Create Animation - Sketch Star The “urban advantage” in education by Marilyn AchironEditor, Directorate for Education and Skills On average across OECD countries, students who attend schools in cities of more than 100 000 people perform better in PISA than students who attend schools in villages, rural areas, or towns with up to 100 000 inhabitants. This difference in performance translates to about 20 PISA score points – the equivalent of half-a-year of schooling. In many countries and economies, the performance difference between the two groups of students reflects families’ decisions about housing and employment, which, in turn, influence how students’ socio-economic status is distributed geographically. In all countries and economies except for Austria, Belgium, Germany, Israel, Korea, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, students who attend schools in urban settings come from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. What this tells us is that some of the conventional wisdom about big city schools may be a little off.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 8 Great New Web Tools for Teachers Below is a list of some great new web tools I have curated for you. These are basically web tools other educators have reviewed in their blogs and websites and which you can use in your teaching with your students. As is the case with every post I publish in Educational Web Tools section here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, the purpose of such lists is to provide teachers with ready materials to use in their classroom and keep those who are too busy to go online and search for web tools, keep them updated on the latest releases in the world of educational technology. Check out the tools I have for you today and let me know if you like this selection or not. 1- ImageQuiz As its name indicates, this tool allows you to create quizzes around images. 2- Pixaby This is a great resource where you and your students can have access to a treasure trove of free images to your in your projects. 3- Book Results 4- Oweb Voice Input 5- WireWax 6- Presentation.io 7- Flashcard Stash
The 10 Best Web Tools For Flipped Classrooms While flipping the classroom is still one of the hottest trends in education, it’s got nothing on time-saving and downright useful apps and web tools. In an effort to provide a quick look at some of the best web tools for flipped classrooms, I thought it would be useful to poll the @Edudemic Twitter followers . Including the tweets, I also got at least 40 emails from friends, colleagues, and administrators from around the world. One thing stood out to me: there were a lot of repeats! Below is a simple list designed to help get any educator, administrator, student, or parent a bit more familiar with some of the most popular web tools for flipped classrooms. Wikispaces About The Tool: Wikispaces is a free and useful web tool designed to give students (or ‘users’ of any kind, really) the ability to share their thoughts, reflect on the work of others, and edit a body of work together. Poll Everywhere Edmodo Screencast Celly Dropbox YouTube About The Tool: It’s YouTube. Twitter Evernote
40 Sites and Apps for Creating Presentations Creating a presentation or slideshow is one of the staples of any 21st Century Classroom. This is a skill that almost every educator has and is a must known skill for any successful student. It used to be that only programs such as PowerPoint could create presentations. However, now there are lots of sites and apps that not only creating stunning presentations but also make it easier then ever. *This list is in alphabetical order.40 Sites & Apps for Creating Presentations 9Slides - A wonderful site and app for adding video/audio narration to a presentation.
One-Fourth of DNA Born by 2.8 Billion Years Ago | Wired Science Using the genetic equivalent of the Hubble telescope, researchers have peered into the distant past and witnessed an explosion of new genes that happened more than 3 billion years ago. About 27 percent of all gene families that exist today were born between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, two researchers from MIT reported online Dec. 19 in Nature. The surge of gene births — which the scientists have dubbed the Archean expansion — predate some important changes in Earth’s early chemistry, including the appearance of large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere, say evolutionary biologists Eric Alm and Lawrence David. The study may show how early organisms responded to and helped alter the planet’s chemistry. Daniel Segrè, a computational biologist at Boston University, says that the work provides “insight into really ancient metabolic events.” Fossils of organisms billions of years old are difficult to find. Image: Flickr/A Hermida See Also:
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: The Best 13 Web Tools for Teachers Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is back to you with another list of great educational web tools that teachers are ( or should be ) using. I know I have not posted in this section of my blog for a couple of weeks now but sometimes I get overwhelmed with the amount of work I have to do and things get piled up on me but I definitely end up doing all. In Educational Web Tools section, I compile and review lists of web tools I gather from different sources online and provide them handy for teachers and educators particularly those who, because of their time constraints or any other reason, do not have the time to spend online looking for web tools to try with their students or to use for their professional development. 1- Claco Find, build and share resources with teachers across the hall or across the world — aligned with Common Core 2- ClassDojo ClassDojo is a classroom tool that helps teachers improve behavior in their classrooms quickly and easily. 3- Diigo 4- Edmodo 5- Evernote
20 Great Websites For Elementary Educators 6 Time-Saving Writing Apps For Students 10.00K Views 0 Likes For anyone who has ever had to write a paper, you know that getting the ideas down when they come to you is important. The 12 Technologies Forever Changing School Libraries everystockphoto - searching free photos
Hints of lightweight dark matter get even stronger - space - 10 May 2013 A strange light is shining near the centre of the Milky Way, and evidence is mounting that it is the spark of lightweight dark matter meeting a violent end. At the same time, a suite of sensitive detectors deep underground is seeing hints of similar particles. Dark matter is thought to make up roughly 80 per cent of the matter in the universe. But aside from its gravitational tug on regular matter, the substance has proven tough to detect, and many of its fundamental properties remain unknown. The leading theoretical candidates for dark matter are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Last year scientists ruled out a possible Fermi signal at 130 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) as dark matter's smoking gun. Unusual suspects That signal has been controversial, in part because it had only been seen very close to the centre of the Milky Way, in a violent region filled with hot gas, newborn stars, supernovae and a supermassive black hole – any of which could be throwing off spare gamma rays.