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"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

"Perhaps one of the most powerful expectations of students in an environment of scarcity is that they not question the source of the information. As the modern classroom has become connected, the amount of information available to both teachers and students has exponentially increased. Where teachers once lectured about important ideas and events, or shared their acquired knowledge with their students, today's classrooms can see every key primary source document, the actual notes of great scientists, and a limitless amount of literary criticism. For students, this abundance of information means not only a changing role from the traditional classroom, but also a drastically different set of skills and expectations."

"Learning technologies change student-resource interactions not only by the amount of resources that are now available to students, but also by the quality of the resources. Instead of students being limited to the textbook they receive from their school, that may or may not be outdated, they now have access to resources from literally around the world. Websites like Project Gutenberg and the National Archives give students access to millions of resources, in various forms of media, on just about any topic they could imagine. With that being said, quantity does not necessarily mean quality. For every respectable source of information online, there's an endless amount of second rate information. Teaching students how to find valid and reliable sources of information is paramount to education in the digital age. However, I don't believe it stops there."

"In a "post-truth" era where people are increasingly influenced by their emotions and beliefs over factual information, fact and fiction can be difficult to distinguish, and fake news can spread rapidly through mainstream media sources and social networks. Moreover, fake news is often meant to do harm, by tricking us into believing a lie or unfairly discrediting a person or political movement. Given this malicious intent, students must learn to approach news and information with a critical eye in order to identify intentionally misleading sources (although recent studies confirm that this is an uphill battle for both adults and young people). Teachers therefore play a crucial role in ensuring that their students develop the skills to decipher the many streams of information available to them."

"Digital literacy, as a set of skills that students need to develop and master in order to properly use digital technologies , is an essential component of the 21st century education. Being digitally literate should not be confused with being comfortable using certain types of digital media such as social media. And as Danah Boyd argued in her book "Understanding The Social Lives of Networked Teens" teenagers know how how to use Facebook, but their understanding of the site's privacy settings did not mesh with the ways in which they configured their accounts.They know how to get to Google but had little understanding about how to construct a query to get quality information from the popular search engine. Along with learning how to conduct effective online searches comes the the second most important skill which is that of evaluating and assessing the validity of information found online. One of the versatile tools teachers can use to teach students about web content evaluation is called CRAAP . The acronym CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, and Purpose. CRAAP is a test developed by the University of California at Chico to help students evaluate web content ( and any other content) based on those four dimensions. Below is a public domain document, a checklist, that teachers and students can use to evaluate web content. Click here to download it."

""Be sure to cite your sources." "Give credit where credit is due." "Don't plagiarize." It's possible all teachers have said these things to students. But what do those directives mean to students who, in all reality, haven't had to do much citing?  What does it even mean to cite your sources?  The first step in the process is for students to understand the purpose and importance of citations. We found this great resource outlining that information from The Write Direction. One of the co-authors of this piece, Jessica Steege, is a middle school writing teacher. In her first year of teaching she did her best to explain the importance of citing her work. But somewhere along the way, the message got lost. When a student turned in a research project citing just one source-www.google.com - she felt defeated and wondered where she'd gone wrong. She realized that teaching citations from a "handbook," especially one that would quickly become outdated, wasn't the best way to teach her tech savvy students. So she turned to electronic resources. The Internet offers an abundance of online citation tools, from the extremely easy to use, to ones that require more research on the part of the user. We'd suggest teaching students about a few tools and let them decide which one to use to help them successfully cite their research."

It is often assumed that technically sophisticated students are proficient in information competencies through their use of the Internet and popular search engines. However, course assignments frequently reflect problems such as plagiarism and inaccuracy in evaluating credible sources. Most faculty welcome support to promote information literacy skills but are often pressed for time; they don't want to be constrained in how they teach and would prefer to customize course resources. Participants will learn about UCF's institutional approach to addressing information literacy for the 21st century, which adopts principles inherent in Web 2.0 that most students and faculty have come to expect.

"July 16, 2014 While searching for some resources on a paper and writing on  the 21st century learning skills I came across this skills checklist created by the university of Toledo. This checklist is meant to help students build powerful resumes outlining all the skills they master. I spent some time going through the components of this sheet and found it really sharing with you here.  You can use this sheet with your students as an explanatory guide of some of the important skills ( I said some because some other important skills particularly those related to digital citizenship and digital literacy are missing) they need to work. Below is a round-up of the 9 most important skills which I selected from the entire list. You can acccess this list from this link. 1- Research skills Know how to find and collect relevant background information Be able to analyze data, summarize findings and write a report 2- Critical Thinking skills Be able to review different points of view or ideas and make objective judgments Investigate all the possible solutions to a problem, weighing the pros and cons 3- Organizational skills Be able to organize information, people or thins in a systematic way Be able to establish priorities and meet deadlines 4- Problem-solving skills Be able to clarify the nature of a problem Be able to evaluate alternatives, propose viable solutions and determine the outcome of the various options 5- Creative thinking skills Be able to generate new ideas, invent new things, create new images or designs Find new solutions to problems Be able to use wit and humour effectively 6- Analytical/ logical thinking skills Be able to draw specific conclusions from a set of general observations of from a set of specific facts Be able to synthesize information and ideas 7- Public speaking skills Be able to make formal presentations Present ideas, positions and problems in an interesting way 8- Oral communication skills Be able to present information and ideas clearly a

"The site will then generate a page of information links about your search topic. It collects information from multiple media and different sources from books, blogs , text images to video and even Twitter references."

