge-creating organizations to identify sequences leading from entry-level 21st century skills to mature levels of the skills defined by the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project. We suggest a developmental scheme to allow students and teachers in any classroom to find a starting point and advance along dimensions identified. In a fully developed knowledge building environment, the ways people and ideas interact are critical to the integration of deep understanding, knowledge creation, and practical action. After proposing a framework for moving toward high-end knowledge environments we consider basic principles of learning and developmental trajectories relevant to them. We distinguish two approaches: “working backward from goals” and “emergence of new skills.” We discuss how modern technologies can help integrate and enhance these different approaches, how formative assessments can be used to increase the pace of innovation, and how a broader systems perspective might inform large-scale summative assessments.
 
An analytic framework, with developmental trajectories defined by 21st century skills, is provided for analyzing environments in light of the extent to which they support knowledge creation. Our goal is to provide a scheme comprehensive enough to identify starting points, as well as pathways to higher-order achievements for all, from elementary through to tertiary education, and applicable to out-of-school contexts, so as to support an inclusive model of 21st century knowledge building. We also aim to distinguish efforts that prepare students for work in knowledge-creating organizations after they leave school from those that aim to transform schools to operate as knowledge-creating organizations in their own right. We end with suggestions for new initiatives to help advance
education for a knowledge-building society.
 
eSkills, new skills, Skills, active learning, formal learning, Informal learning, Education
Verzeichnis

Technological Issues

28 Februar 2013

This paper identifies and analyzes various technological problems in computer-based assessment of 21st-century skills, with suggested solutions.

This paper reviews the contribution of new information-communication technologies to the advancement of educational assessment. Improvements can be described in terms of precision in detecting the actual values of the observed variables, efficiency in collecting and processing information, and speed and frequency of feedback given for the participants and stakeholders. It reviews previous research and development in two ways, describing the main tendencies in four continents (Asia, Australia, Europe and the US) and summarizing research on how technology advances assessment in some crucial dimensions (assessment of established constructs, extension of assessment domains, assessment of new constructs and in dynamic situations).

 

As there is a great variety of applications of assessment in education, each one requiring different technological solutions, the paper classifies assessment domains, purposes and contexts and identifies the technological needs and solutions for each. The paper reviews the contribution of technology to the advancement of the entire educational evaluation process from authoring and automatic generation and storing items through delivery methods (Internet-based, local server, removable media, mini-computer labs) and forms of task presentation made possible with technology to response capture, scoring and automated feedback and reporting.

 

The paper also reviews some special cases for which new technologies have enabled significant advances (e.g. assessments of students with special educational needs, assessment of collaborative skills and group achievement) and discusses the validity issues raised by the application of the new technolgies (e.g. factors influencing achievements when working with technological tools, the question of transferability of skills measured in a virtual environment).

 

Finally, the paper identifies areas where further research and development is needed (migration strategies, security, availability, accessibility, comparability, framework and instrument compliance) and lists themes for research projects feasible in the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project.

 

new skills, Skills, computer, eSkills
Verzeichnis

21st-Century Skills

28 Februar 2013

This paper outlines high-priority 21st-century skills, with examples of how they apply to real-world situations. It also delves into examples of assessment tasks and scoring rubrics that would provide evidence of students’ levels of mastery.

This paper synthesizes research on the role of standards and assessment in promoting learning, describes the nature of assessment systems that can support changes in practice, Illustrates the use of technology to transform assessment systems and learning, and proposes a model for assessing 21st century skills.
 
Large-scale assessments should be only part of any system to support student learning, Assessments at each level represent a significant opportunity to signal the important learning goals that are targeted by the broader system as well as to provide valuable, actionable data for policy and practice. Moreover, they can model next generation assessments that can support learning. To do so assessments should a) be aligned with the development of significant 21st century goals, b) be adaptable and responsive to new developments, c) be largely performance-based, d) add value for teaching and learning by providing information that can be acted on by students, teachers, and administrators, e) meet the general criteria for good assessments, (i.e. be fair, technically sound; valid for purpose, and part of a comprehensive and well-aligned system of assessments at all levels of education)
 
The model for assessments of 21st century skills, based on an analysis of curriculum and assessment frameworks for 21st century skills developed around the world, identifies ten important skills in four broad categories. The paper provides measureable descriptions of the skills, considering knowledge, skills, and attitudes, values and ethics (advanced as the KSAVE framework).
 
The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges to be addressed in developing an assessment system that supports learning using, for example, research-based models of skill development and assessments that make students’ thinking visible to establish their strengths and weaknesses and help shape future learning choices.
 
new skills, Skills, educational level
Verzeichnis

Methodological Issues

28 Februar 2013

This paper identifies and addresses problems inherent in assessing 21st-century skills, both in tests and in the classroom, focusing particularly on computer-enabled and large-scale assessment.

In this paper we have surveyed the methodological perspectives that we see as being important for assessing 21st century skills. Some of these issues are specific to 21st century skills, but the majority of them would apply more generally to the assessment of other psychological and educational variables.
 
The narrative of the paper initially follows the logic of assessment development, commencing with the definition of constructs to be assessed, the design of tasks that can be used to generate informative student responses, the coding/valuing of those responses, the delivery of the tasks and the gathering of the responses, and the modeling of the  responses with respect to the constructs. The paper continues with a survey of the strands of validity evidence that need to be established, and a discussion of specific issues that we see as being prominent in this context, such as: the need to resolve issues of generality versus contextual specificity, the relationships of classroom to large-scale assessments, and the possible roles for technological advances in assessing these skills. We also add a brief segment discussing some issues that arise with respect to specific types of variables involved in the assessment of 21st century skills.
 
We conclude the main text of the paper with a listing of particular challenges that we see as being prominent at this time. The paper has an annex that describes specific approaches to assessment design that we see as being useful in the development of new assessments.
new skills, Skills, methodology