Professional Learning on Twitter: A content analysis of professional learning conversations among self-organized groups of educators

This study explores the nature of professional learning conversations taking place in an online microblogging platform known as Twitter, through the lens of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000). The CoI framework offers an approach to further understand elements of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence found in constructivist learning environments among educators. A content analysis was conducted on three distinct participant-driven educational Twitter chats demonstrating each chat to contain elements of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. This finding led to a deeper understanding about the use of questioning techniques and facilitation skills in order to allow for productive conversations online among educators. The findings have important implications for professionals who are responsible for the design and organization of educators\u27 professional learning programs. Implications for positive social change include increasing educators\u27 effective use of social media to improve self-directed learning opportunities

Mathematics Education Communities: Crossing Virtual Boundaries

The growth of social media has yielded a range of virtual communities focused on issues related to education (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014; Hur & Brush, 2009). These communities, which operate across a range of different platforms, create an evolving landscape for users to navigate. Moreover, interactions within and across virtual communities has become a norm within society at large as well as within mathematics education. The Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere (MTBoS), Mathematics Stack Exchange, specialized Facebook groups, and myNCTM are just a few examples of communities that are currently popular with mathematics teachers and educators in North America. Similarly, students of mathematics use virtual communities to make records of information that, in earlier times, would have been available through more informal channels. For example, solution clearinghouse sites (e.g., Chegg. com) allow students to request or post answers to problems sets and teacher-rating sites (e.g., RateMyProfessor.com) offer a platform where students can trade information about their instructors. With the ubiquity of internet-enabled devices, negotiating virtual communities has become a norm within mathematics teaching and learning. Consequently, educators, both new and old, who participate in these communities are encountering issues and ideas that they likely have limited experience with. This raises a number of questions for mathematics teacher educators seeking to help themselves, preservice teachers (PSTs), and current teachers understand these virtual communities. For example: How can the differences, similarities, and affordances of communities be highlighted? How can the boundaries that define and separate these communities be made clear? Within this chapter, we seek to address these and related questions by providing a framework for understanding these communities. We then use this framework to examine several communities currently popular within North America

FREE STEM Apps for Common Core

We will highlight FREE apps for Computers, Chrome browser and mobile devices (Android and iOS) that align to Common Core standards. A website will be provided with a full list for participants to peruse after the conference. Science will be the primary focus but there will also be apps for Math & Engineering as well as apps that are generally useful for teachers as well. Audience are any K-16 teachers. Participants are welcome to bring mobile devices and to suggest their own favorite apps

Student-centred approaches in Mathematics

Student-centred approaches in Mathematic

‘Follow’ Me: Networked Professional Learning for Teachers

Effective professional learning for teachers is fundamental for any school system aiming to make transformative and sustainable change to teacher practice. This paper investigates the efficacy of Twitter as a medium for teachers to participate in professional learning by analysing the tweets of 30 influential users of the popular medium . We find that Twitter primarily acts as a valuable conduit for accessing new and relevant educational resources on the internet and also as a viable means of social support for like minded educators. The cost effective nature of the microblogging platform ensures that it can act as a medium for sustained professional development, while leaving the individual participants to control and take ownership of the learning. These features align with the current literature associated with the characteristics of effective professional learning

Unicheck_Report_Seminter_ICESS_Unikama_2016_(artikel_saja)_01Mar2019_en_EN-1 (Retno Marsitin)

Unicheck_Report_Seminter_ICESS_Unikama_2016_(artikel_saja)_01Mar2019_en_EN-1 (Retno Marsitin) Hasil Unichec

Resource website for applied Math 30

1 vol (various pagings) ; 29 cm. --To complete the requirements of a one-course project of the Masters of Education degree at the University of Lethbridge, I have chosen to design and build a website for the recently implemented Applied Math 30 program. The major objective of the Applied Math 30 website is to be a supplemental resource for students to utilize while they are part of a formal classroom setting. This website has not been designed as a replacement tool for students who wish to take this course via distance learning. A second objective is to develop a framework in which others may utilise and build upon for both this Applied Math 30 course, as well as other math programs throughout the province of Alberta. The website as it currently stands will be given to Alberta Learning so that it may be distributed to teachers and other educators to build upon or to use with their students

