50+Ways - home Social media for schools: a guide to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest | Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional • For advice on e-safety in schools, click here The use of social media in education continues to be something of a hot topic with arguments both for and against. So I carried out a small survey of 27 teaching professionals in order to create a baseline of understanding into the use (or not) of social networking in schools, and also any concerns over some of the e-safety risks. There are many uses of social media in education - below are just a few of the ways they can be effectively used. Facebook • Using Facebook as a 'broadcast' account. Inspiration: University of Gloucestershire - This is a Facebook Page from my old university. Cambridge University - Another good example. Twitter • Twitter, like Facebook, is also being used as a broadcast account. Risca Community Comprehensive - A great example of an active school Twitter feed. Clevedon School - Another great example of an active feed. iClevedon - This is an account from the Clevedon again. Pinterest
Connected Educators | Strengthening connected online communities of practice in education CEM: Getting Started Never been part of an online professional community or network? Already part of a community or network, but want to be more connected? The Connected Educator Month Starter Kit can help you on both fronts. Written by The Connected Educator author Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Powerful Learning Practice in collaboration with the Connected Educators initiative, and loaded with helpful links and embedded videos, the kit takes a 31 days approach for this special month, giving you one simple way to get more connected every day. Please feel free to pass it along to any friend or colleague you think could benefit from getting more connected! CEM Supporter Kit Want to show your support for the Connected Educator initiative and what it stands for? Join the Book Club edConnectr District Toolkit School district decision-maker, or educator who’d like to see your whole district get involved and get connected? Connected Educator Profiles CEM Help Desk Need help using any part of the CEM site?
Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies Professional Development | Feature Five Digital Literacy Professional Development Strategies By Bridget McCrea08/07/12 Discussing digital literacy as a way to locate, understand, organize, evaluate, and create information using digital technology is one thing, but putting the concept into motion in the college classroom isn’t always easy. With new information resources proliferating daily, and some educators reluctant to change their "old ways" of teaching and disseminating information, professional development has become a key consideration for institutions that are looking to leverage digital literacy. Here are five simple professional development strategies that schools can use to help faculty effectively teach and use digital literacy in today’s classroom: First, discard all assumptions about the "digital natives." About the Author Bridget McCrea is a business and technology writer in Clearwater, FL.
Rethinking Learning and Technology Oh wow! What a process this has been. How you you take something you do so subconsciously and make it into something cognitive? I have changed how I want to portray myself as a learner in my personal learning environment (PLE) multiple times and I suspect that, like the diagram, my PLE will constantly evolve. So, here I am, needing to commit to one of my designs and formats. First, the picture: I started off using CMAP, but got really tired of seeing so many little boxes all of the page. By exploring the other tools, I felt like a child in a sandbox...including the part where they have a hissy-fit and knock down the sandcastle before rebuilding it. The description: My PLE starts with me in the middle. Want Information? Want to Share? Want to Connect? Want to Reflect? So, that covers what is inside the circle in my PLE. There are so many ways to learn and my PLE will continue to reflect that. When will it end? The point is, it won't.
4.2. Conectivismo: uma Teoria da Aprendizagem? | Da Web 2.0 ao e-Learning 2.0: Aprender na Rede George Siemens (17-10-2003), no seu Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks: Extending the Classroom, manifestava estas e outras preocupações, de simbiose entre o virtual e o físico, entre o mundo do trabalho, a aprendizagem formal e a aprendizagem informal, contínua, permanente, face a uma cultura institucional universitária e educativa, em geral, que pareciam alheadas das grandes mudanças em curso. E escrevia o que parecia ser (e revelar-se-ia assim) o embrião para uma nova visão do conhecimento e da aprendizagem: What we know is less important than our capacity to continue to learn more. Aceitando que existe alguma aprendizagem que passa pela aquisição de conhecimento, Siemens sustenta que a aprendizagem é, sobretudo e mais frequentemente, um processo com vários estádios e diferentes componentes. A aprendizagem é multifacetada, orientada e determinada pela tarefa. Fig. 5 - Domínios do Conhecimento e da Aprendizagem. A aprendizagem por acreção é contínua. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
The Hierarchy of Professional Development Needs « It’s July and we are learning. A month usually reserved for family trips and “honey-do” lists has brought something different for our district: professional development. The fact that we are doing professional development in July, while unique to us, isn’t a new concept in educational training. However, what makes this professional development different is that rather than having the usual amount of no-shows or malcontents, we are over-capacity with enthusiasm. What makes teachers want to take a break from a beach trips or finally tiling that living room floor? For the second time this summer myself and fellow trainer Tim Yenca have embarked teachers on a 3-day learning expedition called the “Eanes Apple Core Academy”. 1. Yes, at the academy we celebrate failure so much that when it happens everyone cheers “Woooo!!” 2. 3. This one takes the most amount of work, but has some of the biggest pay-off. 4. Feed me maybe? 5. MIT is re-known for it’s media lab. Like this: Like Loading...
