Group items tagged

Think-Pair-Square - Students share with two other students after they have completed Think-Pair-Share (4-square). Think-Pair-Pod-Share - A "Pod" is a sharing with a small group (a table group) - prior to sharing with the whole group. Students first share with a partner. Then bring all thoughts together as a table (pod) prior to sharing out with whole group. Think-Write/Draw-Share -  Students write or draw their own ideas before they pair up to discuss them with a partner. This allows students to more fully develop their own ideas before sharing. Think-Pair-Share (reading strategies) - During "think" part students are asked to think in terms of summarizing, questioning, predicting, visualizing. Once students understand all four of these areas, groups can be asked to use a variety in a single "think-pair-share". (One (or more) groups summarize, one (or more) groups visualize, etc…) Think-Pair-Share (various perspectives) - After posing a question, ask pairs to "think" in terms of a different perspective. A character in a story, a career, a historical figure. Etc…

The Online Faculty Competency Certification program is intended for future and existing online teachers. The program is designed to help faculty members become proficient in the use of Blackboard and to become effective facilitators in the online environment.

The following are what I believe are the rights of all student to have with regards to using technology as an educational tool, written as a student to their teacher:   1) I have the right to use my own technology at school. I should not be forced to leave my new technology at home to use (in most cases) out-of-date school technology. If I can afford it, let me use it -- you don't need to buy me one. If I cannot afford it, please help me get one -- I don't mind working for it.

Colleagues, Last semester 30 faculty and staff participated in a reading group focused on Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's "The Innovative University." The reading group came together face-to-face on a number of occasions and continued the rich discussion online. It was a great experience and a fascinating book. This semester the faculty and staff participating in the American Democracy Project recommended that we invite the campus community to come together to read "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The work was completed by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, under the leadership of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. It's a brief volume, rich in examples, on how colleges and universities must reclaim responsibility for civic learning. "A Crucible Moment" is available in PDF here: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/college-learning-democracys-future/crucible-moment.pdf The reading group will meet once in March and once in April, with opportunities for online discussion. More information will follow later in the month. In the meantime, if you're interested in joining us for this discussion, please email Kim Schmidl-Gagne (kgagne@keene.edu). If you would like to commit to the reading group, but would prefer to read in hard copy, Kim will also order a copy for you. I look forward to this discussion, and I hope you will consider joining us for our spring reading group. Mel

kCELTER's - we can use this to frame our conversation about WHY use Twitter. Nice and simple post to get started. How do you actually do it? I'm going to leave behind the pedagogy (mostly) in this post, and instead offer some practical advice for teaching with Twitter. I'll cover six aspects of Twitter integration where it pays to plan ahead of time (i.e. sometime last week): organization, access, frequency, substance, archiving, and assessment. I'll deal with of each of these areas in turn, but before I do, and if you're new to Twitter, I want to urge you to read Ryan Cordell's comprehensive ProfHacker primer on Twitter. Ryan addresses many common questions about Twitter, and his guide is perfect for sharing with colleagues-and students-before you move into the nuts-and-bolts aspects of teaching with Twitter.

it is misleading to suggests that all, or even most, aspects of providing an education should, or could, be placed into the hands of [teachers] Historically, it has been impractical to break up the roles of the teacher. You need a certain scale even to have a separate person assigned as a librarian or an audio-visual coordinator. You need a much greater scale, not to mention much better coordination, to have separate people assigned as lecturers, coaches, theorizers and evaluators. Yet relatively few of these roles need to be performed in person, and most of them scale pretty well. This means that with improved information and communications technologies we can begin to rethink how we've organized labor in education. This is in fact what is happening online, at least, outside the circles of formal education

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto largely inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways-cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on. Images of every sort are introduced and examined here-in partnership with contributing institutions and collections, and with the collaboration of experts devoted to transcending the printed word and hard-bound text.

A key reason some ideas are so successful, conventional wisdom has held, is that a few highly influential people espouse them. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that what he calls "social epidemics" are "driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people." Those exceptional people tend to be experts on a subject who love to talk. Such people can convince dozens of others of their opinions. An excellent sales strategy, then, would be to find those few critical people, persuade them of the value of your product, and leave it to them to convince others. It's a compelling idea, but does it really work? Social network theorists Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont in Burlington decided to put the notion to a test. What they found is a disappointment for "viral marketers" who specialize in selling products by influencing influential people.

 I asked students to write in Google Docs and then share their papers with me so I would also be able to view them online. Instead of scribbling marks in the margins of printed papers, I opened each student's paper in Google Docs, highlighted text and inserted comments to clarify my thoughts, and then turned on the screen recorder (Jing) to record my voice as I scrolled through the paper and pointed to items with my mouse. Right after recording, I uploaded the finished recording to Jing's companion hosting site, and then I simply copied and pasted the link to the recording directly into the Google Doc. It was slick like butter.

