Helping Educators Navigate Web 2.0 in a Connected World: A Few Moments with Steve Hargadon Steve Hargadon’s career in education technology stems from a passionate interest in the role of technology in changing education. Known for being at the forefront of open education resources, web 2.0, and virtual live events, Hargadon has become the go-to expert in educational social networking. In 2007, he created Classroom 2.0, a social networking community for educators using web 2.0 and collaborative technologies, which in the past five years has grown to a network of more than 63,000 members worldwide. When you created Classroom 2.0, your hope was that “those who are ‘beginners’ find it a supportive place to start being part of the digital dialogue.” Five years ago, the primary tool for educators to start talking to each other was blogging, but blogging was actually a very caustic environment. What happened in Classroom 2.0 was very gentle because the space was much more egalitarian. You’ve talked about learning as a process. What was the first social network you ever joined?
50 Ways to Anchor Technology (Ways to Anchor Technology in Your Using Free Websites as Learning & Teaching Tools 1. Have students use Spelling City to learn their spelling words, vocabulary words, or site words through games, practice, and quizzes. Spelling City is a free resource for teachers. www.spellingcity.com 2. www.brainpop.com 3. www.dovewhisper.com 4. www.flashcardexchange.com 5. people.uncw.edu/ertzbergerj/ppt_games.html 6. www.clustrmap.com 7. www.ustream.tv 8. www.fanfiction.net 9. www.ccmixter.org 10. www.toolsforeducators.com 11. www.animoto.com/education Share your ideas for integration on Animoto. 12. www.makebeliefscomix.com 13. www.wordle.net 14. www.surveymonkey.com 15. www.readwritethink.org/materials/timeline 16. www.kerpoof.com 17. classtools.net 18. www.buildyourwildself.com 19. www.freerice.com 20. www.fluxtime.com Using Free Websites for Management 21. www.myavatareditor.com 22. www.dropbox.com 23. www.evernote.com 24. www.superteachertools.com 25. www.sharinglinks.com 26. www.bighugelabs.com 27. rubistar.4teachers.org 28. fur.ly 29. www.jingproject.com
Ask a Tech Teacher Kathy Shrock has done a wonderful piece linking the multitude of Google Apps to the levels of Blooms Taxonomy. This is an invaluable resource for all teachers. BTW, she’s updated the page since I posted this 18 months ago so the picture looks a bit different. Click the image; scroll down to the section on “Google Apps to Support Bloom’s” Take a look: Google Apps Meets Blooms Taxonomy Follow me Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. Like this: Like Loading...
The 1-minute guide to the mobile classroom Jan 31st, 2012 Photo by Milica Sekulic Wondering how to start introducing elements of mLearning (mobile learning) into your language classes? Here are five ways to do so, starting from simple recognition type activities to more complex project work. 1 Show and tell Let students talk about their mobile phones, and what they use them for. 2 Texting Carry out a short focused classroom activities in which students use their mobile phones. 3 Reading Engage reluctant readers by sending them simple serialised stories or questions via daily sms messages. 4 Recording Get students to audio and/or video record themselves in pairs while carrying out a speaking task. 5 Creating a treasure hunt Get students creating treasure hunts/ quizzes for each other using quiz apps on smart phones. See more suggestions on getting started with mobile learning from David Read’s blog post (scroll to half-way down). What about you? Nicky Hockly The Consultants-E January 2012
How to use Twitter in the classroom The advantage to using a tool like Twitter for education is that it’s instant and it’s to the point. There have been countless articles about whether or not social media makes us lazy, or whether it affects our attention spans. If that really is the case, why not use that to our advantage? Twitter, and social media in general, can make a surprisingly useful educational tool, giving students and teachers an easy way to communicate that goes beyond office hours and classrooms. With the use of a simple hashtag (#), it becomes incredibly easy to curate tweets, giving students an easy way to follow the information that is associated with a specific class. You might also like: How to Optimize Blog Design to Better Engage with Readers These are just a few ideas on how you can use Twitter in the classroom. This entire process does of course depend on students understanding how to use Twitter. Send reminders Share links We all already share interesting links with our followers on Twitter.
Awesome Apps for Science Experiments, Storytelling, Coding and More Every month, we review some of our favorite educational apps that have been released or updated. You can find all the posts in our series here. Below you’ll find a mixture of iOS, Android and Web-based apps. Scribble Press is an iPad app that lets you build and illustrate your own e-books. The app offers numerous story templates and drawing tools, guiding you through the story-writing and book layout process. The books that are written with Scribble Press can be shared with others — either via Facebook or Twitter or email. Squad is a collaborative code editor. The mobile language learning startup Mindsnacks launched its Mandarin iPhone app this month. It’s hard to pick one app from the new educational game-maker Airy Labs to feature here, particularly as the startup updated all seven of its apps this month. Created by the Van Gogh Institute, the Van Gogh’s Dream iPad app is meant to explore Vincent Van Gogh’s artwork and writing in a new and interactive way. Anything we missed? Related
Lessons learned from using Khan Academy content in a blended learning pilot Final sentence added 3/1/2012. In this December 2011 report [23 page PDF] Brian Greenberg, Leonard Medlock and Darri Stephens report on the "performance and engagement of low‐performing high school algebra students receiving a mix of traditional teacher-led instruction and self‐guided instruction through the Khan Academy website". The authors seek to compare the performance of two groups of "summer school" learners, one group taught traditionally and one group teacher-supported in largely individual use of Khan Academy content (thus "blended learning"). Both groups made substantial progress (as judged by the increase in percentage questions answered correctly on the MDTP Algebra II Readiness Exam). The Khan Academy group is reported - with plenty of caveats, and with the rather disconcerting bar chart above - to have made very slightly more progress. Along the way, the authors make interesting and useful observations about:
Top how-tos and tech tips of 2011 I began this series with a list of my 11 most popular blog posts of 2011. As I looked through my analytics in preparation for that post, I was interested to see the appetite for posts that offer specific tech tips and how-to guidance. Today, I round up the 2011 posts that I think offered the most useful tech how-to tips. 3 steps to creating a Facebook friend list for your kid-related content: Whether or not you have kids, there’s no question that creating smart, specific lists of different Facebook friends is the essential skill for successful Facebook use.