Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

open educational resources and open scholarship (a form of open educational practice)

Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.

Most LMSes isolate students in their particular courses. And once that class is over and once a student has graduated, the information contained there - notes, lessons, assignments, discussions - are lost. Schoology blends a social networking interface with learning management tools, so that teachers and students (and parents and administrators) can communicate and collaborate on academic issues.

"The answer to ending bullying or misuse of social media is not to ban it ... what we need to do is talk about the behaviors that are unacceptable,"

model the correct way to use tools such as cell phones to connect with the world and learn.

Thus, if they use a laptop and they have a cell phone, they are in a 1:2 environment with technology. Add an iPad, and they are in a 1:3 environment

The cell phone is small enough to be in your pocket and with you all of the time, making learning truly 24/7

I spoke about Open Educational Practices, (including Open Educational Resources and Open Scholarship) a subject which I am learning more about all the time as the movement grows and gains traction. You see, the idea behind open practices is that anyone can gain access for free, at any time and in any place - courses, software, ideas, knowledge, people... OEP requires everything to be open - for access, scrutiny and repurposing. So whether it's licensing agreements such as Copyleft or Creative Commons, or open access journals, or even massively online open courses, the open educational practices are gaining ground and influence in the academic world.

It's not going to be easy to change a model where knowledge has become a commodity though. Too many powerful people and organisations stand to lose a lot if everything becomes 'free' and open. But things are changing slowly. The publishing houses who once had a strangle hold on academic journals are beginning to lose their grip. Some are having to change their business models. Google Reader and Google Books for example, are giving us all more than a glimpse of the pages of just about every book that has ever been published. And open access journals are opening up knowledge for all without payment. So when a student comes up against a paywall - what will they do? They will go elsewhere of course - to the free versions that are out there on the web.

srooms. The Gainesville Sun reports that the University of Florida is offering an online course called "21st Century Skills in StarCraft," which requires student to play the real-time, multi-player online strategy game "StarCraft" for up to two hours per week.

University of Florida is offering an online course called "21st Century Skills in StarCraft," which requires student to play the real-time, multi-player online strategy game "StarCraft" for up to two hours per week.

It is unlikely any e-portfolio solution is going to be perfect and I think Evernote ticks a lot of the boxes. A huge advantage of promoting a personalised e-portfolio solution is it truly belongs to the individual and not the institution, particularly important if you want to encourage and support lifelong learning.

Two things really struck me about the iPad during my time with it. The first was how it extended my activity in reality. The touch screen feels like an natural extension of myself.

This is a huge paradigm shift

the device changed my perception of connecting

Gamification is the concept that you can apply the basic elements that make games fun and engaging to things that typically aren't considered a game. Examples are Frequent Flyer Programs, Wii Fit, badges in Foursquare, etc. The possible applications of game dynamics are nearly infinite with many believing that gamification will impact everything from the web to education, health, and work.

While Angry Birds is still the top paid iPhone game, a game written by an eighth-grader has spent the last few days atop Apple's free charts.

Some months back, a friend suggested that if Nay liked his iPod touch so much, perhaps he should try his hand at programming for it. At first he tried the standard Objective-C programming tools, but found the learning curve a little steep. He tried another tool called GameSalad, but didn't like the results. In the end, he settled on the Corona tools from Ansca Mobile. Corona was easy to use, he said, and also let him write once and publish for both Apple and Android devices.