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Bill Graziadei, Ph.D. (aka Dr. G)

OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite - 0 views

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    OpenOffice.org: The Free, Open Source Office Suite v3.0 Release See Open Office 3.0 Review by PC Magazine at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332502,00.asp
J Black

Zoho upgrades Web word processor with good UI (two of them!) | Webware - CNET - 0 views

  • Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features. The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.
  • I find Zoho Writer 2.0 to be a strong word processor that's incredibly easy to learn and use, even more so than Google Docs. The dangerous collaboration function means I can't recommend this product, yet, as a workgroup app. But I wrote this review solo in Zoho, and it didn't give me a minute of confusion or trouble.
  • Zoho Writer users Google Gears to give users offline access
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  • You post directly to a few different blogging services from Zoho Writer, which is a very nice feature for bloggers.
  • Zoho is said to offer simultaneous collaborative editing, as Google Docs does, but when I tested the app I found it far too easy to over-write another user's edits. I do hope this gets fixed very soon.
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    Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features. The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.
J Black

Amazon Kindle for iPhone & iPod Touch « THE FIRE WIRE - 0 views

  • Even if you could never justify spending $360 on a Kindle, you can still partake in the mobile eBook revolution. Amazon Kindle for iPhone & iPod Touch (Free) is a new app that lets you buy and download Kindle books and read them on the go — without buying the Kindle 2. In addition to having access to more than 240,000 books, the app lets you adjust text size, add bookmarks, and get free samples. If you already have a Kindle, the app’s Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes your bookmarks across your Kindle and your iPhone.
J Black

11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress - 0 views

  • the end result is a moderated directory
  • reate a directory on your website or blog where users can submit information about themselves or their business.
  • ort of image bookmarking service for those who have access
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  • RecruitPress is a fee job board option.
  • Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager Using WordPress and FeedBurner.
  • hosting a forum on your site,
  • contact manager.
  • WordPress Wiki is a premium theme ($30)
  • review site
  • WP e-Commerce is a surprisingly powerful free plugin that will allow you to sell items through your WordPress-powered site or blog.
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    In this article we'll take a look at a combination of tutorials, plugins and themes that can help you to use WordPress in non-traditional ways. Hopefully you'll find something that you can use, or at least something that will be a valuable learning resource for extending your knowledge and skills of working with WordPress.
David Peter

MIT Press Journals - International Journal of Learning and Media - Full Text - 0 views

  • Now, with study becoming a lifelong enterprise, and with the advent of a galaxy of new media, “learning” seems once again poised to become all things to all people, be they lay or scholarly.
    • David Peter
       
      So, since we are all lifelong learners with access to transparent, pervasive and ubiquitous technology ... not sure NEW media is all that NEW.
  • learning that do not occur automatically, readily, naturally, or by dint of simply living in a certain place at a certain time
    • David Peter
       
      Almost seems to be speaking of PROGRAMMED learning, and not the new learning environment/commons. Isn't all learning contextual?
  • we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before
    • David Peter
       
      Barr and Tagg mentioned this SHIFT earlier.
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  • advent of a galaxy of new media
    • David Peter
       
      What NEW media are they speaking of? The NEW media is always changing and may be difficult to specifically link to lifelong learners. Prensky speaks of digital natives and digital immigrants. Does all media work for all readers/users?
  • we may well have reached a set of tipping points
    • David Peter
       
      We are BEYOND the tipping point. More likely to be a GROUNDSWELL and it's up to us to ride the wave or not.
  • learning may be at once more individual
    • David Peter
       
      Thanks to technology, or inspite of technology?
  • Both the demands of the workplace and the demands of education have changed profoundly and promise to do so for the foreseeable future.
    • David Peter
       
      And, in addition, the focus has shifted to global learning, and not localized learning. The advent of 21st century skills, the reemergence of liberal education ... all are continuing to change and demand change.
  • technology is often cited as a primary driver of cultural change
    • David Peter
       
      Interesting thought. Is this an anthropological conclusion? A social conclusion? Who has cited this?
  • One could argue that a strictly formal learning experience is characterized by classroom-based instruction featuring an explicit curriculum and traditional pedagogical goals, and scaffolding implemented by a single educator; a pure informal learning experience lacks all of these characteristics
    • David Peter
       
