Hzau09. Tom March :: Bright Ideas for Education. UMW Blogs has Cancer of the MS Word Strain at bavatuesdays. Anyone who is running a pretty big WPMu installation will sooner or later come to hate Microsoft Word in the unlikely event they don’t already. I can’t count the number of times I have seen it break themes over the last two years. And, truth be told, at least 90% of the issues people are having with their blogs are related to the malignant code in Word they unknowingly copy into the text editor. I’ve learned to live with this, and I make sure to try and educate as many people as I can about the evil ways of this software and the power of the MS Word Stripper feature in the WordPress Visual Text Editor. But today I found a far more insidious and potentially devastating strain of the MS Word text encoding cancer: the RSS feed breaker strain.
I got a note from a student that her posts weren’t republishing in the class aggregator blog. I checked the tag she was using to feed the posts, and she was doing everything correctly. Open thinking. Why Teachers Should Blog: An Example (Education - Change.org) Just a quick share about an exchange with a couple of readers on an earlier post, " Calling Bullsh! T on Textbooks ," that is a great example of how blogging can help teachers develop ideas for teaching - through the conversations that happen in the comment threads.
I closed that post with this: Nothing turns students on to a textbook like a teacher who starts the year by saying, “As we learn the material in this thing, we’re also going to talk back to it, criticize it, ask why it left these facts out while including those, and what sort of person it’s trying to mold you into. We’re going to reward anybody who comes up with a good case for calling bullsh*t on the textbook.” Calling BS on any authoritatively packaged knowledge is mere slang for “critical thinking.” Then Claus von Zastrow, who writes on the excellent Public School Insights blog, commented: Of course, Calling bulls**t on a textbook requires you to know more than is in the textbook itself.
I replied: Know what I mean? Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009. Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 as at 15 November 2009 This list has been compiled from the contributions of 278 Learning Professionals worldwide, whose individual contributions you can read here Here is a presentation of the Top 100 Tools. Below you can see the full list with links to pages with more information about each of the tools. KEY F = Free, C= Commercial, W = Windows, M=Mac, S=Server, O = Online Cells shaded blue are new tools on the list this year Cells shaded green are tools returning to the list this year C urrent ranking in 2009 # Votes Name Platform Cost Twitter Microblogging tool Delicious Social bookmarking tool YouTube Video sharing site Google Reader RSS / Feed reader Google Docs Office suite Wordpress Blogging tool Slideshare Hosting presentations Google Search Web search tool Audacity Sound editor and recorder Firefox Web browser and extensions Ning Social networking platforms Skype Instant messaging/VoIP PowerPoint Presentation software Blogger Blogging tool Moodle Course mgt system.
How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom. Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom. Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.
The Professor's results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to. It's funny to hear this history professor admit that "there are some topics we discuss that need more information" than Twitter's 140 character limit allows. The Truth About Twitter « Social Enterprise Blog. A few days ago, I reached that point where you can’t hear any more bullshit without correcting it. I actually called into a radio station to correct yet another pundit who, on the basis of the name alone or maybe 10 minutes worth of playing, thinks they understand Twitter, and worse, that they can summarily dismiss anyone who uses it as flaky. So here’s my attempt to educate those folks who either a) haven’t tried it, b) have tried and are still new, or c) don’t use it often enough or in the right context to see it’s real power. This post is not for those people who are just willfully ignorant or worse, active luddites who are resisting what Twitter is about just to resist change.
If you fall in either of these camps, you are beneath my contempt and therefore unworthy of further commentary. Ok, so what is Twitter and why should you care? The use of hashtags is another user-generated convention which is now supported in dozens of Twitter clients or services. “I don’t Twitter. Like this: Imminent Changes in Higher Education and its Delivery.