Eric Mazur on new interactive teaching techniques | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2012. In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States.
Mazur tried the test on his own students. Some soul-searching followed. Serendipity provided the breakthrough he needed. “Here’s what happened,” he continues. “It’s not easy. Classroom Guide: Top Ten Tips for Teaching with New Media. Safe search engines for kids? Reader Q+A at Cool Mom Tech. What’s the best search engine for kids, in your experience? -via Twitter Keeping kids safe online should be a huge priority for parents. When it comes to kid-safe search, there are actually a lot of good options out there. Since you didn’t specify what age range we’re talking about, I’ll cover a few options. Safe Search For Young Kids There are some great search engines that you can bookmark as your kids’ own versions of Google. Kidzui (above) is a great resource for pre-K through early elementary school-aged kids.
Another kid-friendly search engine is Kidrex. Safe Search For Older Kids When you get into the tween years and beyond, I’d really recommend using Internet filters to ensure that when your kids are using the same search engine you use, they are still protected from the creepy stuff out there. On top of that, we have covered smart internet safety options for kids here before, like Net Nanny which works on both tablets and PCs. 9Share. 12 Things Students Should Never Do on Social Media. The last thing young people want is another set of rules. But these days, social media comes with great responsibility, whether you're just starting high school or finishing up college. The fact is, irresponsible social media conduct could potentially ruin your education and negatively impact your career, not to mention hurt others in the process. (And we're not just talking kids, either.) But most of those consequences are preventable, often with just a little foresight. We've pinpointed 12 social media mistakes that students should avoid at all costs, because after all, it's never as simple as "be responsible.
" And it's never as finite as "don't friend your teacher on Facebook. " Social media circumstances are nuanced and vary by situation, school and user. Please head to the comments below to add your own contributions and advice for young adults on social media. 1. Granted, high school and college students experiment with many activities and substances. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Moodle. 100 Teaching Tools You Should Know About. 5 Ways To Be A Better Public Speaker 7.15K Views 0 Likes If you've been asked to speak at a conference or host a seminar, you may be shaking in your boots.
Not only is the thought of speaking in public nerve-wracking, but being in charge of a seminar that no one wants to at... Edudemic Is Giving Away 30 Free Citelighter Pro Accounts! 576 Views 0 Likes We think Citelighter is a great tool for both students and teachers, and what better way to try it out than for free? 20 Must-Have Educational Resources For All Teachers. Edudemic often features posts providing a list of top resources for a particular category. Recently, the site gettingsmart.com posted the names of the LAUNCHedu finalists chosen by the SXSWedu® Conference, offering even more resources for the Edudemic staff to consider! On March 7, 2012, they will choose winners after a full day of presentations by the finalists. There are so many sites and programs on the Internet already, but this competition just goes to show that the need for educational resources is still great.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. The cliche works because it is true. I thought and pondered, considered and reconsidered, and researched and revised a list in my head this week. First, however, I created a wordle using some of the lists the editors have created recently. I divided my resources into categories, based on my interests as a teacher. Devices iPad – The iPad provides access to e-texts and incredible educational apps. Resources for Lesson Planning. 50 new tech tools you should know about. You may have dozens of apps on your phone and scores of websites bookmarked on your laptop, but that doesn't mean you have all the latest tech tools at your fingertips. New mobile apps, services, social networks and other digital tools pop up so frequently that keeping up with them is a nearly impossible task. Just when you think you're up to date, something newer and hipper comes along.
But before you wave the white flag, let us help. Once again we have sorted through hundreds of new and emerging tech tools to bring you 50 of the most buzzworthy ones. (Last year's list can be found here.) These apps and services can help you do everything from shooting better smartphone photos to cataloging your bottle-cap collection to finding the best pad Thai in your city.
Not all of them are brand new, but we've probably listed some you haven't heard of. Which of your favorite new tech tools did we leave out? 360 Panorama (99 cents): Want to enhance your smartphone landscape photos? Top 50 Google+ Circles for Cutting-Edge Educators » Online College.org. Google+ may still be finding its own footing among the Twitters and Facebooks of cyberspace, but nevertheless hosts a cornucopia of networking opportunities spanning numerous subjects.
