12 Valuable Wordle Tips You Must Read…Word Clouds in Education Series: Part 1 Welcome to a series of posts devoted to the use of Word Clouds. I know you will find new information… whether you are a seasoned user of word clouds, or brand new. I enjoy working with teachers and helping them use word clouds in their lessons because they are a great way to get any teacher started with integrating technology. In this series of posts I will cover: 12 Tips in Using Wordle (Some you may now… but other you may not.)Over 10o ways to use Word Clouds in the classroomThere is more to Word Clouds then Wordle… other awesome word cloud generatorsBeyond word clouds… cool sites and applications to integrate word clouds To ensure you do not miss one of these valuable posts or other resources covering PBL, STEM, 21st century learning, and technology integration please sign up for 21centuryedtech by email or RSS. Word Cloud… Wordle… An Introduction * Do you already know Word Clouds… then go down to the 12 Tips… I am sure you may learn something new about Wordle 2: Making a word cloud?
Sabbath Keeping & Digital Life Our digital lives are our lives – so much part of who and how many of us are, we feel real loss and disconnection when separated from the technologies that support our communities of connection and how we practice our faith. Addiction is an issue, but I want to notice the differences between internet addiction and the grief that comes from being separated from where we have meaningful relationships. When folks who’ve been largely defined by work find themselves unemployed or retired, there’s a similar sense of grief and loss. They weren’t necessarily addicted to work. Liberal religious spiritual life is so much about balance. Like many people I connect with in my social media ministry, I’m often housebound, due to my chronic illness. If you look at my social media presence, you'll notice I have two primary modes - one where I'm sharing information and acting as a spiritual resource, and one where I'm interacting with more particularly and directly.
A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - Online Learning By Derek Bruff Last fall, for my first-year writing seminar on the history and mathematics of cryptography, I posted my students' expository-writing essays on our course blog. The assignment had asked students to describe a particular code or cipher that we had not already discussed—how it came to be, how it works, how to crack it, who used it. They described more than a dozen codes and ciphers. It seemed a shame that I might be the only one to read such interesting content, so I asked the students to read and comment on two papers of their peers. The course blog provided an ideal platform for that task. About a week later, one of my students arrived at class excited. Online Learning: The Chronicle's 2011 Special Report BROWSE THE FULL ISSUE: News, Commentary, and Data BUY A COPY: Digital and Print Editions at the Chronicle Store Since my course blog was on the open Web, my students' work could be seen by others, including Google's indexing robots and the cryptography researcher.
A smartphones proliferate, some users are cutting the computer cord It’s been four years since the introduction of the iPhone and rival devices that run Google’s Android software. In that time, the devices have turned much of America into an always-on, Internet-on-the-go society. A quarter of Americans with smartphones use the devices as their main way to get onto the Internet, the Pew study found. Smartphone users are diverse. “For businesses, government agencies and nonprofits who want to engage with certain communities, they will find them in front of a four-inch screen, not in front of a big computer in their den,” said Aaron Smith, a researcher at Pew and author of the report. The size of the screen is just about the only thing that keeps Miguel Reyes, 20, on his laptop. The recent high-school graduate from Landover was lounging in his backyard last month and was reminded about a book he wanted from Mexican author Francisco Jimenez. “I’m finding fewer and fewer things that make my laptop all that much better than my phone,” Reyes said.
How to Learn Without Memorizing Photo by Edwin Stemp Rote memorization is an inefficient way to learn. Just retaining a single formula can mean pounding the same information into your skull dozens of times. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with your brain. A few years ago, I noticed that smart people seemed to learn differently than most other people. While there are undoubtedly some genetic advantages that allow some people to learn effortlessly, I think part of this difference in success comes down to strategy. Is Your Brain a File Drawer or a Web of Ideas? A computer stores information as thousands of electrical 1s and 0s in a linear fashion. However, your brain isn’t a sequence of bits and bytes, so this approach doesn’t make sense. Other Forms of Learning What I’d like to advocate in this article is a more creative, spontaneous form of learning than the style you were probably coached for in school. There are lots of ways you can learn creatively: 1. You can do the same thing with less technical subjects. 2. 3. Examples:
TechLearning: Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally 4/1/2008 By: Andrew Churches from Educators' eZine Introduction and Background: Bloom's Taxonomy In the 1950's Benjamin Bloom developed his taxonomy of cognitive objectives, Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001.Key to this is the use of verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Sub Categories Each of the categories or taxonomic elements has a number of key verbs associated with it Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) The elements cover many of the activities and objectives but they do not address the new objectives presented by the emergence and integration of Information and Communication Technologies into the classroom and the lives of our students. Bloom's digital taxonomy map Remembering Understanding Applying Analysing Evaluating