Group items tagged

"A good blog post delivers its message by combining words with visual interest in a well-structured format that's easy to read. Follow the basics in this article to start writing posts that attract and hold your readers' attention."

"Why does Posterous shine in an education setting? Here are a few reasons: It's simple - Stay in touch beyond the classroom. In just minutes, create a Site or Group to begin sharing assignments, student work, news, and even meaningful discussions. Easily publish class materials and multimedia - Make learning fun by posting homework, podcasts, slides, and photos. Just upload. Posterous makes it look good and takes out the hassle of dealing with any 3rd party webhosts. Keep content and conversations private - Share class updates and exchange ideas in a secure setting. Control who can view and who can post with easy to manage privacy controls. Contribute as a team - Don't do it alone! Invite others to publish and subscribe. Set access controls for Contributors and Administrators. Easily manage recipient lists. Access Posterous anywhere - With our mobile apps and approach to e-mail everyone from time-pressed parents, teachers, and students can catch up on posts and activity. In this How Do I tutorial we'll be going over some uses of Posterous that are already being used by educators and students."

One of the features I have always liked about Edmodo that provides students with a way to organize their cornucopia of uploaded digital goodness (i.e. files and links attached to assignments and posts) is the Edmodo library.  If you're already an Edmodo user, you know how fabulous the library is, with its ability to upload all types of files to it, shareable folders (for teachers), Google Docs integration, and sorting by anything attached to posts. 

"There's one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free, good quality images that are cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content? It's a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright-a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create your own image from scratch. We'll explore all of these and then some in this post about free image sources. A few things to know before we get started:"

"We all love free apps, but it's hard to track when apps go on sale, and whether they're worth the trouble. Here's a trick for keeping track of on-sale apps, and making those sales last forever. We've shared a few tools that help you track app sales, but they can be a pain. A lot of the apps that go on sale aren't very good, and while you can make a wish list, this doesn't help you discover new apps at all. Of course, we occasionally share cool apps in our Dealhacker posts, but what if you could get automatic email notifications for cheap, good apps whenever they went on sale? Here's a method-inspired by this Reddit post-to make that a reality."

"I cannot take credit for these 6 myths of digital technology - I'm lifting them straight from what I thought was a well known and received investigation in to the impact of digital technology on education. It would appear that a lot of the research however is not well known and in an attempt to do for others as I do for my students in terms of making the implicit explicit; this marks the first of a series of posts which will look in to the evidence behind digital technology and its links to learning. In this post I will be looking at an investigation undertaken by Professor Steven Higgins, ZhiMin Xiao and Maria Katsipataki from the School of Education at Durham University, published for the Education Endowment Foundation."

"Over the last month or so EmergingEdTech ran a survey seeking input from educators like you. The goal was to make sure we understand what you want to know about education and instructional technology, and what your biggest challenges are as an educator. The survey received nearly 160 responses (thank you!). Results are being shared results in two parts. This first post deals with the technology-specific questions, and a second shorter post will follow that focuses on the your most significant professional challenges."

"This post discusses some of the challenges and proposed solutions for implementing maker education activities into a learning setting.  Several trends drive this post: The Play Deficit - diminishing amount of free play in which kids engage Lack of creativity and innovation in children's lives and toys The Maker Movement -Maker Education"

"I guess given its title this blog post could come under some criticism but it's not really about that. These are just some things that I think help. I hope you concur."

"Here are a few of our favorite ways that kids can learn with Minecraft.  For even more ideas, be sure to check out our previous post - Transforming the Way We Learn: Why Minecraft is an Amazing Learning Tool."

Thanks for tagging this post John. Minecraft has taken over at my house and also at my kids school, to learn that there are educational benefits behind it is fantastic. I must admit that I have my own world on Minecraft as do my kids and we love building and exploring. To be ablt to use Minecraft within a teaching environment at the moment would be awesome as it is current and the kids would get very enthusiastic.

"In this post, we'll break down more than 50 different sources and tools for visual content. We'll cover the following (click on any section to be taken to that area directly): Searchable photo sites Free-form photo libraries Photo search tools Create-your-own image tools Embeddable media"

Nearpod has posted 10 guides on working with nearpod via Snapguide.

I have been trying to write this post for weeks now. I love edmodo. In fact I would have to say using edmodo is becoming an absolutely essential tool in our year 5 classrooms. I want to try and explain some of the ways we are using edmodo in year 5 and to try and explain why I am so excited about how our students are using it. I have to admit though that edmodo being a secure online forum means I feel I cannot show you any examples. Thus making my task a hard one and one I have kept procrastinating about finishing!

EduClipper is the latest in a string of Pinterest clones, true (See below), but Bellow's experience in education - in the classroom and with professional development - should give him a leg up in creating a tool that'll work in classrooms and that'll work for teachers. EduClipper lets you build clipboards into which you can post links, images, videos and documents and upload files to share with others. These clipboards can be private or public - that's a key dfferentiator between eduClipper and its competitors- clipped for one's self and/or shared to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Evernote, and Edmodo or via email.

Online Colleges has posted an interesting new infographic that looks at the connection between apps and education. The chart, which we've included here, suggests that the use of smartphones and tablets will only increase in the future, which really shouldn't come as a surprise.

"Recently, a high school teacher sent me the following question via Edmodo: Hey Miguel :) Can you tell me where to look to share a Youtube clip with my Lang &GovEco edmodo students? I found one I'd like to post for the first week. Thanks for all you are doing to help us utilize technology more effectively.  At first, I thought the response might be pretty easy but then realized there were several ways to get this done. This blog entry illustrates 4 of those approaches on how to add video to Edmodo."

A great post from Stephen Downes looking at assessment via contribution rather than collection/regurgitation.

Well on one random post, I grabbed one random picture off of google and then a few weeks later I got contacted by the photographer who owned that photo. He sent me a takedown notice, which I responded to immediately because I felt awful that I had unknowingly used a copyrighted pic. The pic was down within minutes. But that wasn't going to cut it. He wanted compensation for the pic. A significant chunk of money that I couldn't afford. I'm not going to go into the details but know that it was a lot of stress, lawyers had to get involved, and I had to pay money that I didn't have for a use of a photo I didn't need.

Google has developed an interactive curriculum on YouTube to support teachers in educating students on how to be safe, engaged and confident model netizens. The initiative is aimed at students aged 13 to 17 and will help them to develop digital literacy skills on YouTube that would be applicable across the web. A list of 10 lessons has been devised, in which students can learn about YouTube's policies, how to report content, how to protect their own privacy, and how to be responsible YouTube community members and, in the broader picture, digital citizens. Each lesson comes with guidelines for teachers and ready-made slides for presentation. There's also a YouTube Curriculum channel where videos related to the project will be posted.

"As I lamented in my last post, many of the fabulous Web tools out there are restricted to users 13 and over. This limits what Elementary/Primary schools students can access online to create content to collaborate. To save others at school some time, then, I have compiled a list of popular/well known Web tools that can and can't be used by children under 13 - 1), so we are legally covered in what we are allowing our students to use and 2), so they know what is available. Please note that generally the sites that allow for under 13s still ask for parental permission ( even Edmodo if you haven't read the Terms of Use) so a solid school user agreement is needed to use these tools. Some of the sites are not US based so are not bound by COPPA and CIPA regulations. It still requires schools to carefully check out what can be viewed on these sites to ensure they are appropriate to access."