Education subject matter in particular seems to flourish on the service, with parents, teachers, pros, students, and interested outsiders meeting up and talking about anything and everything. Social media-savvy educators seeking any outlet possible to trade resources and ideas should check out the following circles for hot topics in teaching all age levels — including adults! Ed Tech General Eileen O'Duffy's Educators Circle: Exactly what it says on the tin! Higher Education Alexander Fisher's Education I – Universities: Incomplete, yes, but still an excellent start for quickly finding American colleges and universities with a Google+ presence.Liz Gross' Higher Education Circle: Professors aren't the only residents here. Homeschool & Unschool Special Needs March 20th, 2012 written by Site Administrator. New App Tells Teachers When Students Are Confused. Much has been said about how connected devices, whether in college lecture halls or elementary school classrooms, can distract students.
GoSoapBox aims to show how such devices can also help keep class on track. The startup, which is launching Tuesday, makes a web-based app that serves as a constant back-channel to classroom discussion. Students can use it to post questions about the lecture, vote up questions their classmates have already submitted, set their statuses to "confused," and contribute to polls and questions posted by the teacher. "With the app, students are less likely to get distracted because they’re staying engaged with the material," says GoSoapBox co-founder and CEO John Pytel, who says he got the idea while attending large lectures at Michigan State University.
"The questions they have are getting answered. " To use the service, teachers pay $15 per month or $90 per year, and 1,300 of them have already enrolled in the free beta program. Free Notetaking Sites. Qwiki - The Best Way to Share Anything : Qwiki. A List of Free Must Have PDF Tools for Educators. 1- PDF Aid PDF Aid is a cool web tool that allows users to easily extract images from PDF files.
The tool is completely free and very simple to use. If you have a PDF containing several images and wondered how to extract all these images with a single click then PDF Aid will definitely be your solution. 2- PDF Reader PDF Reader is an amazing free tool that you can use to annotate your PDFs just as if you are editing a word document. 3- PDF to Excel Converter PDF to Excel Converter is a cool web tool that allows users to turn any PDF to Excel for easy editing. 4- PDF Converter PDF Converter is a great tool that allows its users to create PDFs from virtually any document format or convert PDF documents to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. 5- Web2PDF This service is particularly useful for those who have already set up a classroom blog or website or even a personal blog. 6- Booklet Creator As its name entails , it enables users to easily and quickly convert any PDF document to a printable booklet.
K-12 Tech Tools © - home. 80 Online Tools, References, and Resources. Top 10 Ed-Tech Startups of 2012. It probably goes without saying, but I’ll type it out anyway: 2012 was an incredible year for education technology startups. Launches. Updates. Funding. Acquisitions. Adoption. Headlines. Disruptions. With all that’s happened this year, making a list of the “top” new education technology startups was more challenging than ever before – least of which because there were a lot more companies to choose from. How I Chose But I’ve written a “Top Startups” post for two years in a row (See: 2010, 2011), so I guess it's part of my end-of-year writing traditions now. Once again, I’m only highlighting here those that were founded and/or launched in 2012.
. … Meanwhile, I’ve complicated things by expanding my categorization of “startup” a tad to include some initiatives from outside the high-risk, high-growth, for-profit business world. I’m also fudging a bit on the number here. Whatever. Tl;dr here’s my list, in no particular order… More disclosure: I signed up for two Udacity classes this year. Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes. There are no lockers in the hallways at Beaver Country Day School. Instead, backpacks and tote bags line either side of the floor while students step over them during the mid-morning rush to class.
Nearly everyone is carrying a laptop. "There used to be lockers, but nobody was really using them," a passing staff member tells me with a shrug. The private school, for grades six through twelve, sits in a quiet nook of Chestnut Hill, Mass. — a suburb sandwiched a few miles between, and directly below, Cambridge and downtown Boston. It's not far from where Mark Zuckerberg built a world-changing social network from his Harvard University dorm room just nine years ago. Two weeks ago, Beaver became the first school in the United States to implement computer coding into each of its classes. It's a new, albeit eccentric experiment. It's a new, albeit eccentric experiment. Some high schools have begun to offer programming courses as electives, but that is largely still a rarity.
And in the meantime? 5 Best Practices for Applying Game Mechanics to Your Website. Craig Ferrara is a senior gaming & UI expert at Gigya, where he designs the integrations of Gigya's technology into clients' websites. Gigya makes sites social by integrating a suite of plugins like Social Login, Comments, Activity Feeds, Social Analytics and now Game Mechanics into websites. Conversations about game mechanics — the rules that govern how enjoyable a game is — are changing. Formerly a topic mostly discussed by game designers and gamer geeks like myself, gamification is now part of the business discussion as marketers look to apply it to websites. One concept that has remained constant, regardless of who is having the conversation, is to identify ways to keep players engaged and games fun. 1. Increase content generated by users on your site. For example, reward top commenters, but also look for alternative ways to reward commenting on pages. 2.
