Group items tagged

"As a 21st century teacher, you probably need to share stuff, and have stuff shared with. "Stuff" like pdfs, various word processing documents, video files, and other digital fare. The traditional way to do this has been email, but limits here-including speed, file size, and the relative clunkiness of sharing with large groups-make sharing files through email less than "best practice." We started to create a chart that listed the nuance details of each platform, from storage and sharing limits, FTPing ability, the need to sign up to use, and password-protecting to flexible expiration dates for rights to files-but then we found that Wikipedia had already done this (and then some). So we instead picked our favorite dozen, and then ranked them in terms of their flexibility and integration that education technology demands. Though most of the tools below can share most files (mp3s, .movs, .mp4s, exe, .zip, .doc and .docx files, .pdfs, etc.), we focused more on documents, images, folders and software integration than incredibly detailed features that may make it overkill for your classrooms."

"Storyboard That provides templates in which you can create your stories in a comic strip style. To help you create your story Storyboard That provides dozens of scenes, characters, and text bubbles to fill your storyboard's frames. Each element that you drag into your storyboard's frames can be re-sized, rotated, and re-positioned to your heart's content. Your completed storyboard can be saved as a comic strip, saved as a set of images (one image for each frame), or saved as a set of PPTX slides. "

"The learn-to-code movement is aiming younger. MIT and partners, for example, recently released a free iPad app with its visual programming language ScratchJr., so kindergartners could use it to code stories and games even before knowing how to read. Vikas Gupta, a former Google executive who founded the startup Wonder Workshop (formerly called Play-i), has taken a slightly different path. "We learned that in order to make programming of interest to young children, it has to be a tangible product. It can't be just software," he told Co.Exist last year. Enter Dot and Dash-Wonder Workshop's two new robots that teach coding skills to children as young as five that are now being field tested in a few dozen elementary school classrooms nationally. And they are definitely tangible: Dash hears and responds to sounds, navigates around a room and avoid obstacles, and comes to life with sound and lights. He can even play the xylophone. Dot, on the other hand, doesn't have wheels and is meant to interact with Dash via Bluetooth and act as a controller. Both have their own customizable "personalities." On the back end, through four apps that control both robots, they are secretly teaching coding skills such as "event-based programming, sequencing, conditionals, and loops.""

"My colleague and I walked into a room filled with a dozen fifth-grade girls snacking on pretzels and huddling around a LEGO robot they had named Kitty. Two of them were laughing about the goggles they had made out of robot wheels, while another small group crowded around a laptop to program wheel rotations. The rest attempted to drive Kitty through what looked like an obstacle course. It was our first glimpse into life as mentors for the Girl Scouts of Western Washington's LEGO League, a competition that combines programming LEGO Mindstorms robots, team project planning, and creative problem solving to get kids excited about science and technology."

"Road to Grammar is a free resource featuring quizzes, games, and lessons for English language learners. Visitors to Road to Grammar will find grammar quizzes. Most of the quizzes provide students with instant feedback. Part of the feedback that students receive on the quizzes they take includes explanations why an answer is correct or incorrect. Before taking the quizzes visitors can work through a series of practice activities."

"During my poster session at ISTE, I must have been asked dozens of times: "When do students use your Makerspace?  How do you organize scheduling?" I am in a magnet middle school on a flexible schedule.  I have an extremely supportive administration and staff and an enthusiastic student body that's eager to learn.  I realize that these circumstances won't apply to everyone and that I'm very lucky to be in the place that I'm in. That being said, here's how and when students at Stewart Middle Magnet use our Makerspace:"

"Makerspaces have made headlines recently. Several weeks ago New York City hosted the World Maker Faire. The White House had its first Maker Faire this summer, and schools and libraries across the country are installing these spaces. It is certainly tempting to start thinking about all the amazing tools you could put into your makerspace. If you know anything about Makers, you are probably thinking that you need a CNC machine, a 3-D printer, Dremels for everyone and a laser cutter since they are the gateway tool for making things. But buying a bunch of tools without first stopping to think about how they will be integrated into the culture and curriculum of your school is a recipe for a dusty and underused workshop. Don't be tempted by the sexy CNC and laser cutters if you don't need them. Just taking apart a blender offers a wealth of learning opportunities. From my experience installing makerspaces in several dozen schools, I've developed a process that helps you think through your makerspace and how it fits into the culture and curriculum of your school. Skipping this process, or one like it, will almost certainly result in tension, missed teaching opportunities, and overspending."

