Group items tagged

In an environment where global economy, global collaboration, and global 'knowledge' are  the aspiration of many countries, the understanding of the complexities of plagiarism becomes  a global requirement that needs to be addressed by all educators and learners. This paper  considers a simple definition of plagiarism, and then briefly considers reasons why students  plagiarise. At Unitec NZ, Te Puna Ako: The Centre for Teaching and Learning Innovation  (TPA:CTLI) is working closely with faculty, managers, student support services and library  personnel to introduce strategies and tools that can be integrated into programmes and  curricula whilst remaining flexible enough to be tailored for specific learners. The authors  therefore provide an overview of one of the tools available to check student work for  plagiarism - Turnitin - and describe the academic Professional Development (PD)  approaches that have been put in place to share existing expertise, as well as help staff at  Unitec NZ to use the tool in pedagogically informed ways, which also assist students in its  use. Evaluation and results are considered, before concluding with some recommendations. It  goes on to theorise how blended programmes that fully integrate academic literacy skills and  conventions might be used to positively scaffold students in the avoidance of plagiarism.  Conference participants will be asked to comment on and discuss their institutions' approach  to supporting the avoidance of plagiarism (including the utilisation of PDS and other  deterrents), describe their own personal experiences, and relate the strategies they employ in  their teaching practice and assessment design to help their learners avoid plagiarism. It is  planned to record the session so that the audience's narratives can be shared with other  practitioners.

Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word "cat" or "day" but haven't been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase...

Nature: It's more than just a faraway beach or mountain. It's a fantastic factory that makes the building blocks of all our lives-food, drinking water, the stuff we own and the air we breathe. It makes amazing memories, and even protects us from floods and storms! That's why The Nature Conservancy and its 550 scientists have created a new initiative - Nature Works Everywhere - to help students learn the science behind how nature works for us…and how we can help keep nature running strong. Nature Works Everywhere gives teachers, students and families everything they need to start exploring and understanding nature's fantastic factory - videos, interactive games, and interactive lesson plans that align to standards. Hosted by Nature Conservancy scientists, Nature Works Everywhere takes your class around the world to visit nature at its productive best - from coral reefs to bee gardens, from Maine's snowy forests to Africa's grasslands. We'll be adding more lessons each year from around the globe on science and social studies topics that teachers can use as is or customize for their own classroom needs.

This site offers a growing bank of imaginative, highly visual teaching-aids developed for use with interactive whiteboards in 11-18 Schools. The resources are designed to be used as rich sources of visually stimulating material, making use of both animations and drag and drop interactivity. The appropriate Key Stage is indicated for each resource. It is hoped that the resources will help students to make sense of some of the more challenging concepts they encounter.

These folks promote a "computer-free" computer science curriculum. Agree or disagree, this is probably useful to keep for times whenever the network gives up the ghost. "Each Unplugged activity is available to download in PDF format, with full instructions and worksheets. Background sections explain the significance of each activity to computer science, and answers are provided for all problems. All you need for most of these activities are curiousity and enthusiasm. There are photos and videos showing some of the activities in action, and we've collected links to other useful resources. The activities are primarily aimed at the five to twelve year-old age group, but they are by no means restricted to this age range: we've used them to teach older children and adults too, with little modification."

Read Write Think's flip book maker provides a template for students to use to create and print a ten page flip book. Students can use the flip book maker to design pages that contain various combinations of text and images. The flip book maker provides drawing tools that students can use to create original drawings to illustrate their stories.

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone. But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud. To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

WOW! Very Scratch-like UI for programming Android mobile apps!!

The Smithsonian site is a wealth of outstanding activities and interactives. In the Walk in the Forest interactives, students are guided through a virtual forest where they do field research using the same scientific methods and tools that Smithsonian scientists use to monitor forest biodiversity. Students can act as dirt detectives, predicting which trees will thrive in each type of soil; learn about forest layers and the plants and animals that take up residence in each; identify a tree; observe seasonal changes; map the forest; and use amphibians as an indicator of the forest. Each of the interactives has the option of narration (audio) or non-narrated (students read through the interactive).

"Through Dan Meyer's blog I just learned that Google has recently released dozens of lessons for exploring computational thinking through the use of Python programming. Now if you're wondering, "what the heck does that mean?" don't worry, I wondered the same. But since Dan Meyer is one of the people in the edu-blog-o-sphere that I have great respect for, and since he wrote one of the lessons, I had to investigate exploring computational thinking through Python. Python is a programming language. Exploring computational thinking through Python is a series of lessons in which middle school and high school students use Python to try to put mathematics and science concepts to use."

Be Funky is a simple tool for turning digital photographs into digital comics. The image you see to the left is a cartoonized image of me based on a photograph I took with my webcam. Be Funky can be used for simple one frame images or be used to create an entire strip of cartoonized images with inserted text.

This is a great site! I like to use it to 'hide' student faces when using images of students online.

We've provided a collection of educator-created lesson plans for you to use as idea starters for using GarageBand in your classroom. These wonderful examples come from educators like you, who are using GarageBand to enhance their curricula and student performance.

ImageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator.

The only problem with it is that it seems to require an email address. Maybe someone can contact them to find out how schools can use this without that. Or, the teacher can create a generic account that the students can use. Maybe? (This was on the Clif Notes list)

Holy cow! If I used Google Talk, I'd definitely use these talkbots. They do lots of things: post RSS alerts, suscribe to friendfeeds, post to twitter, etc.

Summary of efforts from Temple Media Lab.

From Larry Ferlazzo's tips blog. This is excellent! What are the events of the day that shaped the speech, given which words were uttered most often in it? How did his term match the tone/goals of his speech? Great potential!

A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.

Explores how adults are using social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.  Findings include: Adult internet users with a profile on a social network site have quadrupled in the last four years; Although the percentage of teens using social networks is higher, adults still make up the majority of social network users; and Younger adults are far more likely to use social networks than older adults.

Using the StudyStack web site, you use your computer to display a stack of "virtual cards" which contain information about a certain subject. Just like flashcards, you can review the information at your own pace discarding the cards you've learned and keeping the ones you still need to review. However, unlike traditional flash cards, each card can show multiple pieces of information; and the whole stack can be automatically sorted by any one of the pieces of information. Also, when you enter the data for a studystack, the same data can automatically be displayed as flashcards, a matching game, a word search puzzle, and a hangman game.

Students can use StudyStack to create banks or stacks of electronic cards that can be reviewed online, printed, or exported to a pda, cell phone, or iPod. Email registration is required in order to create a Study Stack, but students can use public study s

"Sure, you use the Internet all the time, but you need to wise up to the web when you use it for your university or college work." Use this free Internet tutorial to learn to discern the good, the bad and the ugly for your online research.

What do wild animals do when we're not around? Find out with National Geographic's Crittercam. Safely worn by wildlife, Crittercams capture video, sound, and other information, giving us rare views of the private lives of animals. By allowing us this animal's-eye view, Crittercams help to solve scientific mysteries. And what we learn from Crittercams helps us protect the very animals that wear them.

A searchable site where anyone can upload video clips. Although it may not be good to use during student instruction, this site could provide teaching resources to use. You can save the video to a flash drive using zamzar.com.