CALL_IS_VSL

"We all know Google Presentations is a great tool for making multimedia slideshows. But did you know it can also be used to make interactive quizzes and "Choose Your Own Adventure" style stories? With Google Presentations ability to link to specific slides you can build a non-linear slideshow that allows the user to make choices and go to different slides depending on their choice. Learn tips and tricks to make this work best, and see how this can be used for you or your students to make interactive quizzes and stories." This looks like fun. Users warn that some of the links to help files don't work, but give it a try.

"Technology in the classroom no longer means simply having a computer available for students to use or presenting material through a PowerPoint presentation. Educational tech means utilizing aspects of the digital classroom within the traditional classroom-students use cloud technology to submit and review assignments, teachers facilitate class discussions through online platforms, and students collaborate through online media. These are new and revolutionary elements of learning and education that play an important role in our students' academic experience."

"Create free timelines. Follow interesting stories, get updates and notifications with "Today in history". myHistro is an interactive diary and a story-flow generator for bloggers." This seems an addition to ways to use timelines/mind-mappers/blogs that would be worth exploring.

A great lesson plan for teens using QR codes to find out information and write a short report. Thanks to Carla Arena and the Casa Thomas Jefferson team for passing this on.

This is a handy way to get darker/lighter shades of the same color for your webpages. Results are visual and rendered in Hex values (e.g., #A3FFC2). The w3schools.com site has many excellent tutorials to learn HTML, PHP, CSS, etc.

This blog entry makes the point that I have repeatedly about technology in general -- it's not what the tool does, it's what you, or rather your students, can do with it. My favorite section is a smack down on IWBs -- who is using them and why??

Includes a list of useful links to help teach students digital literacy search skills.

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.

An audio Web service that allows recording from any phone, including Skype or an in-browser widget. Recordings can be shared with aFlash widget, embedding, RSS, download, etc. Staring at $4.95/month.

The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others. Links to tools and discussion forums in many content areas.

EnCompassCulture is a worldwide reading group, the place to find your next book and talk about books with other readers from around the world. It has full details of over 10,000 books for all age ranges and is full of useful features. British Council initiative.

EnCompassCulture is a worldwide reading group, the place to find your next book and talk about books with other readers around the world. It has full details of over 6,000 books for all age ranges and is full of useful features.

The YDC Educator's Kit is designed to help teachers and educators working in schools, youth clubs, community centres, and training institutes to generate and manage project-based learning activities with young people. --EHS

The idea of "portfolio" implies that the sum of the parts is greater than its individual parts, that there is some benefit to seeing the whole work longitudinally or from start to finish. A portfolio, here, is a collection of written work, related or not, presented as well as it can be, by a student for the purposes of showing, well, the best that the student can do at a given time. ... The idea of "portfolio" implies that the sum of the parts is greater than its individual parts, that there is some benefit to seeing the whole work longitudinally or from start to finish. A portfolio, here, is a collection of written work, related or not, presented as well as it can be, by a student for the purposes of showing, well, the best that the student can do at a given time.

"A portfolio, here, is a collection of written work, related or not, presented as well as it can be, by a student for the purposes of showing, well, the best that the student can do at a given time. Online, portfolios allow wide latitude in individual expression, and can contain a wide variety of kinds of work: research papers, essays, weblog entries, paragraphs, journal entries, summaries or creative work. There is a kind of dynamic tension at all moments with weblog portfolios: on the one hand, they should have visible, from the first screen, all the best of the student's work, properly formatted, edited, looking crisp and nice (defined more carefully below) and properly linked. On the other, the weblog is a dynamic thing, receiving the latest of the student's work, and pushing older stuff down and out of sight." article by Steve McCarty

ongoing student work/collaborations: This wiki contains resources for educators interested in podcasting and language learning and teaching. Although the primary focus is on English Language Teaching (EFL & ESL), it also applies to (and contains examples of) podcasting and MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) teaching and learning.

ongoing student work/collaborations

This is a really nice example of how students use a podcast to present a project and self-evaluate their own speaking.

Yeh uses a podcast to listen to and comment on students' speeches.

Sue Lister's blog - Though this seems to end at 2006, each one of these descriptions of a student teaching situation is a gem! Sue describes lessons she tried and the outcomes. A great model for teacher blogging.

Sue Lister's blog

Article on PBL: The assumption of non-constructivist approaches to learning has been that as long as learners are provided with knowledge, they will be able to use it. Education based on that assumption is thus primarily concerned with transferring substance to the learner, and little importance is placed on the role of the learning activity. From a constructivist view, on the other hand, learning is the process of constructing knowledge - not merely obtaining it - in social environments (Brooks & Brooks, 1993). The theory of situated learning consistent with this view asserts that what we come to know and understand is fundamentally a product of the learning situation and the nature of the learning activity. Learning tasks should thus, as far as possible, be embedded in the target context and require the kind of thinking that would be done in real life (Brown et al., 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991).