Group items tagged

"Videos are traditionally linear and directive. In the classroom, videos are designed to either dispense information or teach the viewer a new skill. However, great lessons are rarely passive. Using the annotations feature in YouTube, teachers can create videos that require participation. At its most basic, students are given four choices, and they select the correct answer. If an incorrect choice is made, students watch a new video that reteaches the concept. If the correct choice is made, the initial video links a new video that shows the next step, or the next problem. Going deeper, the first video can link to several choices, and each of those choices can link to several choices. " A nice tool to enhance the use of video -- annotations that link to other videos. It doesn't say if the links could also be to resources or other kinds of sites.

This guide is fairly complete on how to use Google Hangouts, but doesn't mention that you can open a text chat elsewhere on the web, e.g., in your blog or YouTube channel, and thus have a much larger class or group of students join in with text chat, while seeing and listening to the audio-video hangout. Participants take turns dropping in and out. This would be hard to organize with high school kids/teens, but would work with adults or teachers-in-training.

"Geeky teachers have brought Minecraft to subjects ranging from history to biology to probability. The game is being rolled out to every secondary school in Northern Ireland this month. If you're a parent, you've noticed Minecraft offerings spawning in your local summer camp listings. The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers a Minecraft camp for budding builders. Ninety-two libraries participated in the International Games Day Minecraft Hunger Games tournament, andcrowned a 13-year-old girl as its champion. And, I've helped launch Connected Camps' Summer of Minecraft, a new in-game online camp. "Progressive educators have been advocating for games-based learning ever since Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, and Reader Rabbit opened up a new market for consumer children's software in the '80s. SimCity demonstrated how a building and tinkering game could be embraced by parents, kids, and educators. And, Scratch shows how kid-centered learning communities can thrive online. "Minecraft is part of this lineage of learning games, but it fundamentally rewrites the playbook." This blog talks about why Minecraft is so popular with kids and with educators alike, referring back to Papert's experiments with "turtles." My 9-yr-old granddaughter is totally absorbed by the game and the games within the game she can play. She's even venturing into the "survival" mode where exploration includes fighting zombies. What's not to like?

Amazing and detailed explanation of how to incorporate Google Calendar for assignments -- and include parent participation. This really works, especially when combined with Google Docs to hold notes and assignments.

10 factors that stimulate success in student project-based learning, based on a class participating in a 3-week project at Manor H.S. "Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, is a 100 percent project-based learning school. They are part of the New Tech Network of schools and their approach has yielded remarkable results, including a 98 percent graduation rate, with all of their graduates accepted to college."

"Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor's results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to. A video about Rankin's classroom experiment follows."

"Kidblog.org is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own, unique blog. Kidblog's simple, yet powerful tools allow students to publish posts and participate in discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs. Set up your class with no student email addresses. Provide your students with an authentic, engaging, and interactive learning experience with Kidblog." Looks like a safe environment for elementary/middle school kids.

"Week 3: Discussion activities on Audio Tools and Virtual Classrooms. From Real-time communication to podcasts, from Skype to Voice thread, from Virtual Classrooms to Streaming technology is the broad subject for week 3." This discussion is a runup to the IATEFL conference. Participants in VoiceThread offer some ideas for getting students talking.

"WritingFix: For Teachers, Students & Writers interactive prompts, lessons, and resources for writing classrooms Since 2001, the Northern Nevada Writing Project has proudly sponsored this free-to-use website, which aims to "fix" those teachers who don't believe that writing instruction can be both fun to plan and easy to differentiate. If you explore our website's pages, you will find prompts, lessons, and resources that were created and shared--and then posted here--during workshops and in-service classes sponsored by the NNWP. The Nevada teachers who participate in these professional development opportunities discover ways to be passionate about teaching writing, and here we share the very best, hoping that our passion is contagious to the teachers across the globe who have discovered what we've proudly posted here. Our Mentor Text Bibliography can help you directly link to lessons and prompts based on books you might already own. "

"What is BigBlueButton ? BigBlueButton is an open source project that is built on over fourteen open source components to create an integrated web conferencing system that runs on mac, unix, or PC computers. In the true sense of open source, we invite you to try out and participate in our project."

"The aim of the social network is to build a community of learners and educators for the purpose of connecting and engaging people of all cultures in collaborative lifelong learning. We suggest you edit your profile, add your picture, invite friends and/or start (in any language) your own groups, events, discussions, photos. videos, blog posts, and have fun. In addition, you are cordially invited to present, moderate, and participate in the professional development workshops including Moodle for Teachers (M4T) at Integrating Technology for Active Lifelong Learning (IT4ALL)." Recommended by Nellie Deutsch, this site allows you to create your own groups, blogs, calendar, etc. This might be a good place to get a class of students or a whole school connected.

