beyondwebct

An interesting starting point for discussion...

PostPost is your social newspaper. It compiles all the links, videos and pictures your friends post on Facebook into a real-time newspaper.

Just wonder what will happen when some or most open source apps go freemium or fee-based: "At Maryland's Chelsea School, free and open source software is helping deliver services to the school's elementary students inside the classroom and out--from audio editing software to learning apps for special needs students to course management. In fact, open source so permeates Chelsea that some students are even working to contribute code back to the open source development community."

Twijector - real-time twitter wall for conferences, events, cafe and classrooms.

Automatically collect links you share on FB, Twitter, Delicious and makes them searchable.

Arguably, if you have the skills to do it, you could literally build your own education by creating your own curriculum, your own classroom, and your own assessments. It's a shift to a highly personalized, do-it-yourself education, a process that will continue to grow as we get better at pulling information and people from the Web to ourselves. Buckle up.

This is what Cindy Kendall says about this: magine creating a 3D world in your classroom where students interact, where objects can have interactive properties and can be manipulated, and you can interact with each other and those objects; the next 5 years are going to be very interesting! OK, I know this can be done with real objects now if you have them - but - I'm thinking of the scaling potential as well as simulations for objects in areas such as biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Play and problem solving in immersive 3D/4D environments... Kinnect is going to have some awesome classroom applications, and when it goes 3D...

First cartoon about tools in the classroom

Cartoon #2

Cartoon #3

Tips for students new to using Ning. Not sure how useful this will be for those using the Pearson-sponsored free ed nings. 

A short-term hyperfocus for your Tweets

Not the first person to employ this method. 

Your thoughts?

The value of in-class Internet technologies to student attentiveness, engagement, and learning remains both controversial and filled with promising potential. In this study, students were given the option to use LectureTools, an interactive suite of tools designed specifically for larger classes. The availability of these tools dramatically changed the mechanics of the course as over 90% of students attending lecture voluntarily brought their laptops to class. On one hand, surveys over multiple semesters show that students believe the availability of a laptop is more likely to increase their time on tasks unrelated to the conduct of the course. On the other hand, the surveys also ascertained that students felt more attentive with the technology, significantly more engaged, and able to learn more with the technology than in similar classes without it. LectureTools also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students posing questions during class time, with more than half posing at least one question during class over the course of a semester, a percentage far higher than achieved in semesters prior to the use of this technology. These results suggest that while having laptops in the classroom can be a distraction to students, students of today show confidence that they are capable of productive multitasking, showing that they not only can handle this technology when applied through "deliberate engagement" using tools like LectureTools, but thrive with it, as seen through improved attentiveness, learning, and overall engagement even in larger classes.

Evan Rubin, Director of Instructional Technology at Lang Acquisition Resource Center SDSU, Google Site. Nice example of how to use this as a portfolio