dropping knowledge :: Table of Free Voices - 0 views
Cell Phones in the (Language) Classroom: Recasting the Debate (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | ED... - 0 views
-
My Google Voice number has served primarily as a messaging service students call (sometimes spontaneously during the instructional period, more often outside of the classroom) to record dialogues, poetry, even song, either individually or in pairs. These recordings are stored on Google servers, but can be downloaded and posted on course management pages (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.) or podcasting, blogging, or social networking sites (I post particularly good recordings on my Spanish Facebook page). While I have yet to experiment with this particular feature, Google Voice can also be used for conference calling, and dialogues with groups of students can be recorded for later informal group or formal teacher evaluation.
-
It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.
-
The access that I had to that student combined with the ease and speed of communication presented by Google Voice solved more than a pronunciation problem; it likely helped me head off a building class management issue by engaging that student on his terms outside of the classroom setting.
- ...2 more annotations...
'absolutely intercultural!' - 0 views
-
Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners.
Cell phone novels come of age › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion - 0 views
-
“Teenage girls began messaging with pagers in the early ’90s,” says Mizuko Ito, a research scientist who studies cell phone use among Japanese youth. “Because of this, Japan was the first country to have widespread mobile communications, even before mobile phones became affordable and popular.” Ito sees in the rise of cell phone novels a high degree of media and gadget literacy, a cultural willingness to experiment with new technologies, and a desire for private space and intimate communication.
-
The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.
-
Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author with a cell phone novel publishing deal enjoyed a first run of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
- ...1 more annotation...
createthefuture - The Future of Learning 10 Years On - 0 views
-
The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment…
-
The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment – a game, a community, a profession – through the provision of the materials that will assist him or her to, in a sense, see the world in the same way as an accomplished expert; and this is accomplished not merely by presenting learning materials to the learner, but by facilitating the engagement of the learner in conversations with members of that community of experts.
-
In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities.
- ...9 more annotations...
Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views
-
Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind? Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
-
Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations. Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking. Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with. If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas. What about the new comment was challenging? What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged? Will you change yoru mind? Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
-
The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way. To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions. That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably. While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers.
Web 2.0: beyond the buzz words | 4 Jun 2007 | ComputerWeekly.com - 0 views
-
Lee Bryant, one of the founders of Headshift, says the network effect is the difference. Traditional applications, such as groupware, became slower the more people used them, he says. With Web 2.0 applications the reverse is true: the more people use them, the more effective they become.
-
“You influence each other, so that if you use a social tagging system, for example, themes start to emerge and other people pick up on them and you get these positive feedback loops. It is that difference that leads to the network effect.”
-
These technologies are mostly just HTML and Javascript web pages designed to offer a more streamlined user experience, sitting atop a relational data layer used to feed back user-contributed data in new ways.
- ...3 more annotations...
Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views
-
Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
-
Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
-
The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
- ...48 more annotations...
Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views
-
intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
-
While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
-
A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
- ...6 more annotations...
Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 0 views
-
Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
-
Traditional courses provide a coherent view of a subject. This view is shaped by “learning outcomes” (or objectives).
-
This cozy comfortable world of outcomes-instruction-assessment alignment exists only in education. In all other areas of life, ambiguity, uncertainty, and unkowns reign.
- ...21 more annotations...
:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:. - 1 views
How Social Media is Changing Government Agencies - 0 views
-
Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Twitter Earthquake Detector (@USGSTed) is a prototype that gathers real-time Twitter updates during seismic activities faster than scientific equipment can be tapped for more precise measurements and alerts. It examines earthquakes at an anecdotal level, and complements scientific analysis, according to the project’s overseer, Paul Earle.
-
At the most basic level, social media is about community building. Government agencies have adopted this mindset to varying degrees as a way to foster trust and dialogue with people. “It is truly a national town hall that has never been attempted during a disaster,” said Commander James Hoeft of the U.S. Navy, who oversees the cleanup effort’s social media team.
Cell Phones in the (Language) Classroom: Recasting the Debate (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | ED... - 0 views
-
New Internet SMS and messaging services are proving especially useful to language teachers, turning the focus away from the particulars of language and writing and toward whole language oral output and pronunciation, even at the beginner level.
-
is the time to revisit and recast the debate over cell phones in education and to consider their relevance as engagement and assessment tools for foreign language teachers in particular.
-
And it is no longer only what takes place inside the classroom that needs debating. Paradigm shift also means embracing the notion that learning takes place in more collaborative, interactive ways and also — at least potentially — everywhere and (nearly) all the time.
- ...11 more annotations...
The Learning Nation: Introducing Smartphones to the Classroom - 0 views
UDI Community - 0 views
-
Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) is an approach to teaching that consists of the proactive design and use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learners including students with disabilities.
-
One of the important aspects of UD is that its inclusive elements benefit all users, not just those with disabilities.
-
By providing faculty with a framework and tools for designing inclusive college instruction, the dialogue surrounding college students with disabilities changes from a focus on compliance, accommodations, and nondiscrimination to an emphasis on teaching and learning.
- ...6 more annotations...
1 - 17 of 17
Showing 20▼ items per page