The site will then generate a page of information links about your search topic. It collects information from multiple media and different sources from books, blogs , text images to video and even Twitter references.

"How do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care? We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct. 6, and try to answer them with resources from The Times as well as from Edutopia, the Center for News Literacy, TEDEd and the Newseum. Although we doubt we need to convince teachers that this skill is important, we like the way Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project frames it in a post for Edutopia. As he points out, every teacher is familiar with "digital natives" and the way they seem to have been born with the ability to use technology. But what about "digital naïveté" - when students trust sources of information that are obviously unreliable?"

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE AwesomeStories is large resource filled with primary-source information. Its purpose is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites. The site is very easy to use and is would be helpful to use with many projects across the curriculum.

"It just might be that in a society where information is abundant, thinking habits are more important than knowledge. Somewhere beneath wisdom and above the "things" a student knows. Laws of economics say that scarcity increases value. It's no longer information that's scarce, but rather meaningful response to that information. Thought. And thought has a source-a complex set of processes, background knowledge, and schema that we can, as educators think of as cognitive habits. And if they're habits, well, that means they're probably something we can practice at, doesn't it?"

"Michelle Joyce doesn't shy away from politicized science topics such as climate change. In fact, she works to equip seniors at Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida with the skills to accurately evaluate those topics on their own. Along with teaching chemistry and physics, she offers a class called "thinking skills" where students solve logic and math puzzles while also enhancing their media literacy. Students go beyond just learning about legitimate sources of information on the internet and delve into just how the information is put together in the first place. But teaching students those critical thinking skills only as they're about to depart for college can be too little too late. "It's a really hard thing to teach within the space of everything else that you need to teach in a classroom," Joyce said. "It's crucial that we teach it as early as we can." The internet has no shortage of dubious information; and the ability to evaluate health and science claims is a subset of media literacy. With the abundance of health/science content students may only see via social media, kids are ill-equipped to discern hype from real science."

"People of all ages struggle to evaluate the integrity of the digital information that rains down with every web search and social media scroll. When the Stanford History Education Group released findings showing that most students couldn't tell sponsored ads from real articles, among other miscues, it intensified the scramble for tools and strategies to help students discern better. But a more recent study by Stanford's Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew suggests that many of the techniques that students and teachers employ - which include checklists and other practices most recommended for digital literacy - are often misleading. A better solution for navigating our cluttered online environment, they say, can be found in the practices of professional fact-checkers. Their approach, which harnesses the power of the web to determine trustworthiness, is more likely to expose dubious information. The following guidelines for interrogating online information, inspired by the fact-checkers' techniques, will increase students' odds of determining unreliable sources (and consuming reliable ones)."

"With 'software in the cloud' service 'Dot ePub' you can convert any web page into an eBook making research on the iPad a snap. After you setup a 'magic bookmark' using the directions on the Dot ePub web site you can automatically convert any web page into a format that you can open in iBooks or any other eReader. From there you can group sources together onto a bookshelf, annotate, underline, and highlight. Dot ePub also automatically copies source citation information into the back of the book."

Wikipedia is an incredible teaching tool for the importance of citation, peer review, and evaluating sources. Without proper citations, the entry will change to reflect only sourced information.

"Teaching news literacy is more necessary and challenging than ever in a world where news is delivered at a constant pace from a broad range of sources. Since social media and filter bubbles can make it challenging to access unbiased, factual information, we must equip students to be critical as they access news sources for a variety of purposes. This live, interactive edWebinar will give an overview of the phenomenon of fake news going viral and tools educators can use to help students develop news literacy skills."

"The merits of doing research and creating these reports and papers are valid. When they create them, students … Gather information Evaluate sources Organize and synthesize data Form ideas and cohesive thoughts Create a polished, finished product Cite where they got their information Here's the problem, though: the finished product just isn't very relevant to the real world, be it in the workforce or in people's personal lives. Reports and papers often end up where mine always did - in the trash. If students are going to do their best work to learn and create, shouldn't it be in a form they can be proud of - and that they want to show others? I think it's time that we turn research reports and papers on their heads. Here are 10 creative alternatives:"