Danieldmccabe: Why I Tweet (As a ... LessonNote - A lesson study classroom observation app for iPad. ASTsupportAAli : Latest addition2 Roll a series... Agility- The teaching toolkit: ROLL A... series... How Twitter is Reinventing Collaboration Among Educators. In the three years that I’ve been building up Edutopia’s presence on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, I’ve noticed a significant shift in how our audience of education changemakers interact and collaborate. In particular, I’ve seen Twitter reinvent the way educators collaborate to create change in education. Twitter Transforms Educators Before the advent of Twitter, most educators I know had limited opportunities to collaborate with colleagues outside their building. Some subscribed to listservs or participated in online forums, but these outlets lacked critical mass; teachers also networked at in-person conferences and training sessions, but these isolated events didn’t provide ongoing support.
Enter Twitter. Here are some of the specific ways educators are using Twitter to collaborate: Edcamps: Edcamps are “unconferences” for educators that are mostly promoted through Twitter and organized by people who’ve met on Twitter. Hashtags: Educators use a lot of hashtags. $1,000 for the Cheapest Surface? Consider this the second time that we have heard rumbles concerning the pricing of Microsoft’s Surface line of tablets. Also, consider this the second time that pricing news concerning the Surface has been bad. Today the world of Microsoft reporting is buzzing with the news from a Swedish website that listed prices for all four coming Surface models, covering both the RT and Pro editions. Here is a screengrab, via WPCentral: Now, to put those prices into dollars, the cheapest tablet is $1,001. You can apply that conversion rate to the other devices. In short, they are expensive.
Over on NeoWin, a good place to read comments to see what the Microsoft enthusiast community is thinking, has some choice commentary from its readers concerning the above pricing. If this pricing is true then I guess I won’t be getting one afterall. Dead on launch at that pricing [...] Way too expensive. Yikes. From a PR perspective, Microsoft needs to clear the air, and start talking numbers. The Internet map. The map of the Internet Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.
Charges and springs To draw an analogy from classical physics, one may say that websites are electrically charged bodies, while links between them are springs. Springs pull similar websites together, and the charge does not let the bodies adjoin and pushes websites apart if there is no link between them. Semantic web The Internet Phenomenon. Microsoft Announces Move Into Cloud Services for Schools - Marketplace K-12. School should not feel like this. How to Cite a Tweet (MLA Style) Information Literacy.
Quick Look: Why Children Should Play More Video Games. Reluctance and Technology Integration. One of the questions I am often asked in interviews for technology positions is how I would approach dealing with faculty members who are reluctant to embrace or integrate technology in their lessons. First, I think it’s an excellent question, and my answer to it says a lot about how well I would be able to work with faculty.
It is a question to which any good technology integration specialist should have a good answer at the ready. Before I tell you what I think, however, it bears saying that I think a healthy skepticism of technology is not a bad thing. I have seen tools adopted simply because they will add technology to a lesson. I personally feel technology has two propositions to answer before it should be adopted for integration in a lesson/class/school/activity: Will it make it easier to do what I’m trying to do? Having said that, sometimes a learning curve is wrongly interpreted as making something more difficult to do.
You are essential to the presentation. Videos to help you rethink education, learning, & school. Having children causes one to (re)think seriously about education and the role of school. Education obviously is the most powerful thing in the world. And yet the old Mark Twain chestnut — "I never let school get in the way of my education" — speaks to the core of my own thinking regarding education. I am not an expert in education by any means, but like almost everyone, I have strong ideas based on my personal experiences going through formal, mass schooling. Personally, the best years where I learned the most and was inspired to study and learn on my own were surely the six years of elementary school, and then university and graduate school. One thing I am sure of is that while listening carefully to teachers (and to the masters, etc.) is important, the real learning requires lots and lots of doing, not just listening.
