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"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?

R. Byrne: "One of the problems I run into when trying to find documents, videos, or folders that I have saved in my Google Drive folder is trying to find them again quickly without having to dig through the myriad of my created folders. I also want the ability to quickly share with my students folders that have documents or videos without having to send them a link to each one. With these concerns in mind, I felt that combining one of the best visual web resources (Symbaloo) with one of the best storage resources (Google Drive) was the best way to go. " The article shows how G-Drive and Symbaloo can be used together, with an instructional video. It also offers tips on using the two tools for student research projects. Organization of the tiles in the Symbaloo webmix, and the folders in G-Drive is promoted -- a good lesson for anyone whose desktop and files/folders are cluttery. Symbaloo might also serve as a mind-map for a research project, collecting related sites together, and/or tagged by color. I use Symbaloo as my Firefox desktop -- all the sites I want to find fast are there, not just the ones I have used most recently, which is what Firefox offers when a blank tab/window is opened. Symbaloo also means that when you switch from device to device the same set of tiles is viewable. Run out of room? You can organize tabs with different sets of tiles.

R. Byrne: "Odyssey.js is a new open source map creation tool from CartoDB. Through Odyssey.js you can create mapped stories in three formats; slide, scroll, and torque. In all three formats viewers will see a location on a map along with the text and pictures of your story. The slide and scroll formats are fairly straight-forward, you click through slides or scroll through a story. The torque format allows you to connect elements of your map to a timeline." This tool could be used to map history, parts of novels, the immigration of peoples, the expansion of wars, etc. Mapping and visualization are always good to enhance learning.

Our pedagogical imperative is to let a course unfold according to the whim and determination of the group - to replace teacher-as-content with learning-community-as-content-maker. Doesn't this replace the content-as-authority with the random knowledges of various members of the group? How does "whim" become "content"? Wouldn't it be better to start with actual, factual knowledge? on Dec 09, 14 - Edit - Remove This is at the heart of what Freire calls "co-intentional education," in which "Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge." The collective knowledge of a group of students will almost always exceed the expertise of one instructor. The last sentence is misleading -- not what Freire says. If the teacher is not included as part of the task, the knowledge of the group of students probably doesn't exceed the instructor's expertise.

A screen recorder that comes in a free edition, as well as two more professional levels. Windows 7 only. Screen recordings are great for showing students how to use applications, open specific files/folders, etc. Students can also use a screencast to put together their project presentations on their own computer and then upload them as videos to YouTube or a wiki.

Nik Peachey's blog opens avenue for discussing immigration issues: "openCities is a project that collects together information and case studies on best practice regarding the successful social and cultural integration of migrant workers and their families into their host cities. As many of you probably already know, the issue of migration will be one that is and will continue to have huge impact on our societies over the next few decades and dealing with this effectively is going to be of key importance."

The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools." This may be an appropriate replacement for Ning. Looks interesting and is designed especially with educators in mind.

"ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys. Our newest tool, TCast, allows teachers to record and place audio or video files anywhere in a lesson--in 3 easy steps. Each of these tools really opens up the scope and sequence of lessons centered around spoken language tasks." Jeff Magoto has done a great presentation on how to use ANVILL, which is a wonderful, free, A/V tool available now internationally.

"The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World." Though not specifically EFL/ESL, the lessons offered could be very useful in class, particularly math, science, history, SAT prep, Calif Standards tests, etc. Also topical videos, such as the Geithner plan to solve the banking crisis of 2009-10.

"Skype is a free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom and their students to a world way beyond their campus. With Skype, students can learn from other students, connect with other cultures, and expand their knowledge in amazing ways. Teachers and parents can also benefit from Skype in the classroom. Read below to learn how you can take advantage of the power of Skype in your classroom." Links with short explanations--very useful.

"The readability index is a bit coarse, but it is helpful none-the-less. The index use a simple ranking of "basic," "intermediate," and "advanced." In order to sort by readability you have to open the advanced search tools then select "reading level" from the drop-down menus." This blog entry has some screenshots to help understand the process.

Everything you need to create a website, preparing images for the web and uploading your site to a remote web server will be covered in this tutorial. If you have any questions please email me at robert@twelvedozen.co.uk For each of the following tutorials download the ZIP file unzip the contents and open using Keynot on your apple mac. Each of the files is a slide show presentation with a work through movie that you can follow along.

"Second Life English is a free resource and open community for language learners and teachers in the virtual world of Second Life. Welcome! " Has a chatroll for a BB, and links to the official second life Website and SLURL

Totally cool, downloadable, free. You can make great screencasts of your desktop activities to show students how to open a program, edit a photo, etc.

You enter a Twitter name and open a video chatroom. "What else can Tinychat do? Quick and easy video conferencing. + Make video chatrooms instantly + Host small or large groups effortlessly + Control your room and moderate + Save and customize your room + Embed on your own web site"

An online speed reading training tool, this site really helps you improve reading speed. Contains a very limited library for practice, but you can also highlight text in a browser and open the Eyercize tool from an icon on your browser toolbar. Should be quite useful.

Article from the Informal Education Homepage. infed (the informal education homepage) was established in 1995 as an open, independent and not-for-profit site. Put together by a small group of educators, it is now accessed around 6 million times a year. Our aim is to provide a space for people to explore the theory and practice of informal education, social action and lifelong learning. We want to encourage educators and animateurs to develop ways of working and being that foster association, conversation and relationship.

"Building bridges for the future through collaborative projects" This site is a huge collection of inter-related blogs, videos of collaborative student projects, likes to wikis, Twitter and Skype pals, etc., etc.--open the box and start devouring the candy! Based on Tom Friedman's concept, "the world is flat," this is the place to find help with teaching, display your students' work, discuss issues and projects, et al.

Similar to Bubblr, but this app produces a book-lik presentation, rather than a comic strip format. You add two pictures per open book page, and add text as a subtitle. Good for projects with students' own photos uploaded to Flickr, or pictures found in a search. (See Russell Stannard's description and tutorial at http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/newBubblr/index.html.)

"Using Moodle - Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster is published by O'Reilly as part of the Community Press series. "The first edition of the book, written by Jason Cole and released in July 2005, is based on Moodle 1.4. The second edition, released in November 2007, has been updated to cover all the features in Moodle 1.8, such as the new roles and permissions system, blogs, messaging and the database module. " This is a free download!