Empowering the Educator
Industrial training programs, whether they are on-the-job-training programs, off-the-job-training programs, or even job simulation programs, are key to ensuring the quality and effectiveness of employees.
classroom response system
Empowering Education at ConEd
More than 10 million people in the greater New York metropolitan region rely on Con Edison (ConEd) to keep the lights blazing, the gas burning in their furnaces, and the steam running through their pipes. But who empowers the employees of ConEd when it comes to ensuring that this sprawling service and delivery infrastructure is operating properly?
Medical Education and SRS
A medical education requires a good mind, lot of money, and an extraordinary ability to forego sleep. That latter requirement presents no small amount of irony, given that sleep is critical to brain function and information retention.
Press Button A to Save a Life
What is stress? Let’s see: How about police or military personnel finding themselves faced with difficult shoot/no-shoot decisions. To be sure, the possibility of getting shot is definitely a cause of stress, and the symptoms of stress in those situations are very clear. Time horizons contract and the immediacy of the situation can overwhelm all else; the fight or flight impulse can take over, sometimes with disastrous effects.
Making Active Learning Interactive
Educational researchers looking at active learning continue to extol its virtues. Active learning – which involves students actively engaging in the classroom and using active listening skills and skills to formulate meaning – has been credited with increasing student retention in both the short and long terms.
ARS and Freshman Orientation
The bloggers at Meridia Interactive Solutions have posted several articles about the use of audience response systems (ARS) in school settings – mostly showcasing the value of ARS when it comes to pre-testing students, facilitating student engagement in sensitive conversations, and the like. Those make perfect sense, but the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) showed me a whole new role for ARS in an educational setting: RIT used ARS to help calm the frayed nerves of parents dropping their kids off for freshman orientation.
ARS and the End of #metoo
The hashtag at the heart of the #metoo movement first appeared two years ago this month. The #timesup hashtag showed up not long after that. Both are painful reminders of a long dark history of gender violence that lots of people have just not wanted to think about or hear about.
Outcome Studies and Student Response Systems
It’s curious: each month, Google gets hundreds of thousands of queries on terms such as “pedagogy” and “student engagement,” on “outcome studies,” “audience response systems,” and “classroom response systems.” But it gets virtually no queries linking these ideas together.
Student Response, Missing Data, and Survey Bias
A recent paper on Audience Response Systems and Missingness Trends in JMIR Formative Research identified an issue that educators need to pay attention to when using ARS to discuss sensitive issues in a school setting. As we’ve noted elsewhere in discussing the value of using ARS to facilitate active student engagement, the anonymity of ARS can help shy students overcome their reticence and diffidence. It can give a voice to students who feel uncomfortable sharing the reality of their experiences.
Clickers and Classroom Reinforcement
You’ve heard the terms positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement usually takes the form of a reward given for actively behaving a certain way. Negative reinforcement takes the form of a reward given for not engaging in a specific kind of behavior.
