EST430

Judy O'Connell's excellent A-Z listing of all manner of tools and apps, not necessarily Web 2.0 either.

"I have an issue with the word "e-learning". I was wondering at what point we are going to ditch the "e" in front of "learning". I assume "e" stands for electronic. Did we have "p-learning" before that, when kids used pens for learning? It seems, to some, at least, the tool that is used to make the learning happen is considered more important than the learning itself. People (like myself) who are considered accomplished in "e-learning" should be considered first and foremost as great teachers who happen to use technology quite a bit to enable the learning. If you truly want to integrate technology into your teaching, your first step is to stop thinking of it as something separate, and start thinking of it as a way to achieve your educational goals."

"Dropbox, the app we all (at least many of us) know and love, has a plethora of advanced uses to make life so much easier in managing data between multiple computers and online. We've posted several roundups of tips and tricks for Dropbox and now we present our ultimate toolkit and guide. We've pulled all our tips and tricks together and added quite a few more. Additionally, share your Dropbox tips and tricks and we'll update the list to share the fun with everyone."

Wes Fryer's great Scratch resource wiki has tutorials video and an assessment rubric.

"Last month, 16 teachers from across the country got together at Google's Seattle office for the YouTube Teachers Studio - a sort of bootcamp to learn how to best use YouTube in the classroom. Jon Corippo, a Google Certified Teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator, was among the group, and came back with ideas about what YouTube was great for."

"Teachers around the world are gearing up for the new school year -- but the experience is going to be vastly different for new teachers. Where an experienced teacher has the knowledge of what worked and what didn't, a new teacher is going to be bombarded with tons of new info and the need to process it! Not to mention, they will be preparing for the most important piece of all: their classroom instruction. In no way, do I want to add to the burden of the already-filled-to-the-brim, new teacher stress bucket. I do however, want to share just 20 tidbits which I hope will help ease new teachers into a fun, successful school year. Some of these will be in the form of social media tools, which I think are awesome, and wish I had had as a newbie. And each little tidbit is linked to a resource which I hope you will find supportive. "

Some tips for beginning teachers from Edutopia

"We all love infographics. Why? Well, they help us grasp information in a quick and fun way that appeals to our visual senses. In fact, there's an infographic here explaining that. Below you'll find 10 infographics that discuss learning in many different capacities - online, blended, mobile, etc."

"As the school doors swing open to welcome the start of another year, both teachers and students will have goals: to inspire a class, to learn new things, to get good grades. What probably won't be on that list is to make a mistake -- in fact many. But it should be. Why? Because we're raising a generation of children -- primarily in affluent, high-achieving districts -- who are terrified of blundering. Of failing. Of even sitting with the discomfort of not knowing something for a few minutes. If students are afraid of mistakes, then they're afraid of trying something new, of being creative, of thinking in a different way. They're scared to raise their hands when they don't know the answer and their response to a difficult problem is to ask the teacher rather than try different solutions that might, gasp, be wrong. They're as one teacher told me, "victims of excellence." "

"Google Docs is my favorite tool for keeping my email inbox free of large file attachments from my students. In fact, after September 30 I don't accept written assignments from my students in any other format. But, I realize that there are some files that aren't perfectly suited to being viewed in Google Docs. For example, it a student has a Keynote file it won't be viewed the same way in Google Docs as it is in Keynote. I also realize that not all of my readers are Google Docs fanatics like me. For those reasons I've compiled this list of good ways to share large files without the need for sending email attachments."

"In the digital age, kids need to have an understanding of what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. They need to learn the technical how-to's, as well as a more global comprehension of how to navigate the online world. To that end, Melbourne educator Jenny Luca made a commitment to help her students start blogging and to create ePortfolios. Here are five reasons why, at her school, these skills are now a high priority."

"I've been reading snippets of Eli Pariser's book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. He leads off the book with a discussion of the effect of Google's "personalization" feature on the ranking of search results. This feature uses 54 signals (what browser version you're using, your prior searches, geographic location, and so on) to customize search results for each user. Pariser was concerned about this and tested it by asking two friends to run the same search at the same time and comparing the results. He found that the results were disturbingly different, and concluded that search engines are "increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.""

"A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults..... Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?"

An interesting infographic related to the Flipped Classroom. Mainly High School data but useful nonetheless.

"BANNING Facebook at school? Ha! When Thom McKay realized that his son had figured out how to get on the social networking site even though his New Jersey middle school had blocked it, he asked the boy in astonishment how he had done it. "Pretty easy, Dad," his son retorted. "Don't be an idiot. We know more about computers than the teachers do." "

"Draw it Live is a free application that allows you to work together with other people to draw in real time. You simply create a whiteboard and share its URL to allow other people to join in. No password is required, and no special plugins are required. Just click on the link, type in your name, and start drawing and chatting with your friends:"

This is so cool Wow :)

"The vision of a modern education built around personalized learning is not new, but it is definitely tantalizing. Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age (Spectra, 1995) shares a vision of personalized learning in the future via an interactive book that possesses a conversational interface (CI) and "pseudo-intelligence," a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that is inferior to human intelligence. It's likely that we'll see decent conversational interfaces within the next decade, and certainly applications like Google Voice are moving us much closer to this reality. AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20-50 years, but we can't wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?"

This is Matt Koehler's TPACK site with links to an intro to TPACK, Surveys, bibliography, groups and newsletters amongst other information.

"Kevin Buran teaches 6th and 8th grade science to students at Carmel Middle School. I use Evernote, Everywhere: Mac, iPhone, Web Clipper I love…ScanSnap Scanner for scanning in worksheets and student work JotNot for taking snapshots of my daily itinerary and saving them instantly to Evernote I use Evernote for.. I first heard about Evernote about a year ago, but have become an avid user much more recently. Here are just a few of the ways that I use Evernote for teaching:"