Todd describes how he solved the problem of having to give a presentation in a room that doesn't have a projector. He uploaded his presentation to SlideShare, then created a QR code that points to the presentation. He then printed an image of the QR code and will make that available to the audience. Those attendees who have smartphones can point to the QR code and go right to the presentation on SlideShare. For step by step instructions, see Todd's article on Social Times.

YouTube-mp3.org is the easiest online service for converting videos to mp3. You do not need an account, the only thing you need is a YouTube URL. We will start to convert the audiotrack of your videofile to mp3 as soon as you have submitted it and you will be able to download it. Different from other services the whole conversion process will be perfomed by our infrastructure and you only have to download the audio file from our servers. Because of this our software is platform-independent: You can use it with your Mac, a Linux PC or even an iPhone. All our conversions will be perfomed in high quality mode with a bitrate of at least 128 kBit/s. Do not worry, our service is completely free. We need approximately 3 to 4 minutes per video.

The coalition government is driving forward reforms to allow commercial companies to set up universities to compete with traditional institutions. Students at private universities will have access to student loans of up to £6,000 a year from 2012. Further proposals to encourage the for-profit sector are due next month.

The mission of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship - and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed - by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats. We are committed first and foremost to teaching and learning, and intend that the journal itself - both in process and in product - provide opportunities to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practice.

"iPad deployment includes all of the steps between buying an iPad and beginning to use the device. For an individual's personal iPad, this is often a very fast and easy process lasting no longer than five minutes: You just open the box, turn it on, download the apps you want on your device, and go. But for a school, or district, with potentially hundreds of iPads-each one requiring a specialized list of apps that need to be purchased before protecting the devices with a case and sending them out to classrooms. As an administrator or teacher, there are a few things you will need to know before you deploy your iPads. Lucky for you, the eSpark Engineering team has created a five step road map to aid in this journey, highlighting the best practices and considerations relevant to deploying and supporting iPads in education environments."

The developing themes have influenced the design and strategy of media production at SCE, including: Strategizing videos to tie directly to course assignments and/or assessment Advising faculty members to use conversational language in production; also encouraging them to use humor and draw on past experiences Adding audio/visual elements to the video that supplement the content; the videos should not convey information that students could just read as text Producing high-quality videos (despite mixed findings related to production values, elements such as professional sound, lighting, and graphics are considered important when creating high-quality media) Keeping the four-minute view time as a design consideration, especially when producing longer-form content lectures that can be broken up into shorter segments

Students still want face-to-face contact with staff, but more use of the kind of technologies they have grown up with, though they need to be persuaded to use them to study. They also need to learn how to critically evaluate online sources, while academics need more help in using the technologies.

Dual enrollment is widely seen as a strategy to help advanced high school students begin college early. More recently, interest is growing in using dual enrollment as a way to smooth the transition to college for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education.1 Many scholars and practitioners are coming to believe that high school students who have the opportunity to participate in college courses are more likely to enroll in college and succeed once there.

This fall, I am requiring the students in my seminar to have a Twitter account. Students will post items on a regular basis, using the hashtag #BIO361. We also will devote some time on a regular basis to discussing items or responses from Twitter. Our first post probably will be on the first day of classes - Tuesday, August 24, 2010. For this project to work most effectively, we need a critical mass of people outside of our class to participate. If you, your students, friends, or colleagues would like to join us, please do. We will appreciate any new comments, retweets, or responses. I'm looking forward to an engaging discussion throughout the semester.

Jaron Lanier's article in the NY times. --- Adding to an already rich life, my father decided in middle age to become an elementary-school teacher in a working-class neighborhood in New Mexico. To this day, people who run grocery stores and work on construction sites, and who are now in late middle age themselves, come out when I'm visiting to tell me how Mr. Lanier changed their lives. Go up to any adult with a good life, no matter what his or her station, and ask if a teacher made a difference, and you'll always see a face light up. The human element, a magical connection, is at the heart of successful education, and you can't bottle it.

When you use Wylio, you're searching through the millions upon millions of Flickr photos that have been designated as Creative Commons works by their owners/uploaders. We don't guarantee the validity of the licenses since we can't control what people decide to upload to Flickr. So, be pragmatic when you decide what photo to use. If it's painfully obvious that "flickr_user_1234" isn't the copyright owner for that Coca-Cola logo they uploaded... don't use it. That said, it is our opinion that people generally upload their own work to Flickr (like they're suppose to). This means when a Flickr user decides to release one of their Flickr photos under a Creative Commons license, they are legally allowing certain uses of that photo.