Common Core State Standards on Twitter: Public Sentiment and Opinion Leaders

The purpose of this study is to examine the public opinion on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Twitter. Using Twitter API, we collected the tweets containing the hashtags #CommonCore and #CCSS for 12 months from 2014 to 2015. A Common Core corpus was created by compiling all the collected 660,051 tweets. The results of sentiment analysis suggest Twitter users expressed overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards the CCSS in all 50 states. Five topic clusters were detected by cluster analysis of the hashtag co-occurrence network. We also found that most of the opinion leaders were those who expressed negative sentiment towards the CCSS on Twitter. This study for the first time demonstrates how text mining techniques can be applied to education policy research, laying the foundation for real-time analytics of public opinion on education policies, thereby informing policymaking and implementation

The relationship between faculty and administrator attitudes toward internet-based technologies and virtual networking and the development and support of social capital in six selected rural secondary schools in Pennsylvania

Social capital (or the ways in which people in an organization collaborate and to a greater extent the quality of professional community in that context) has a variety of implications for organizations, specifically schools. This study examined the relationship between attitudes of administrators and faculty at the secondary level toward Internet-based technology and virtual networking and the development and support of social capital within schools’ organizational contexts that can lead to school improvement as demonstrated by student outcomes (e.g. achievement and a sense of community welfare or connectedness). A mixed method approach was utilized that consisted of a questionnaire, focus group discussion, and site observation conducted in six selected secondary schools in Pennsylvania. The findings of this study demonstrate a high positive significance between (teacher and administrative) perceptions of Internet-based technology and virtual networking and the development of social capital within these schools. A policy development strategy along with specific practices that enhance those perceptions are outlined Given the proliferation of technology within school settings, this study will provide policymakers and educational leaders, concerned about 21st Century learning priorities, with knowledge that will inform their decision-making regarding the perceptions and attitudes toward Internet-based technology and virtual networking and its relationship to social capital within the secondary school context.Keywords: Technology, Social Capital, Secondary School CultureEd.D., Educational Leadership and Management -- Drexel University, 201

A Cultural Historical Activity Theory Perspective of Teacher Learning in the Edmodo Math Subject Community

Teachers are participating in online communities in ever increasing numbers to find and share knowledge with educators around the world. However, the majority of the studies on online communities of practice often fail to examine the process of knowledge sharing as a complex, dynamically evolving practice that is shaped by local classroom and school contexts as well as other sociocultural factors. This study was designed to address the need for a more comprehensive and multifaceted exploration of teacher learning in an online community of practice. A Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Leontiev, 1978; Engeström, 1987; Cole and Engeström, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978) framework was used as a guide for examining how teachers acquired and made use of the shared knowledge from the Edmodo Math Subject Community, an online community of practice with more than 250,000 members. Multiple data types were collected in order to examine the teachers' object-oriented actions in two overlapping activity systems. Data analysis revealed that the participants were driven by the contradictions and limitations of their local school activity systems to take control of their learning and find knowledge in the Math Subject Community. The participants' ability to find knowledge was defined by the roles they performed in the community, the tools they used, the collective knowledge of the community, and the implicit community rules of reciprocity and professionalism. The participants' ability to select and implement the knowledge they found in the Math Subject Community in their classrooms was shaped by their local school activity system tools, the support of their colleagues and administration, their students' range in math abilities, and the community rules. A Model of Teacher Knowledge Acquisition was developed to display the participants' fluid, ongoing process of navigating between two overlapping activity systems to find new knowledge. The Model of Teacher Knowledge Acquisition presents teacher learning as a complex, socially constructed process that is influenced by multiple activity systems that interact with and shape one another. Overall, the participants felt that engaging in this process of acquiring knowledge allowed them to make changes, both small and large, in their teaching and learning strategies