Group items tagged

Designed as a research development tool to help students decide how to isolate the important facts in a body of text, this note-taking tool is great for summarizing and paraphrasing practice.

The primary goal of the Digital Youth Network Program is to develop a model program that enables urban youth to become discerning new media consumers and fluent media producers.To be full citizens today, youth must be engaged, articulate, critical and collaborative. Youth must become creators - designers, builders & innovators - who can envision new possibilities. Youth must also be able to organize, navigate and judge the large amounts of information and media to which they now have access. Full citizens today must be reflective thinkers who are committed to personal and community improvement.

Trends suggest that mobile phones have educational potential. Cell phones are often tolerated in schools as long as they are turned off during lessons; sometimes they're banned outright. But as mobile technologies continue to improve and pioneers find innovative ways to use them, it's only a matter of time before students are admonished for not bringing their phones to class.

Phenomenal global collaboration project involving students from 15 countries. Teaching assignment is replicated across continents. Last year's project, Rock n Sol, was featured in the California K-12 Technology Showcase. This year's project, "Are You Game" focuses on digital storytelling. Students collaborate to compose music, make movies, podcasts, and experiments and met in face to face video-conferences. Using Garage Band, kids annually create a collaborative song that has been touched in every continent in the world. Each week, each group contributes 30 seconds with a specific musical instrument. Even blind students are involved in the project.

Teachable moment: In addition to the three important lessons, the teacher guided students through a process of creating and posting their own version of appropriate rules for cell phones in school. Over five dozen student comments are posted. Interesting stuff.

The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education.

This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.

Edmodo is a private micro-blogging platform built for use by teachers and students for use in the classroom. Recommended by Kathy Schrock at NECC09.

Leonard's class at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Wesley Chapel, a middle-class Florida suburb about 30 miles north of Tampa, is one of a growing number around the country that are abandoning traditional policies of cell phone prohibition and incorporating them into class lessons.

K-12 cross-curricular projects that make use of Voicethread for student collaborations.

Technology not only changes how we write, but it also changes what writing is. Education will need to re-evaluate which writing skills teachers should pass to their students. Digital graphic writing is one genre students need to be fluent. Comic Life is the "word processor" of digital graphic writing.

Howard Gardner, the founder of multiple-intelligences theory discusses the challenges ethics and education face as digital media become more prevalent. Through his GOODPLAY PROJECT, he examines the ethical sense of young people. He ooks at five elements related to what it means to be ethical with new media: sense of identity, sense of privacy, sense of ownership/authorship, trustworthiness and credibility, and what it means to participate in a community.

Part of an 18-unit curriculum developed by Renee Hobbs and integrating media literacy into common state standards in English, Social Studies, Math, and Health. Provided by Temple University's Media Education Lab.

Media literacy is the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of forms. It uses an inquiry-based instructional model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, see and read. Media literacy aims to enable people to be skillful creators and producers of media messages, both to facilitate an understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium, as well as to create independent media.

Brilliant and meaty post from Alex Couros about what "digital citizenship" encompasses and really means for pedagogy.

An eleven year old gives an awesome one-minute rundown of all of the cool things he does with digital media at his school and in his life.

An educator with a class of 90 students wanted to reach more students and involve them in classroom discussions. She did so by engaging them with Twitter in a collaborative dialogue. Students sent comments by laptops and via cell phone. The micro-blogging experiment forced them to stay on track and keep their thoughts concise.

This is a demo of the microblogging and communications platform Edmodo, a private social network for K-12 education. http://www.edmodo.com/