"Makerspaces have made headlines recently. Several weeks ago New York City hosted the World Maker Faire. The White House had its first Maker Faire this summer, and schools and libraries across the country are installing these spaces. It is certainly tempting to start thinking about all the amazing tools you could put into your makerspace. If you know anything about Makers, you are probably thinking that you need a CNC machine, a 3-D printer, Dremels for everyone and a laser cutter since they are the gateway tool for making things. But buying a bunch of tools without first stopping to think about how they will be integrated into the culture and curriculum of your school is a recipe for a dusty and underused workshop. From my experience installing makerspaces in several dozen schools, I've developed a process that helps you think through your makerspace and how it fits into the culture and curriculum of your school. Skipping this process, or one like it, will almost certainly result in tension, missed teaching opportunities, and overspending."

Sprout is the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Any size, any number of pages. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.

"Social gaming has a come a long way from the days when a dozen students would squint at a 10-inch screen of Oregon Trail. The 2000s seemed to be the decade of case studies: Bold educators willing to experiment with developing technologies. But now, the involvement of major funders, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, points to an industry that is on the cusp of freeing education from its 2D textbook prison."

"On one particular day, I began to question my rationale behind all of this print media I was accumulating. Media that - in a matter of days - would get tossed in the recycling bin. "Why," I asked myself, "was I reading all of this print media when I have an iPad? Isn't print media supposed to be on its deathbed? Why was I sticking with a format that will soon depart this life?" Adding fuel to this query, I have more than two dozen news-related apps on my iPad - from the New York Times to Flipboard. Some of them are spectacularly well-designed. Yet, I was rarely using them. Why?"

"What if every teacher tweeted? Is there some kind of sequence of events we might expect? A teacher signs up for twitter after agonizing over the details (username, avatar, bio, etc.), follows a few dozen people, then sits slack-jawed and confused as that non-stop digital stream begins. We have to assume that somehow this trickles down to the learning experiences of the students-their writing, their skills, and the wandering of their thoughts-yes? No reason to tweet just to be all avant-garde about it all. It depends on how it's used-twitter, that is. Like any tool, twitter is designed for a task. The results of that task depends on the knowledge and skill of its user. There is nothing other-wordly about twitter, if we're being honest. It has its talents (a few of which we looked at in why twitter works in education), but it is, in shorty, some thing some one made. And as teachers, we can use it, or leave it alone."

"Try Engineering is a site that hosts lesson plans and games designed to get students interested in engineering. The lesson plans, more than 100 of them, are arranged according age and engineering topic. The lesson plans can be downloaded as PDFs. The games section of Try Engineering features 36 online games. Some of the games were developed specifically for Try Engineering while others are hosted on other educational sites like those of NASA and PBS. Like the lesson plans, the games collection cover a variety of topics including solar energy, space science, and bio-engineering. The games section of Try Engineering also includes links to a dozen iPad apps that students can use to learn about engineering and programming."

"How many times have you heard that "practice makes perfect?" Well, a new meta-analysis of dozens of previous studies shows that it is not always true. In this post, Alfie Kohn explains and talks about the consequences of this when it comes to education. Kohn is the author of 13 books about education and human behavior, including "The Schools Our Children Deserve," "The Homework Myth," and "The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting." He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org."

"Kudos-you want to start a blog for your class! Now comes the fun part: setting it up. While a blog is something that evolves and grows over time, you need to create a solid foundation to build on. However, finding resources to guide you through the process can be time consuming and frustrating. Instead of sifting through dozens of articles about what platform to choose and what you should blog about, use this one, simple guide."

"Here's one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim and blossom like flowers. A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed a tablet-operated system that illustrates their cutting-edge research on distributed algorithms via robotic sheep, origami flowers that can open and change colors and robotic ducks that fold into shape by being heated in an oven."

"Close-reading is the product of a dynamic and deeply personal interaction between the reader and a text. It is an active process characterized by questioning, adjusting reading rate, judgement thinking, and dozens of other "strategies" readers use to make sense of what they're reading. This is an interaction that doesn't require technology, but can be changed by it.  It is a matter of fluency, strategy, and will. Two of these are easier to promote in students than the third (we'll let you guess which are which). And if we're going to start this conversation (monologue?) from a position of full transparency, technology isn't at all necessary for close reading. In fact, some might (effectively) argue that it's counter-productive there. There is so much potential to do anything but sit and roll around in a text that it can make using an iPad for reading seem like using a sharp pocketknife for a fork. But the other side of that argument is that, well applied, technology offers additional tools-and possibility-for readers, and to promote close reading of a text. (Something we discuss here in "Trying To Understand How Technology Changes Reading.")"