Seth Godin on EducationIn this short interview, Seth Godin sums up the essence of the problem. Dr. Presentation tips for teachers (Never give a boring lecture again!) Facebook Meets College Apps with Mission Admission. Teaching Strategies By Nathan Maton Games and Facebook: We know those are two sure-fire ways of getting kids’ attention. Combine them, and you might have a tool to motivate low-income high-schoolers to apply to college. That’s the premise, anyway, for launching Mission Admission — to help students who don’t know what steps to take to get in the college application game.
“These kids didn’t know what kinds of classes they should be spending their time on or basic vocabulary like what is a letter of recommendation,” said Tracy Fullerton, a USC professor and the lead game designer on the Mission Admission project about students she worked with, during a seminar at the recent SXSW conference. “They didn’t know how to break down the steps into things they could accomplish. They didn’t know whether the Frisbee club or physics club would look better on an application.”
The process of applying for college is already a game, Fullerton says. The process of applying for college is already a game. JAMF Software: Products - Casper Suite. How to Back Up and Migrate Your Posterous Spaces to Tumblr, Blogger, or Wordpress. Venomous porridge - The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA. Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format: This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level.
You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app. But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top: IMPORTANT NOTE: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.
And in section 2: B. iBooks Author. Teachers go to the Movies: Top Ten Film Cliches in the Classroom. ‘iBooks Author’ Hits The Mac App Store, Aims To Revolutionise Textbook Authoring. Amongst Apple’s many education-focused announcements today was another called “iBooks Author.” The new app, (available from the Mac App Store for FREE), aims to revolutionise the way digital textbooks are authored for mobile platforms, allowing both authors and publishers access to an easy-to-use, “drag and drop”-controlled interface for laying out their textbook offerings.
Supporting multi-touch gestures, 3D models, and more, Apple may have just taken textbooks to the next level: Now anyone can create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, and more for iPad. All you need is an idea and a Mac. Start with one of the Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. Features Apple warns that although the software should work out the box, publishers looking to include Keynote widgets in their textbooks will require Keynote ’09 (v5.1.1 or later). Grab your copy of iBooks Author from the Mac App Store, today.
Daily Updates. Tomorrow’s classroom excuse: SOPA ate my homework. In case you haven’t heard, several large websites have blacked themselves out today to protest two pieces of anti-piracy legislation now before the U.S. Congress. Leaving aside the merits of their arguments, which I think outweigh the merits of the legislation’s advocates’ arguments, I’ve got two questions. 1. Will Wikipedia’s 24-hour disappearance have a material effect on anyone’s life? (I’m talking about you, students and journalists.) If so, that’s pretty amazing — given how preposterous the very concept of Wikipedia seemed not too long ago. 2.
Maybe we’ll know the answers tomorrow. iTunes U for iPad Retools the Learning Experience. In the second half of Apple's education-focused media event today, the company turned its attention to iTunes U, the company's free educational podcast section in the iTunes Store. Eddy Cue took the stage to announce that over 1,000 universities are currently using iTunes U, with the program's content having seen over 700 million downloads to date. The new iTunes U app advances iTunes U from audio and video lectures to a full-fledged learning app, allowing non-traditional students access to huge amounts of free content but more importantly for Apple, allowing schools to adopt iTunes U as a learning platform. The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world.
Courses are created via the iTunes U Course Manager, a web-based tool that allows teachers to build a course that includes a syllabus, handouts, quizzes, and other items. Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL. Redefining “Cheating” With Homework. Culture Teaching Strategies B. Gilliard Technology is often blamed for encouraging bad behavior, particularly when it comes to academic dishonesty.
There’s the notion, for example, that it’s much easier to plagiarize now thanks to the ability to copy and paste information from the Web into a term paper. So at first blush, the new homework help Web site Slader might be accused of fostering just this sort of cheating behavior. Though the site was originally launched with answers written by math tutors and teachers, the plan going forward is to use the peer-to-peer model — students helping each other on the site.
