Group items tagged

"Since its release in 2009, Minecraft has sold millions of copies worldwide revolutionizing thus the gaming industry and providing game players with an endless world of possibilities. As a sandbox construction game, Minecraft has successfully and distinctively set itself from the crowd by incorporating the ethos of 21st century learning that include: creativity, challenge, problem solving, and strategic thinking all of which are adeptly adapted to the player's little gaming world. Minecraft provided players with the tools and resources to construct their own gaming reality and test their creative possibilities. In a relatively short time, Minecraft succeeded in marking a strong presence within the education sector  and became one of the leading educational learning platforms for students. As a culmination of its sweeping popularity among the educational community, Minecraft recently released  Minecraft for Education which is a website geared primarily towards providing teachers with a forum where they can share their ideas about how they use Minecraft in their teaching. Given this growing potential of Minecraft in education, we decided to compile the list  below featuring some of the best reads on Minecraft. These books will help you learn more about how educators are using Minecraft as a powerful instructional tool to engage students and teach different subjects."

"Over the next four or five posts in this series, I'm going to share with you details about each week's activity and the work involved, components needed, and more. It's my hope that there are others out there who might find this useful for creating their own camp, so I'll do my best to share where I've deviated or modified the project (and why). I'll also include some details about costs and where I ordered stuff as well as give you some ideas for what science-y topics work best for each project. (You don't have to order a book for each student, but a few extra copies might be useful for those who are interested in reading the story or investigating the various projects. The books are around $12 each.)"

"I've been a #MakerMom since my daughter learned to walk. I didn't label it that way, though, until she was in first grade and received a copy of Fashioning Technology from one of the editors of O'Reilly media. This book changed the course of her life in many ways, and how she thought of herself. For the first time she had a way of thinking about what she did so naturally - make things - and a community of support, encouragement and learning where she could develop her passion fearlessly. The Maker Movement is more than electronics, robots, 3-d printing and drones. It is a way of thinking and a stance towards learning and community that is collaborative, participative, critical without being judgmental, and inclusive. One way that Making supports education is the natural evolution from any of the myriad entry points towards facility with electronics, design, coding, engineering, and iterative approaches."

"Every single day I see something awesome on Twitter, on a blog, or from a colleague that excites me about learning. We are surrounded by awesome.  Education is filled with a new energy that about sharing, creating, and learning.  I know, it's not really "new," but it's new to me.  Past the canned programs and copied downloads is this one thing:  Authentic learning. We all have a chance, right now, to make school more.  And we can do it with less."

The government is ready to introduce controversial new copyright legislation that experts believe will introduce harsh new restrictions on downloading, copying songs to CDs and music players, unlocking cellphones and time-shifting of television shows.

Lessonwriter creates lesson plans and instructional materials for teaching English language skills from any reading passage How it works- Copy & paste any text you choose into LessonWriter; LessonWriter analyzes text for vocabulary, grammar and usage, pronunciation, and word roots and stems; Then, LessonWriter writes a lesson plan and a lesson that teaches the skills you chose in the context of the passage - automatically.

Write something and this site flips it upside down

Just for fun! Type your text. Click the Flip button to turn it upside down. Copy and paste the flipped text into a place that you use text.

This site is dedicated to the students and teachers who want to learn Scratch. . (To receive a free copy DVD with all the video-tutorials and materials in this website, please submit the mailing address of your school or institution through the 'Contact Us' link.)

Once you've installed the Open Attribute add on, which makes it ridiculously simple to copy and paste a properly formatted attribution for Creative Commons licensed work on the web.

"Your iPhone and iPad allow you to carry around a bookshelf full of your favorite novels, textbooks, and periodicals to read whenever you'd like. Before you can snuggle up with a digital copy of Sherlock Holmes, however, you'll need to first download an e-reader application."

You write the text for the cartoon, and then the website generates the html for you to copy and paste into your blog.

"Often you may come upon a website you wish to add to a web 2.0 resource like Diigo, Delicious, Evernote, Livebinder, ReadItLater, Instapaper, Shareholic, etc. On a computer browser, you can install extension toolbars to make quick work of it, but not so easily on the iPad. Not wanting to relegate the iPad to a second-class browsing too, you can make these tools work by copying the javascript code directly into the browser bookmark."

"Last winter I published a chart that compared the key features of five popular student response platforms. In the nine months since then more student response tools have come onto market. This morning I added those tools my chart. The chart is embedded below as PDF hosted by Box.com. You can also get a Google Documents copy of it by clicking here."

"Today as I was sifting through some of graphics created by the Visual Communication Guy, I come across this interesting visual on plagiarism. This could be a very good document to use with your students in class to teach them about plagiarism : what constitutes an act of plagiarism and the different types of copyright violations involved in it. Unfortunately, as I was looking for a download link I found out that the visual is not free. You can access and read it in large version by clicking on the image there but if you want to have a copy you  need to pay. If you are looking for web tools to help you detect plagiarism in your students works, this list is a good place to start with. Enjoy"

"Creating augmented reality has never been so easy until now! DAQRI 4D Studio gives educators and students the ability to easily create experiences and instantly publish them to share with the world. As our friend Katie Ann said during her augmented reality presentation at Podstock this year, "If you can copy and paste, and drag and drop, then you can create augmented reality." Each experience created and published by in 4D Studio for Education can be viewed using the target image and free DAQRI application.  "

"Well it appears that my series of charts comparing ed tech tools is catching on because today I received my first suggestion for a chart topic. The suggestion was for a comparison of website creation tools. In the chart below I compare five popular tools for building classroom websites. You'll notice that the last column of the chart contains links to tutorials on how to use each service. You can find a Google Docs copy of the chart here or download it through the Box.com widget embedded below."

"The following example is a piece of work about simplifying algebraic fractions that illustrates the value of student explanations. The task was to make a video explaining how to simplify the three fractions below, complete with full explanations. No training was given on how to do this, and no apps were recommended. This was my first attempt at asking this particular group of students to create a video. It follows that after years of simply writing down answers and them either being right or wrong, several students decided to assume that I was joking with this task and simply handed me in a copy of the answers. Job done. Or was it Wolfram Alpha's job done? Anyway, here is what a few responses to the task looked like"