This is one of a long series of "pocket culture" snapshots of peoples of the world. This site would be great for students, both for learning about other cultures, and for participating in a project about their own region. Places and topics are listed, as well as blogs about culture.

A free, ad-free discussion site

"Nicenet's Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA) allows virtually any classroom, even those with modest resources, access to powerful tools. Everything in Nicenet is offered free for public use, and Nicenet makes no profits from your participation." Sign in to create your own online classroom base.

"IMAGINE a world in which teachers and students all across the planet are able to work collaboratively on projects that make a difference in the world. Among the tens of thousands of schools worldwide that participate in iEARN, there is no shortage of success stories to demonstrate the power of iEARN's vision, not only to make a difference in the world, but to deepen the learning that takes place in these connected classrooms. "

"This group began in 2002 as an event convened under the auspices of TESOL EVOnline (Electronic Village) but has carried on as a community of practice or a distributed learning network ever since. Participants meet informally throughout the year and regularly each Sunday noon GMT at http://www.tappedin.org to help each other learn about forming and maintaining robust online communities through hands-on practice with synchronous and non-synchronous text and multimedia CMC (computer mediated communication) tools."

This two-step exam process sounds like a great way to do online-exams: "The two-stage exam is a relatively simple way to introduce collaborative learning and formative assessment into an exam. Their use is rapidly growing in the physics department at the University of British Columbia, as both students and faculty find them rewarding. In a two-stage exam students first complete and turn in the exam individually, and then, working in small groups, answer the exam questions again. During the second stage, the room is filled with spirited and effective debate with nearly every student participating. This provides students with immediate targeted feedback supplied by discussions with their peers. Furthermore, we see indications that the use of this exam format not only ensures consistency across interactive course components, but it also positively impacts how students approach the other collaborative course components. This is accomplished without losing the summative assessment of individual performance that is the expectation of exams for most instructors. In this paper we describe how to implement two-stage exams and provide arguments why they should be part of physics courses that use interactive engagement and social/collaborative learning methods." The paper is from The Physics Teacher, AAPT.

"As various means of computer mediated communication (CMC) have been incorporated within language classrooms over the past two decades, it has become important to critically understand whether, to which extent, and under what contextual factors, a particular type of CMC is more effective than other modes of communication. This study examined the magnitude of the effect of text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) on second language acquisition (SLA). By searching the studies published between 1990 and 2012, this meta-analysis explored 10 experimental and quasi-experimental journal articles and doctoral dissertations and reports their overall effect on SLA, and the contextual factors that influence the between-study variation. A small but positive overall effect (m = .33) indicates that text-based SCMC could make a larger difference on SLA than other means of communication. Findings further suggested that intermediate learners may benefit more from SCMC tasks if they are grouped into pairs or small groups and participate in SCMC interactions on a weekly basis. In terms of suggestions for future research, authors should provide more description about the SCMC task in order to confirm or disconfirm the factors that are associated with effectiveness of second language (L2) learning in technology-mediated language learning contexts."

"This is a virtual place for folks interested in learning to "operationalize TPACK" (Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge) via curriculum-based learning activity types ('LATs') to get up-to-date information, and (more importantly) participate in the vetting and refining of the activity types in each of the curriculum areas in which activity type development is happening." College of William & Mary School of Ed has set up a community site where there is a collection of activities with accompanying technologies for a wide range of ages/grade levels. There is also a "teaching strategies" page and links to presentations, assessment tools, and other resources. Hopefully there will be frequent updates and the pages will be a useful resource.

"ClassDojo allows you to create your own standards to record in your class rosters. For high school students you could set standards for participation in classroom discussion be creating a standard like like "use of evidence in argument" or "thoughtful consideration and reply to opposing viewpoints." If your students are working in groups you could create standards like "efficient delegation of tasks" or "makes effort to include all group members."" Seems like a good way to create rubrics for creative topics. T/H R. Byrne

" StoryJumper is a free, online storybook maker. With awesome resources for teachers, StoryJumper provides an easy way for to empower students to make their own storybooks. Students write the story and illustrate them with artwork from StoryJumper, or by uploading their own images. Student books can be shared online for free, or purchased in paperback or hardcover format. It's a great way to inspire a passion for writing." The teacher starts by creating a class so that students can enter the site and write privately. Students must be over 13 to participate. The teacher can also set up a collaboration option to create group books.