Flipteaching How to Teach Students Coding When You Don't Know How to Code Digital Technologies has to be one of the most exciting and rapidly changing key learning areas in schools. However, it’s a KLA that makes the digital divide between teachers (whether socio-cultural or generational) even more apparent. While some primary school teachers are completely confident introducing digital technology activities into their classrooms, others have no experience or even fear this ‘new’ learning area. This knowledge divide means that sometimes students can spend a year learning how to code with one teacher and then move onto the next year level with a teacher who doesn’t feel at all comfortable creating opportunities for kids to code during class time. What’s important to realise is that teachers don’t need to know how to code in order to provide their students with the opportunity to do it! I realise this is a somewhat controversial statement. Hour of Code Start Here: Hopscotch’s Hour of Code (for Apple devices) All you need to do:
The 100 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You The Wordle of this list! (Click image to enlarge) One of the most popular posts on Edudemic in 2010 was The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You and I felt it might be time for an update to that list for 2011. In order to put together a list of the best Web 2.0 classroom tools, I polled my Twitter followers, Facebook fans (are they still called fans? There were more than 900 submissions but many were duplicates. Turn your notes into writing using the Cornell method This post is by Dr Katherine Firth who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine is a Thesis Whisperer, like me. Unlike me, Katherine is still an active researcher in her field of 20th-century poetry. Over coffee Katherine told me about the ‘Cornell Method’ and kindly agreed to write a post. I found it enlightening, I hope you do too. I take a lot of notes. Now that I’m working with lots of PhD students, I find that they also take a lot of notes. The reason I think it’s so hard, is because when you take notes you focus your attention on the text (or case study, or thing under your microscope). Figure 1: Writing notes and writing the thesis mean you have to focus in opposite directions. Even if you see note taking and research as a cycle of reading and writing, you still focus towards the research, then towards the essay, then towards the research, then towards the essay. Related Posts Like this:
The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You If you’re not an avid follower of #edchat on Twitter, you may be missing out on a great opportunity to learn about some new Web 2.0 tools that are currently being used in classrooms around the world. That’s because @chickensaltash posed a simple question to the PLN and there has been a huge swell of support as hundreds of people have jumped in to answer the question about which 5 Web 2.0 tools teachers are using in classrooms. The Best of the Best You can view the live stream of #edchat here and see what people are saying at the hashtag #chickenweb2tools here. We scoured hundreds of responses and have come up with the following list. The following tools have not been verified and are simply based on the number of times each was mentioned on Twitter during this hashtag discussion. Made at Tagxedo – it’s in this list! The List Added in the comments and via Twitter: Add To This List Have another recommendation?
8 Educational Apps To Create Digital Portfolios by Jennifer Rita Nichols, TeachThought Intern Digital portfolios are becoming increasingly popular in classrooms across North America. School administration, teachers, parents, and students are all recognizing the benefits of this amazing tool. Digital portfolios have the ability to impact education and student learning in ways that we simply have not been able to do before technology evolved to the level it is at today. This exciting new technological era will change the ways students think and learn, creating digital arenas for sharing work and building on knowledge. Many educators are eager and willing to incorporate digital portfolios into their curriculum. 1. Platform: iOS Price: $1.99 This app is very easy to use for both teachers and students. Easy Portfolios allows the user to share items in the portfolio via email or upload to a Dropbox account. 2. Platform: Android and iOS Price: Free Evernote has become a very popular app to use for digital portfolios in classrooms. 3. Price:Free
100+ Google Tricks Posted by Nexus – 01/03/2010 With classes, homework, and projects–not to mention your social life–time is truly at a premium for you, so why not latch onto the wide world that Google has to offer? From super-effective search tricks to Google hacks specifically for education to tricks and tips for using Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, these tricks will surely save you some precious time. Search Tricks These search tricks can save you time when researching online for your next project or just to find out what time it is across the world, so start using these right away. Convert units. Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school. Google Scholar. Google Docs Google Docs is a great replacement for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so learn how to use this product even more efficiently. Use premade templates. Gmail Use the Tasks as a to-do list.
40+ Resources for Teaching Using Animation and Comics January 27, 2014 Some of the animation links catalogued here will give educators very basic tools and histories of animation while others have the animation already created and set in motion, it’s just a matter of sharing it with students. Educators need to decide which tool is best for them. If you want to create your own animation from scratch, then you want to go to sites such as Animwork. If you want to select from animation that’s already set up for you then perhaps Explainia makes more sense. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. The following links will help educators find animation that’s already set in motion. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. iTunes U Find any and everything at iTunes U, just search or select a category and move through animation after animation. 40. 41. 43. 45. 46. 47. 48. 50.
(Il)literacy How a mother’s literacy skills, even at a basic level, translate into healthier kids. A series of photos taken by Sarah LeVine during the four-country project. It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time: The more formal schooling a mother gets, the better off her children’s health will be. Study after study in public health, particularly in the developing world, has shown this to be absolutely true. And yet, surprisingly, for many years, no one ever quite figured out why or how this happened. Even Professor Emeritus Robert LeVine and his wife, Sarah, an anthropologist and former researcher at the Ed School, couldn’t quite put their fingers on the school-health connection when they started looking at women’s schooling, fertility, and child mortality in the early 1980s with the Ed School’s Project on Maternal Schooling. At first, LeVine says he “pooh-poohed” the suggestion. What they found from their initial work was surprising. Findings But for the sake of her children, she needs to.
cooltoolsforschools - home Student e-Portfolios | The Big English Blog Avec certaines classes ou certains groupes, nous allons expérimenter cette année avec la création d’un STUDENT e-PORTFOLIO à l’aide de WIKISPACES. Chaque élève devra gérer son propre espace de travail en ligne, en incluant travaux écrits et oraux. On peut télécharger les travaux sous forme de documents en traitement de texte, des images, des fichiers sons enregistrés et des vidéos filmées. L’élève devra donner un accès à Mme Léger afin de lui permettre de suivre l’évolution du travail personnel de l’élève tout au long de l’année. Le travail en ligne fera partie d’une évaluation particulière. A tout moment, il sera possible à l’élève de demander le regard du professeur à tout moment – il suffit de faire la demande par mail à l’adresse de la classe. Il est tout à fait possible pour l’élève de faire du travail au delà de ce qui est demandé en classe – c’est un peu l’avantage de ce type de travail. Pour les L LVA, le premier travail à mettre dans le portfolio sera la présentation filmée.