Group items tagged

One of the best ways to stay up-to-date on the latest in education (other than a free subscription to the SimpleK12 blog) is to follow hashtags on Twitter. Before we get into which hashtags to watch, let's look at what they are.
Hashtags (#) are basically keywords for a tweet. Depending on the cont

"What does that mean exactly? It means you play in a multiplayer world that has the possibility of being permanently destroyed, resulting in server-wide perma death. What's more, the reason it's destroyed would be the players' own fault. It's not that different from our own world in that way. "This ecosystem is your only lifeline in a race against time." It works like this: a new server is started, and players enter at the beginnings of civilization. There's a world-destroying cataclysm looming, like a drought or a flood or a meteor heading for the Earth, several real-time weeks away. In order to prevent that catastrophe from happening, you need to build a civilization and advance technology and resources to the point that the crisis can be averted. However you're not alone in this world. Besides the other players, you'll be sharing the world with a detailed wilderness simulation full of plants and animals. They simulate 24 hours a day, living out their lives with or without human interaction, growing, feeding and reproducing. Together they form an ecosystem rich with resources, resources that you must use to survive and develop a civilization."

"For many, flipping the classroom simply involves turning the traditional classroom on its head - moving the class work home, and the homework to class. Others argue there is a lot more to flipping than meets the eye. Rather, as flipped learning pioneer, Jon Bergmann states, it's moving from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side." For students, the obvious benefit lies in the ability to pause and rewind the teacher at will. For teachers, it means less time creating lectures, and more engaged students as the boring introductions are pushed out, and the fun practical work is pulled in. Fishtree makes flipping your classroom as simple and effective as possible, providing everything you need in one platform. Follow our 8 simple steps to flipping your classroom, and transforming your teaching! "

Quizilla is a fun site for kids 13 on up to use to create/share: quizzes, stories, polls, and poems. This site does not allow anything inappropriate to be posted as their are strict AUP's in place. There is also a nice web 2.0 aspect to allow users to rate other people's work.

The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

Nota is a unique, cutting-edge collaborative web platform that allows users to create, share and collaborate on presentations and virtually any other form of online material. Using Nota's proprietary toolset, users can instantly integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web album or on the local computer, or license-free images from Flickr, and material from an ever-expanding array of sources. Users can then instantly embed their work in Facebook or blogs, and can share and collaborate with friends.

"This small program can help you to calculate optimal cut of rectangular details. It can be used to design cutting out of wood, glass, steel and other material."

"... In addition to serving as a great explanatory example of the potential danger of AI, I have realized that paperclip maximizer is also a perfect allegory for capitalism. Where the artificial intelligence sought to maximize paperclips, the capital maximizer seeks to maximize capital. ... While this story of the capital maximizer might strike some as the anti-capitalist rantings of socialist idealism, it is not meant as such. Capitalism is the most powerful machine that humans have ever created. It can realize the benefits of technological progress and leverage them to improving the human condition better than any other economic system yet devised. The problem is in viewing the growth of capital as an ends and not a means. If we do not demand that our systems maximize the well-being of humans and the environment which sustains us, then all is lost."

"Select a country to view its environmental sustainability and social performance relative to the "safe and just space" framework and see how it compares with other countries. Blue wedges show social performance relative to a threshold associated with meeting basic needs (blue circle), green wedges show resource use relative to a biophysical boundary associated with sustainability (green circle), while grey wedges show indicators with missing data. Wedges with a dashed edge extend beyond the chart area. Ideally a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold and green wedges within the biophysical boundary. See the tables below for country-specific details."

"The Chinese government blocked 17.5 million would-be plane passengers from buying tickets last year as a punishment for offences including the failure to pay fines, it emerged. Some 5.5 million people were also barred from travelling by train under a controversial "social credit" system which the ruling Communist Party claims will improve public behaviour. The penalties are part of efforts by president Xi Jinping's government to use data-processing and other technology to tighten control on society."

"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. On a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet's past that could spell disaster for the future. Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons' oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today."

