Group items tagged

"Engage, Entertain, Train, and Collect Data. Sticky & Embeddable." You can make an interactive, multimedia quiz and embed it on your Website. One of the most slick looking interfaces, and it's free at the present time.

"During a lecture, students can use their phones, tablets or laptops to tell their teachers when they are confused and when they understood something. Teachers then see this data in real time and can adjust their lectures accordingly. The app does not actually tell the teacher who in the class isn't quite able to follow along, so students don't have to worry about voicing their concerns."

This page explains how to create a Google form. You can make a quiz for your students and email it to them, collecting data from the form. You can require respondents to sign in to use the document, which helps with security. See the sidebar on the left for more instructions and tutorials.

"Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who became the richest man in the world, believes that foundations can step in where markets fail. Higher education should cost less, produce more graduates, and better serve low-income students, the Gates thinking goes. Colleges cannot count on more public money to fix their problems. Instead, better data and openness are part of the solution, to do things like measure the "value" added by each institution. So is technology: Among the foundation's investments are projects to test how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, could change introductory and remedial classes." Thought-provoking: what is the real purpose of education? Does Gates' vision focus too much on completing a degree, rather than the educational experience?

"For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they'll prove they understand them." The cognitive emphasis in Bloom's taxonomy is heartening, but beware of using the spiral in an overly rigid way. It's all too easy to get stuck on the lower levels of "knowing": remembering or factual information, while never quite getting to the higher levels of creativity.

"he introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps. " While this is a pay-per .pdf file, it looks to have some significant data about the effect of technology on reading and math. Worrisome!

"Image Based Speaking Activity for IWB This is a quick image based speaking activity that any teacher with an IWB or just a data projector in their classroom can do." Nik Peachey's quick lesson plan could be done with your own photographic slide show--or have students in groups make slideshows for other groups to use in describing and discussing.

"Create free educational games, quizzes, activities and diagrams in seconds! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No signup, no passwords, no charge!" You enter data once and student can choose from 5 different types of games to play. Many templates and files already created by other teachers are accessible here. Premium membership is ad-free, and you have your own Web area to organize your favorite resources; can also be used on an interactive whiteboard.

"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI," Berners-Lee continues, referring to universal resource identifier. "Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space." Great article!

"Graphic organizers have become a valuable tool for helping students learn to analyze and process information. The visual format makes organizing, interpreting and understanding new material quicker and more successful than simple memorization alone. The graphic organizers on our site were selected for their value and broad appeal to many different educational situations. " Offers a number of visual organizers created in PDF format to download. You don't load in any data online, but they look like a help for organizing student projects

This is an interesting video, both pedagogically, for teaching EST, and for instructors using small groups--and it's based on research by a professor of physics at Harvard. Go watch.

"Be part of a unique scientific experiment by playing games on your phone. "Test your memory, your impulsivity, your attention and decision making. Learn about the neuroscience of every day life. " Another crowd-sourcing data collection to contribute to neuroscience research. Looks like a fun app.

Webcams from around the world are the basis for participatory collection of data about the zoo-universe, as well as astronomy, climate, and genes. Have your students join one of the on-going projects.

"If homework is to serve as formative data, then it needs to be instructionally sensitive for both student and teacher alike. Ideally, then, what happened with homework the night before should inform a classroom teacher's instruction immediately the next day. Rather than simply correcting right/wrong answers and then collecting the homework papers to be recorded somewhere, teachers must consider meaningful and interactive ways to create engaging, learning conversations and generate quality, supportive information for the next lesson following the completion of homework." Sound pedagogical advice.

A pdf file which discusses critical issues with referenced support. the 5 issues are (predictably): 1.Create competency based education systems 2. Improve student access and equity 3. Measure and assure quality inputs and outputs 4. Support innovative educators 5. Support new learning models through connectivity, data systems, security. (Sounds like that last is thrown together...

"What if classroom learning was a little more active? Would university instruction be more effective if students spent some of their class time on active forms of learning like activities, discussions, or group work, instead of spending all of their class time listening? "A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing."" This is great news for teachers of EFL/ESL also.

"Using Google Forms, teachers can create custom checklists that allow them to quickly record observations for all students on one form. With a place to record the date and objective being observed, the form is reusable. Google Forms also conveniently organizes all observations in one place. Teachers can collect data over as many days, and for as many objectives as they wish. Keep in mind that it's not necessary to record an observation for every student every time." Blog by Nick LaFave helps teachers use technology to become more efficient and effective at real-time assessment.

R. Byrne gives us some good tools to use in class with ideas for use with students. The cultural studies uses are unlimited, but also history and politics play a role. Visualize data sets, build a tour or gallery of images, etc.

As always, an intriguing post by R. Byrne, showing how you can use several different new applications to massage video data and link together various videos you find or make. Also info on YouTube annotations.

"Wikis are an exceptionally useful tool for getting students more involved in curriculum. They're often appealing and fun for students to use, while at the same time ideal for encouraging participation, collaboration, and interaction. Read on to see how you can put wikis to work in your classroom." Suggestions include Resource Creation, e.g., for presentations, math problems, glossary, study guides; Student Participation, e.g., for exam review, portfolios, peer editing; Group Projects, e.g., organizing ideas, tracking progjects, showing participation; Student Interaction, e.g., for collecting data, discussion of a book, creating and authoring a group story; for the Classroom, e.g., creating a FAQ, a calendar, sharing class news; Community, e.g., writing a local history or nature guide, a place for parents to see their children's work; and generally as a hub or Website, or to track progress.