ISTELive: Talk Less, Learn More

Description:
Emergency online learning provides an opportunity to design assignments providing students with collaborative and self directed learning. This frees the teacher to spend much more time engaging with individual students and to learn more about how students learn. In turn, this leads to students who are empowered.

I love Alan November.  His book "Who Owns the Learning?"  is my bible.  In the book, he argues that students should be publishers, bloggers, tutorial designers.  They should be in charge of their own learning.

He makes the following points.

• The classroom teacher is the head learner.
• We can customize and personalize material for each student.
  
• The value of the knowledge base of a teacher is in decline.
  
• Teachers need to know how to diagnose their students' learning in advance.
  
• The teacher is the head learner.
  

Alan introduces two cools.
Prism - developed by graduate students at UVA.  Allows to know the thinking of their students while (or before) they are teaching.  A great way to poll understanding of a whole class.

Perusall.  It's Prism monsterized.  Developed by Eric Mazur.  Allows you to share a book, video, podcast.  Highlights show what students say/ask/question about a specific.  Perusall changes the concept of when things happen and lets you know in advance what your students are thinking.

Alan's takeaways.

• We need to move learning from "curriculum as a body of knowledge students memorize to the application of that body of knowledge."
• Application problems/questions are higher level problems/questions.
• Prompt kids to ask questions, even before they have the body of knowledge.