Home. 4 Powerful Free Cloud Apps for Teachers. These popular free Internet based tools provide excellent functionality that you can access from many devices.
The buzz about “the cloud” just seems to keep growing, but the fact is the cloud has been around for years – if you’re using an Internet based tool, you’re using the cloud. Search Engines, YouTube, Facebook – these are all cloud services. One of the most powerful benefits of a fully realized cloud app is ubiquitous access – tools that can easily be used on multiple devices.
To me, this is the kind of functionality that makes “the cloud” a truly meaningful concept. Beginning Teachers - classroom resources, tips, articles, newsletter, books, webinars, & free web pages.
Websites for Educators - StumbleUpon. Comics in Education. 4 Lessons The Classroom Can Learn From The Design Studio. Earlier this year, we peered into the work spaces of some of the most inspiring companies working in the creative economy to glean design ideas for learning spaces.
Instead of the tyranny of cubes and boardrooms, we found spaces for serious play, dynamic cross-pollination, and cultivated serendipity. Inquire Within. It is so interesting where ideas come from, and how a class can dramatically shift from one activity to the next.
Being fluid and organic, and accepting that ideas are built on more ideas (and being flexible enough to evolve with them) leads to a dynamic environment. This is true in ecology, and also in the classroom. We were working on area of a circle and the class was trying to get their heads around all the different parts of the various equations. I tried to make it interactive earlier in the week by having them rotate pencils, where the pencil could be either the radius or the diameter. Tame the Beast: Tips for Designing and Using Rubrics. Rubrics are a beast.
Grrrrrrr! They are time-consuming to construct, challenging to write and sometimes hard to use effectively. They are everywhere.
Three Ways to Leave a Legacy in the Land of Online Learning. Share on Tumblr Email In my last post I talked about the fundamentals of becoming an online teacher without supporting huge investor-fueled teaching platforms or business practices you don’t agree with, don’t understand or simply don’t care about. Today I want to talk further about how you can establish your own legacy instead of indirectly fueling an impersonal brand that will eventually forget about your efforts. If you work as a teacher for one of those start-ups and people up in the hierarchy make decisions you don’t have any influence on – if the start-up goes down, all your efforts will go down with it. This is not to say that individuals are less prone to failure than organizations.
Pedagogy, Coding and Teaching Kids to Think Deeply. 1.13.12 | Idaho teachers resist technology push; teens adapt the Xbox to help patients; & why learning to code may be harder than you think, all in this week’s Playback.
Teachers Resist High-Tech Push: We kick off our first Playback of 2012 by continuing our coverage of how teachers are responding to new state mandates for online learning. Before the holidays, we wrote about efforts to pass state legislation to expand virtual school programs and increase requirements for online courses—and how some online charter schools are putting profits ahead of quality. Teaching Laws. Murphy's teaching laws The clock in the instructor's room will be wrong.
Disaster will occur when visitors are in the room. A subject interesting to the teacher will bore students. We learn by teaching. Doug woods. User Generated Education. I recently attended a workshop entitled “Beyond Assessing for Knowledge” presented by Kimberly Tanner whose research agenda is: To understand how people learn science and how teachers and scientists can collaborate to make science teaching and learning in classrooms – Kindergarten through college – more like how scientists work ( The key points that I extracted from the talk are: To what extent do current assessments yield insight into the development of “Thinking Like a (Professional in the Field Being Studied)?”
How To Use Game Dynamics In The Classroom. The best Presentation on Social Learning and the New Role for Educators. I’m fascinated by the impact Social Media has had on just about everything we do, including how we learn and how we share knowledge with our peers.
It’s no exaggeration to say that we are now learning something new all the time, from just about anywhere there’s a connection, and through just about any mobile device. I can’t think of a better time in history to be alive than now. User Generated Education. This past week in my undergraduate interpersonal communications course, I adapted the Bridge-It communications exercise to incorporate my students’ (most ages 17-20) mobile devices.
It combined some of my favorite instructional strategies: Experiential and Hands-On LearningTeam Building and Problem-Solving Group InitiativesUsing Mobile Devices in Educational Settings Procedures First. students were asked to line up in the classroom on a continuum from those who believed they had the best, most effective communication (verbal and listening) skills to those who thought they lacked those skills. They counted off by three’s to form three groups.
Next, groups were moved to separate rooms, given the same set of building blocks and their task . . . Build a three-dimensional structure using all the pieces provided. No time limits were set. Reflections Comments included: