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Aggregate, Curate and Create Your Own Textbook

Aggregate, Curate and Create Your Own Textbook
The Journal's article: 5K-12 Ed Tech Trends for 2012 includes: ‘Beyond the Digital Textbook’ as one of the trends with the premise of adding interactivity to digital versions of textbooks. Apple has now partnered with the major textbook publishers with the newly unveiled iBooks Textbooks. There are a handful of textbooks available through iTunes at about $15. These books are constrained to be viewed using iBooks 2 in an iPad with Apple iOS 5. Moreover, it looks like Apple's new products do not allow social interactivity and collaboration. Several concerns about Apple's new enterprise have been voiced in the blogosphere. Is there an option for a free, relevant course companion? With information being ubiquitous, I believe that teachers can (and should) take control of their courses by creating their own interactive textbooks. The process of creating your digital textbook involves three steps: The first step is to gather the sources of information. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!

A Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony Dear President Obama, I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. Where to begin? Then there's the irony that many teachers voted for you, President Obama, in the hopes that you might turn things around, only to find that you did indeed turn them around-- 360 degrees. Then there's the irony we teachers are guilty of. But those are just the Big Three ironies. We accuse teachers, who actually work with our students on the front lines of education because they care about students, of greed.

Teaching: Prepare and Connect Goal: Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching for all learners. Teaching today is practiced mostly in isolation. Many educators work alone, with little interaction with professional colleagues or experts in the outside world. Professional development typically is provided in short, fragmented, and episodic workshops that offer little opportunity to integrate learning into practice. A classroom educator's primary job is understood to be covering the assigned content and ensuring that students test well. Not surprisingly, half of freshly minted teachers leave the profession within the first five years (Ingersoll and Smith 2003). The Practice of Connected Teaching Figure 3. Teachers at George J. Other online environments also allow broader participation in a student's learning. Teachers.tv

Kids and video games: Why children should play more Parents, politicians, and educators often criticize video games as a waste of time that distract kids from healthier activities such as school, outdoor play, sports, and community service. Just one problem: Research is quickly proving the theory wrong and illustrating that gaming can be a beneficial and well-rounded part of a healthy, balanced media diet. Moreover, due to their interactivity, at odds with passive mediums such as television, kids’ video games can actually be one of today’s most powerful tools for sparking learning and creativity. But while gaming offers tremendous potential, it also bears remembering: It takes a running commitment from parents and teachers to actively follow and participate in the pastime to make it a truly safe, healthy, and rewarding part of household life. Among the findings she cites are the marked benefits of outings like the Legend of Zelda and Bakugan games, which encourage planning, problem solving, and creative self-expression.

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. Who and Whom This one opens a big can of worms. Which and That This is one of the most common mistakes out there, and understandably so. Lay and Lie This is the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. Moot

Wind Map An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US. The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We've done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires :-) If the map is missing or seems slow, we recommend the latest Chrome browser. Surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. If you're looking for a weather map, or just want more detail on the weather today, see these more traditional maps of temperature and wind.

Video Archive By Category MacMost includes more than 900 free video tutorials on how to use your Mac, iPad, iPhone and other Apple technology. Select a category below, or search above to find a tutorial and learn how to get the most from your Mac! Also: Accessories (2), Accounts (2), Contacts (3), Disk Utility (1), Dock (2), dvds (1), iBooks (3), iBooks Author (1), iDVD (1), Internet (3), LaunchPad (1), Mac Applications (2), Mac Apps (3), Mac Hardware (3), Maps (1), Messages (2), Mission Control (1), Networking (1), PDF (2), Photo (1), Photos (2), Printing (3), Support (2), Switching (1), Utilities (2), Video Editing (3), Widgets (3).

6 Free Tools to Easily Cite Resources for Students and Researchers Citing resources is an important skill for the 21st century students and for any other learner or researcher. I have already included it in my ebook " The 21St Century Skills Teachers and Students Need to Have ". It is a fact universally acknowledged that citing resources nowadays is way harder than it used to be when technology was not a huge issue. As technology crouches into our life, new ways of communication emerge giving birth to novel content providers. We have now blog posts, online newspapers, ebooks, tweets, emails,.. and several other forms where learners can get the information they want. 1- How to Include Tweets in your Citations MLA has recently issued a guideline showing researchers using its method how to include tweets in their papers. 2- Cite This For Me This is a citation generator for Harvard and APA. 3- Son Of Citation Machine Citation machine helps students and professional researchers to properly credit the information that they use. 5- Purdue Online Writing Lab

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