My TEDx Talk, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Discussing Race." My TEDx Talk, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Discussing Race." This is the TEDx Talk I gave at Hampshire College last month, my first time doing this type of presentation but the school's all-star organizers and audience made it a great experience. Much thanks to everyone at Hampshire College for putting this event together, you should check out all the talks from that day, I felt like they each touched on related themes and complemented each other really well. Text adaptation of the speech below. I want to talk a little bit about race tonight. This is in part because growing up as a very light-skinned black man of mixed descent I often find myself in sort of peculiar race-based conversations. So I’ve always had a passion for studying and observing how we communicate about race and how we might get a little better at certain aspects of that communication. That’s a conversation we all find ourselves in from time to time.
5 Web Tools to Create Awesome Digital Newspapers for Your Class To help you create digital newspapers for your class, we curated a list of some of our favorite web tools for this purpose. The list below is an updated version of the list we created last year. enjoy 1- Issuu This is my favorite. To create a newspaper using Issuu , all you need to do is upload the content of your news paper into Issuu and choose the template you like and there you go. The tool is free and requires a sign up. 2- Scribd This is another popular web tool to use for publishing your class digital magazine. 3- Zinepal This tools lets you create an ebook or magazine from posts and articles of a blog. This one here is very simple and easy to use. [nytlabs] How Has The Internet Changed Education? [Infographic] If you want evidence of the way the internet is pervading every aspect of our lives, you need look no further than its effect on education. The internet and social media have dramatically changed both teaching and learning. In fact, most students’ (an incredible 93 percent) first instinct when confronted with a research problem is to turn to Google or Bing to get information rather than going to the library, and despite the best efforts of faculty to discourage its use, Wikipedia is the research resource that is used most often. A whopping 90 percent of faculty uses social media in the courses they’re teaching, and 8 in 10 have used online video in class. The internet has also had a strong influence on the how, where, and what students are studying. Even with online learning being as widespread as it is, however, as many as one in three academic leaders consider it to be inferior to face-to-face instruction. Sources:
Technology in Education Group News Classroom of the future? A response This article from the New York Times on the use of technology in classrooms and test scores merited a response: Dear Mr. Richtel– I enjoyed your article “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores” — but I have a key concern. The entire “debate” around the use of technology in classrooms is focused around using new technologies to teach the same, old stuff. Instead of using these tools to teach centuries-old subject matter, perhaps we should instead use them to help us develop meaningful skills and personal knowledge — and to enhance our capacities to imagine, create, and innovate. Any furtherance of using such devices for “teaching” ancient information hinders the potentials these technologies provide, and puts our children at risk by excluding them from the co-creation of opportunities in the 21st century. Sincerely, John W.
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice | Just another WordPress.com weblog Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project One of the things I love about working at Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail. It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close. We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors!
Mr. Foxhole's Classroom: Standards Based Assessment w/ Bloom's Taxonomy I just started to teach an alternative to Algebra II, called Applied Math III, this year. The students I have are those that do not enjoy math and thus do not enjoy math homework. Each one of them has also failed Washington State's standardized math test, the HSPE, required for graduation. My school also has a high population of English Language Learners (mostly Hispanic) and our current Free/Reduced Lunch level sits at 60%. Three weeks into the semester, I had the highest amount of missing assignments per student than I have ever had in all the years I have been teaching. I started to look into some alternative ways of ensuring that they meet the standards, without throwing them into the same old pattern of demonstrating a skill and then giving them the remainder of the period to work on their assignment. Here is how it works. Now I know the next thing you are going to say. That is only the first part of this strategy.