Of course, students have long shared their answers the old fashioned way – turning to one another for help, sharing their answers and solutions — whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transcribed word-for-word from another student’s paper or solved thanks to the help and support from a peer. These are homework answers for students written by students. Related. Neil Winton: Wifi with the chain is a p... UK schools creating "generation of digital illiterates" | Education. By Nicole Kobie Posted on 28 Nov 2011 at 10:05 UK students are in danger of becoming "illiterate" when it comes to technology, an industry leader has said. Ian Livingstone, president of gaming publisher Eidos and author of a recent report into teaching tech in schools, has called for improvements to computing education ahead of a response to his report due out from the Department for Education today. Livingstone noted that many assume children are tech savvy, because they use devices such as computers and mobile phones frequently.
"In fact, the narrowness of how we teach children about computers risks creating a generation of digital illiterates, and starving some of the UK's most successful industries of the talent they need to thrive," he writes in a column for The Independent. "There are computers in our classrooms, but for the most part, they are not used effectively. " "Computer science is to ICT what writing is to reading," he said. Donald Clark Plan B. Mark Prensky is a lively New Yorker and ex-teacher who set the pace on the use of games in learning with his evangelistic book Digital Game-Based Learning (2001).
Prensky claims that today's educators/trainers and learners are from separate worlds. Sure, learners have a short attention span nowadays - for the old ways of learning! His point is that the old ways are inappropriate for the new generation of learners. His argument is that games make learning cool. School and most learning experiences are not cool. Digital natives’ versus ‘Digital immigrants’ Yes, it was Prensky who was responsible for this useful, and some claim, overused phrase. There has been much criticism of this distinction as being too black and white, encouraging the view that all young people have full, online, literacy skills, which they clearly do not. Some prefer the generational distinctions, so loved by marketeers, and argue that these are better researched, such as generation and Milennials. Conclusion. Top 10 Signs That Your Teacher Is A Geek. The label of geek is thrown around a lot these days.
But truly what is a geek? And is it a term you should be proud to associative yourself with, or should you take offence? Dictionary.com defines a geek as:“a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.)” Geek used to be a title reserved for professions such as IT, Software Development and Electronics. But now, as technology encroaches on nearly every aspect of life, the line is blurring and geeks are making their way into nearly every profession possible.
So how do you know if geeks have infiltrated your school? [features tab1="Number 10" tab2="Number 9" tab3="Number 8" tab4="Number 7" tab5="Number 6" tab6="Number 5" tab7="Number 4" tab8="Number 3" tab9="Number 2" tab10="Number 1"] [featurestab] [/featurestab] [featurestab] [/featurestab] [/features] Are you aware of other key signs that your teacher is a geek? Image courtesy of Flickr, katybate. Like Stickers. TellMe vs Siri. The Khan Academy Opens Its Virtual Doors — Carefully. Digital Tools Teaching Strategies The Khan Academy "Knowledge Map," which suggests working exercises, will be made available to crowd-sourced videos chosen by the Khan Academy. As of today, there are more than 2,700 videos on the Khan Academy site.
All of them have been created by Salman Khan himself, with the exception of those produced by the SmartHistory team who Khan hired a few months ago. Over the course of a few short years, Khan has accumulated a vast library of education videos that are now used in schools and homes across the country. But no man is an island, as they say, and Khan is opening up his academy – at least in part – to the great Internet expanse. “We want to expose our tools so that everyone can use them to help kids learn at their own pace.”
Khan describes it this way: “In the first iteration, let’s say you teach gender studies at U.C. Eventually, the site will serve as a highly curated repository of educational videos – those considered valuable by Khan and his team. Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can't Search | Magazine. Home. ImageCodr.org. Share photos and videos on Twitter. Don Ledingham's Learning Log » Twitter: Confessions of an unjustified sceptic. A human review of the Kindle Fire. Android dreams. Stanford's Free Developing Apps for iPhone and iPad. Separating Tech And Teach. EduScotICT – Objective 3: Promoting New Behaviours. Apple TV may revolutionize the use of a teacher iPad in the classroom!