"Take a look inside Alibaba's smart warehouse where robots do 70% of the work. They can carry up to 500 kilograms above them around the warehouse floor. They have special sensors to avoid colliding into each other and they can be summoned using wifi. When they run out of battery, they can take themselves to a charging station. A five minute charge can power them for 4/5 hours."

"Contents:Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci ('The Codex Arundel'). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as 'a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams. "

"In order to help reduce the gap between industrialized countries and those in the emerging economy, UNESCO has decided to adopt an Open Access Policy for its publications by making use of a new dimension of knowledge sharing - Open Access. Open Access means free access to scientific information and unrestricted use of electronic data for everyone. With Open Access, expensive prices and copyrights will no longer be obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge. Everyone is free to add information, modify contents, translate texts into other languages, and disseminate an entire electronic publication."

"Because energy fuels both human development and environmental damage, policies that encourage energy demand reduction can run counter to policies for alleviating poverty, and the other way around. Achieving both objectives can only happen if energy use is spread more equally across societies. However, while it's widely acknowledged that part of the global population is living in 'energy poverty', there's little attention given to the opposite condition, namely 'energy excess' or 'energy decadence'. Researchers have calculated minimum levels of energy use needed to live a decent life, but what about maximum levels? "

"She demanded that all participating staff members surrender their phones and other such personal devices. The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form. - Adrian Tomine, introduction to 32 Stories Computer Science Professor Calvin Newport's recent book, Deep Work, posits that all that shallow phone time is creating stress, anxiety, and lost creative opportunities, while also doing a number on our personal and professional lives.Author Manoush Zomorodi's recent TED Talk on how boredom can lead to brilliant ideas, below, details a weeklong experiment in battling smartphone habits, with lots of scientific evidence to back up her findings."

"Build your own virtual tour Capture and upload your own 360° photos into CoSpaces Edu to build an immersive tour. Simply organize your images as scenes, add text and details, and let others go on your virtual tour!"

"Teaching climate science & action can seem daunting: for university-level lecturers, teaching to younger children can be quite intimidating. For primary-level teachers, the science and scope can seem too vast and fast changing to cover. For everyone, the content can be overwhelming. As adults, how do we present this topic to children: give them the information they need without crushing them? I decided to face the challenge, and over the course of one rather sleepless night, put together some materials for my 6 year-old son's class. This post summarizes and communicates that experience, in the hope that others can take ideas and inspiration, and will be encouraged to volunteer to teach about climate in primary schools. Teaching and engagement in schools is now part of all of our work, as researchers, academics, parents, activists, advocates, so I hope this idea spreads. The 4-part lesson plan worked quite well: the topics & materials held the children's attention, gave them varied aspects to think about and interact with, and they seemed to come away with deeper understanding. The whole thing took roughly 1 hour. This is doable!"

""Dice el refrán que una imagen vale más que 1000 palabras...". Pero en este caso le daremos la vuelta al refrán y diremos "...más de 1000 palabras que te darán una imagen... de mi aula". Así empezamos la primera sesión de tutoría del curso 2015/2016 con 3ºESO. Con esta actividad, que paso a relataros,pretendemos que el alumno rompa el hielo del comienzo del curso escolar desdevarios ámbitos: "el personal, pensando en quién es, que le apasiona, que le cuesta…; el grupal, descubriendo y conociendo a las personas con las que va a convivir los próximos nueve meses; y el espacial, convirtiendo el espacio-aula en un lugar del que también se sienta protagonista junto con sus compañeros..."

"eXeLearning is an easy to use authoring tool under GPL-2+ to create educational web contents. Installing eXeLearning on Ubuntu: sudo snap install exelearning eXeLearning generates interactive contents in HTML5 and other formats and it allows you to create websites including text, images, interactive activities, image galleries, evaluating rubrics, multimedia clips, games... All the educational materials can be exported in different formats: SCORM, IMS, ePub, responsive HTML website, XLIFF... eXeLearning is available for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Go to https://exelearning.net/ for more download options."