Aside from being both repetitive and easy, sharing can prove incredibly useful in syndicating your content. 3. 4. 5. Open Badges 101. Gamification-education.png 1000×5700 pixels. Finalists for the Microsoft Partners in Learning 2012 US Forum - TeachTec. Today we are excited to announce the official list of educators for the Microsoft Partners in Learning 2012 US Forum. This is the 8th annual Partners in Learning Forum, a global program that last year attracted more 250,000 educators from over 70 countries. The Partners in Learning 2012 US Forum focuses on showcasing and celebrating educators and the work they are doing in classrooms across the United States. A select few will go on to represent the U.S. at that Partners in Learning Global Forum in Athens, Greece in November.
This year we received an unprecedented number of applications and we want to sincerely congratulate all that took the time to apply and share their work. This summer we are inviting 102 educators from 25 states to showcase their projects (here is the official press release). Here is the list of superstar educators from across the country. Alabama Kelli Etheredge & Marty Lester, St. Project: Professional Development for the 21st Century St. Alaska Arizona California. 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020. What Will Education Look Like in 2020? How and Why to Teach Your Kids to Code.
Class Flipping. iPad. Online Course and Open Access. QR Codes. Visualization Tools. UDL Book Builder. Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything - Home Page. Sweet Search. Check Spelling, Style, and Grammar with After the Deadline. 6 Important Wikipedia Tools for Teachers. Wkipedia is a great educational resource for both teachers and students. Its articles appear almost always in the first four links of the search results. I know there are some issues with the use of this resource in education such as : plagiarism, trusted content and many more but still instead of excluding it all together we better learn and teach our students the best ways to use it.
Everything online has both negative and positive effects and we should always focus on the filled side of the cup. Check out Facts Educators need to Know About Wikipedia to see how important a resource such as this in education. Given this importance I have compiled here a set of tools that are commiserate to Wikipedia. They are great learning tools that can be used in our classrooms with students. 1- Wikisummarizer WikiSummarizer is an application designed by Context Discovery Inc. 2- The Full Wiki This is a mash-up between Google Maps and Wikipedia articles. 3- Navify 4- Wiki Field Trip 5- Video Wikipedia. Gamestar Mechanic. Sticky Notes & Boards.
Organize your resources in an online binder - LiveBinders. Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book. K-12 Education & Learning Innovations with Proven Strategies that Work. Assignment Survival Kit. Memrise - the fun way to learn anything. Paola Brown Student Learning Tools. Great Tutorial on How to Create your Own eBook on iPad. Wikibrains. Flubaroo grading site. 20 Brain Break Clips: Fight the Fidgeting. How to Make Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes in Google Docs and Spreadsheets or Google Apps. Want to find out what your coworkers want for lunch? Need to get feedback for your training session?
Want to find out which movie your friends want to see on Saturday? Do you need a database of your club member's phone numbers? Use Google Forms. Forms in Google Docs are easy to create. Forms feed their results directly into a spreadsheet in Google Docs. Google Resources in Education. Class Resources. BrainPOP - Animated Educational Site for Kids - Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts.
Online learning for kids. PBS Idea Channel. eLearn Magazine. A New Digital Divide? Future U: fear and loathing in academia. 7.2 Metaphors of the Mind. 7 Habits of Highly Effective Tech-leading Principals. Project Switch: A Small Game Experiment Yields Big Lessons. BBC Research: The Mythology Engine. Persuasive Tech. Apps for Poets! Mathalicious. Fibonacci Tree. 94 Elements | Stories from Hydrogen to Plutonium. Teaching Math Without Words, A Visual Approach to learning Math from MIND Research Institute. Think.com, Oracle Education Foundation, Projects | Competition | Library. Kerpoof Studio.
Create Rich, Active and Social eLearning with Curatr. Silk - a brand new way to create and consume content. Metta — Storytelling + Polling In One Compact Format. The Literacy Shed - The Literacy Shed Home. Why Kidblog | Kidblog. Publication Network - Youblisher.com - turn pages / flippable pdfs - pdf's zum umblättern. A Simple Guide for Teachers to Create eBooks on iPad using iBook Author. Learn Web Design, Web Development, and More | Treehouse. Electronic Arts announces 'SimCity' for the classroom. Edtech tools. BuildingTools. Kinds of Digital Media for Learning.