Group items tagged

"Guessing what the future of education holds is equal parts logic and guesswork. The logical part is simpler-take current trends and trace their arc further, doing your best to account for minor aberrations. If the majority of public education in the United States is waist-deep in adopting new academic standards, it doesn't take Nostradamus to predict they are going to have a strong gravity about them in the education at large."

"At the time of this writing, there are nearly 70 million tablet users in the U.S. alone, a figure that has doubled from the year before. This means that nearly 30% of the country's Internet users are browsing on a tablet device. Tablet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by 348% from 2011 to 2012, overtaking smartphone traffic for the first time. With the tablet market as young as it is, its footprint is only going to expand."

"If I touch a hot stove and burn my hand, I immediately learn that touching a hot stove results in a burned hand. My brain makes the connection almost simultaneously. There's little need for reflection because the "hot stove=burn" connection is one that my mind makes almost immediately. Similarly, suppose I'm driving in bad weather and going WAY TOO FAST for the conditions. If my car spins out and I find myself stuck in a ditch, I've learned a lesson about driving in bad weather. Again, the connection is almost instantaneous. Academic learning however is seldom that obvious."

"Children's books are an excellent means of 'travel'. With some good writing and an active imagination, you can go quite a lot of places without getting up off the couch. But did you know that many of the fabulous children's books out there were inspired by and written about real places? From Harry Potter to Beatrix Potter, authors have been drawing their inspiration from real life for a long time. Check out the handy infographic below (photo credit) to learn about traveling as well as a bit more about the real life places behind some of the most popular children's books of all time."

"ArtSet was an impressive app that I was introduced to last week. I was presenting at a conference and one of the organisers asked if a number of the presenters could go through a workflow to illustrate how a series of apps might be able to be used to deepen student learning. The idea was the the product of one app would become the input for the next. The story of The Lion and the Mouse was suggested as an idea. Each presenter was given three minutes only. There was a cross section of both primary and secondary teachers in the group."

"Given the tragic story of RSS within Evernote being dropped, my content curation process is shot. No longer can I highlight content on a web page, then drop it into an Evernote Notebook with the hope that an RSS feed will allow me to share that content elsewhere. That functionality is gone, and there's no going back."

"How about creating and managing your lesson plans on the go ? If you have an iPad and are looking for some excellent and reliable apps to use for creating lesson plans for your class then you have landed on the right page."

"Making use of free iPad apps in the classroom can enable you to diversify your teaching, while providing the opportunity to inspire and get students more engaged in lessons. There are many different educational apps available, which range from apps like Evernote that allow you to organize your teaching materials, through to interactive whiteboards from Educreations, and Screen Chomp, a screen recording app that can be very useful for teaching lessons on the go. What, then, are some of the best iPads that can be used in the classroom, whether you have multiple tablets, or just one as a teaching tool for different groups?"

"I remember when I bought my iPad last september; the semester just started, and I was now facing the great task of being productive with an iPad. Everyone can play angry birds for hours but maybe not write a decent paper and print it out afterwards (and no, you do not need a dedicated AirPrint printer for that). I once read an article about this very topic which seemed rather like a list of popular recommended apps. Here, I am instead going to try to present iPad apps for education I like to use together. Each of them is doing a great job, and they sure helped me ever since I installed them"

"My first take on 'special needs' is: Don't all students have special needs? Aren't we beyond the cookie cutter education that lines students up and feeds them from the same trough? Yes and yes, but for the purposes of this article, I'm going to reign my pen in and discuss what we traditionally consider 'special needs' and technology's affect on those students who function outside of the normal bell curve of pedagogic expectations."

"Earlier this week I shared five good feeds for mathematics teachers and five good feeds for history teachers. These lists were born out of a common request that I get and that is "can you recommend some good blogs for X?" So this week I'm going to publish a short list each day of the blogs that usually come to mind when someone asks me to make a recommendation for a blog related to teaching a particular subject area. Today, I have five good feeds for ELA and ELL teachers."

"Even though older adults might still carry a negative association with video game consoles and devices, today's technology is vastly different than it was 20 years ago. Apps have exploded on the scene, and while there are plenty of time wasting games available on the market, today's offerings also include a wide range of affordable apps that enrich learning and allow for quick on-the-go play. Whether your child is waiting for the doctor or relaxing on a long car ride, the following apps are some of the best games that pack an educational punch."

"Facilitating creativity can be rewarding and exciting. Integrating creativity into the curriculum can be engaging to the learner. Creativity can be fostered by smell of a new crayon, the engagement of being able to tinker, the excitement of relaxing and creating, or some amazing technology already in your classroom. It allows student to go beyond the role of being curriculum consumers and blossom into curriculum producers. Creativity allows classrooms to go to the top of Bloom's Taxonomy in the vivid and colorful action verb each step was meant to be. I have divided these creativity resources into four different group I have included below. "

"For the past few days, I've been playing with a Chromebook. Though I have been an advocate of Google's myriad web products since the beta-test Gmail account that I was invited to open over 10 years ago, I had not previously put my hands on one of these devices. I may be in love. This may come as a shock since I have spent the past two years completely immersed in iPads. I love my iPad too, and my iPhone, and my mostly retired iPod Touch. However, as mobile devices go, I don't see the need for a monogamous relationship."

"The most powerful thing she said was something that education policy makers will ignore at all costs. That is that Creativity is the next essential literacy. Now keep in mind I am just beginning to try and wrap my mind around what that may look like. My first belief in this discussion is that creativity is something that begins at a young age. I also believe that creativity and imagination go hand and hand. When I teach my courses for the college I refer to imagination as a sense of wonder because often people are distracted by the word imagination. This is because it brings up a short time in their life when they were encouraged to imagine. As an education system we ignore imagination and we have quickly weeded out that perceived "unnecessary" tool over the past 20 years. "

Check out the three PDFs included in the article: Core Teacher Apps, Core Student Apps and Inquiry Learning with iPads!

"Since I posted How to Child-proof iPAD, I received so many questions asking how to lock the iPAD screen, so kids stay within the app you want them to play. Now we found the solution - Daisy Simpson, our new reviewer at iGameMom is going to share the trick with you."

"As the year has gone by and I have more time to research, read other iPad articles and experiment more with apps and with the students using them more frequently, I've had time to reflect on what iPads are offering schools. I'm not going to debate what model of iPad program to commit to - 1:1 or shared. I'm simply going to concentrate on what I think schools should consider before committing to iPads at all."