More on Online Language Learning Last week’s article on online language learning apparently hit a nerve; not only was it widely e-mailed, but a number of people told me about other language courses that I had missed in my research. In addition, a few factual corrections to the article are in order. Starting with the latter, the free language courses at the BBC‘s Web site may not work in all countries. For example, the videos cannot be played in the United States, but other elements of the program do work. The Oxford Translator applications for the iPhone have changed their name; they are now known as the Odyssey Translator apps. And Tell Me More (not TellMeMore) currently offers both online and CD-ROM-based language courses for the PC; it’s an online version for the Mac that is forthcoming later this year. Other language learning programs include Busuu.com, a free and fee-based online service where one can learn English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
A Great Way to Use Google Docs with your Students One of my first posts here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning was about Google Docs in Education and by the time I wrote and published it, Google Docs was still not popular and did not have the advanced features it has now. Since then, many articles have been published on this topic and one of the most popular of them all was Google Docs 52 Secrets Educators Need to Know about. I am personally impressed by the power of this service and the several things we can achieve by using it. The video is just 2 minutes and 46 seconds but is really great by all means and can help you learn about a new way to use Google Docs with your students. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge - Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice In a new book, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, the authors offer a practical guide to making knowledge work inside an organization. In this excerpt, the authors detail seven design principles for cultivating communities, everything from "design for evolution" to "combine familiarly and excitement." by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice In Silicon Valley, a community of circuit designers meets for a lively debate about the merits of two different designs developed by one of the participants. Because communities of practice are voluntary, what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance, and value to attract and engage members. How do you design for aliveness? Design for evolution. 1. The dynamic nature of communities is key to their evolution. Community design is much more like life-long learning than traditional organization design.
ICT for Language Teachers: QR codes in education: Why all the fuss? The Web is abuzz at the moment with blogs on using QR codes in education. I am not going to give a detailed explanation of what a QR code is if you don’t already know. Suffice it to say that it’s a bit like a barcode but looks different and has a wider range of uses. The Wikipedia article on QR codes gives a good summary of their historical development and how they have been used, particularly in industry. Barcode containing information about Graham Davies’s gender, age, weight, height, location and value in US$! Although QR codes have been around for some time, namely since 1994, it is only recently that they have attracted the attention of educators. • launch an mp3 file, • play a video, • visit a website and answer comprehension questions, • engage in a treasure hunt, • answer questions set by the teacher using QR code voting. I have to confess that so far I am not too excited by the current interest in using QR codes in education. Using barcodes in education did not catch on.
Leaders Leading iPad Programs I can across this article today from EmergingEdTech and it immediately resonated with me. We have been struggling with this exact situation in schools in our own region. Whenever you talk to teachers, especially those that have some first hand experience of iPad use in the classroom, this is one of the first things they say to you. Real change in schools needs to come from the top. This is a great article where Principal David Mahaley discusses their approach to iPad implementation. Make sure you check out the rest of the EmergingEdTech site for some interesting articles on eLearning and Educational Technology. Stealth mentoring I was looking for any previous post I’d made about stealth mentoring, so I could refer to it in a post I was writing, and I couldn’t find it. It’s a concept I refer to often (and have to give credit to my colleague Jay Cross who inspired the thought), so here’s my obligatory place holder. When someone is thinking and learning ‘out loud’, e.g. putting their deeper reflections on line via, say, a blog (er, like this one, recursively), they’re allowing you to look at where and how their thinking is going. When they also are leaving a trail of what they think is interesting (e.g. by pointing to things on Twitter or leaving bookmarks at a social bookmarking site), you can put together what’s interesting to them and what their resulting thoughts are, and start seeing the trajectory of their thinking and learning. In formal learning, we can think of modeling behavior and cognitive annotation, the processes covered in Cognitive Apprenticeship as a development process.