"his ubitour version of Verne's adventure classic is enhanced with 2d codes, which extend the book into the digital world. With an iPhone or other appropriate Internet mobile phone you can participate in online conversations about the book, its characters, or author. The book also links Fogg's adventure to online interactive maps. Last, but not least, each chapter of the book is linked to its audio and video versions, which can be streamed or downloaded onto the mobile phone."
Welcome to TED Books: an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run fewer than 20,000 words each -- long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.
E-books are becoming an increasingly popular medium for displaying information. And if you find yourself frequenting these new electronic books, you may have noticed that it becomes quite dull after a while. I, for one, miss the tangible page flip of a novel or a good instructional guide.
That's why Codebox's web app - that's called PDF to Flash Page Flipper (or Flip) - appealed to me. It's an app that can replicate the more interesting animations found on my iPad or a similar tablet and put them onto my laptop. In fact, it's almost better, allowing you to turn any old PDF file into a superior flash-based and flippable book. The conversion process is fairly easy, with a lot of customization options that really don't need to be messed around with. All in all, it is a pretty slick app, at the right price….$0.
Book2Cloud has a simple structure with a participatory challenge. It presents an original text and then invites the individual and the group to play with the ideas and create. Create what? Build what? Remix what? Building So what? What's next?
One of the best, most concise explanations of why the antipathy to technology in education.~JB
The conflict between computers and schools is really a conflict between educational paradigms. The traditional and dominant paradigm is rooted in the book and the pedagogy is one of transmission. Teachers, who have presumably read more books than their students and listened to more scholarly lectures, transmit what they've learned to their students in a similar fashion.
The students who do best within this system are those who can capture the transmission - as unfiltered as possible - and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. Within this model, digital technology can provide improvements, but they are cosmetic. Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don't understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction. Within this system of learning, (Inquiry based and student centered) there is real value in having the widest range of technological tools for not only consuming information in all its multimodal forms, but for creatively demonstrating what one has learned.
Explore the surprising side of color with Color Uncovered, an interactive book for the iPad, featuring fascinating illusions, articles, and videos developed by the Exploratorium.
both a blog and a book "Thanks to Chad Orzel and his endearing mutt Emmy, I finally understand Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle! Not to mention a few crucial ideas that Emmy grasped perhaps more quickly than I. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a blessing for all those who never mastered - or maybe even had the faintest glimmer about - modern physics. I can't be the only one"
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.
It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.
But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he describes as an inclination to procrastinate.
Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape
“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I still look the same.”
“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”
He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing homework. He says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to his chosen future, and he hopes colleges, like the University of Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by his portfolio that they will overlook his school performance
But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of “The Things They Carried.” His grade at that point, she says, tracks around a D.
calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats can be found here.
"For several reasons I have deliberately avoided talking too much about technology in this book. Firstly, it is too easy to dismiss what is happening as technological - to label it "digital" - and to miss the real point - the changes we are seeing are cultural"
Contributions from many including:
Bryan Alexander
Howard Rheingold
is book, and accompanying website, is a resource for selforganizing self-learners.
With YouTube, Wikipedia, search engines, free chatrooms,
blogs, wikis, and video communication, today's
have power never dreamed-of before. What does any group
of self-learners need to know in order to self-organize learning about any topic? e Peeragogy Handbook is a volunteercreated and maintained resource for bootstrapping peer learning.
Book review I know that our faculty friends in the humanities have a lot of advice to offer for facilitating student writing, but often it doesn't seem to fit the context of quantitative work (or at least, the benefits are lost in the translation of the process). Enter Student Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines: A Guide for College Faculty by Patrick Bahls,
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