      This would imply that informal learnnig, without structure, is somehow inferior. Isn't the tone of learning set by the classroom, the teacher and other variables?
  • A successful informal learning practice depends upon an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking
    • David Peter
       
      Hard to imagine that this can ONLY occur with a constructivist paradigm?
cheryl capozzoli

MIT - Peter Suber, Open Access News - 0 views

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    Wow, MIT continues to lead the way in Open collective collaborative intelligence!!
Dennis OConnor

CyberSmart! - 0 views

  • Two free resources support daily teaching. The free CyberSmart! Student Curriculum empowers students to use the Internet safely, responsibly, and effectively. The free CyberSmart! Educator Toolbar puts 21st century skills into practice every day, with just-in-time 24/7 access to annotated essential resources to support student learning.
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    Free k-12 Curriculum featuring Information Fluency/literacy issues. Professinally prepared, available by grade level in pdf format.
Sheri Edwards

Kids Create -- and Critique on -- Social Networks | Edutopia - 0 views

  • "With Web 2.0, there's a strong impetus to make connections," says University of Minnesota researcher Christine Greenhow, who studies how people learn and teach with social networking. "It's not just creating content. It's creating content to share."
  • And once they share their creations, kids can access one of the richest parts of this learning cycle: the exchange that follows. "While the ability to publish and to share is powerful in and of itself, most of the learning occurs in the connections and conversation that occur after we publish," argues education blogger Will Richardson (a member of The George Lucas Educational Foundation's National Advisory Council).
  • In this online exchange, students can learn from their peers and simultaneously practice important soft skills -- namely, how to accept feedback and to usefully critique others" work.
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  • "I learn how to take in constructive criticism," says thirteen-year-old Tiranne
  • image quality, audio, editing, and content
  • Using tools such as the social-network-creation site Ning, teachers can easily develop their own networks, Mosea says. "It is better to create your own," he argues. "If a teacher creates his or her own network, students will post as if their teacher is watching them, and they'll tend to be more safe. "You can build social networks around the curriculum," Mosea adds, "so you can use them as a teaching resource or another tool." An online social network is another tool -- but it's a tool with an advantage: It wasn't just imposed by teachers; the students have chosen it.
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    Self-Directed Learning "When students are motivated to create work that they share online, it ignites an independent learning cycle driven by their ideas and energized by responses from peers."
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    "Self-Directed Learning When students are motivated to create work that they share online, it ignites an independent learning cycle driven by their ideas and energized by responses from peers."
Tero Toivanen

eLearn: Feature Article - 0 views

  • The goal of the Semantic Web is to provide the capacity for computers to understand Web content that exists on systems and servers across the Internet, ultimately adding value to the content and opening rich new data, information, and knowledge frontiers.
  • In essence, the Semantic Web is a collection of standards, data structures, and software that make the online experience more detailed, intelligent, and in some cases, more intense.
  • In addition to the standards that govern the data and its structure, semantic technologies seek to define the framework and method of communication between systems.
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  • This is a key component of the Semantic Web because IPAs will make the intelligent connections between content, mapping relationships, and alerting users and systems to content that previously would not have been identified, or if recognized, would have been discovered accidentally by searching or user recommendation. The Web will essentially be building correlations between defend types of learning interaction regardless of whether the user is online.
  • The potential of the Semantic Web could actually revolutionize the learning experience. Roger Schank, who helped found the Learning Center at Carnegie Mellon University, designed a new methodology that eliminates classes, tests, lectures, and even programs themselves.
  • Schank argues the most effective way to teach new skills is to put learners in the kinds of situations in which they need to use those skills, and to provide mentors who help learners as and when they need it. Effective learners come to understand when, why, and how they should use skills and knowledge. They receive key just-in-time lessons, in such a way that learners will most likely remember the information later when they need it. In a Semantic Web context, learning would be continuously invigorated with the obvious benefits being an increase in the quality of content and the sophistication of student interactions.
  • The prospect of applying semantic concepts to learning administration as well as direct pedagogy could offer benefits to the institution and the learner.
  • educational organizations should keep data secure while addressing issues around open access, though in principle the way would be clear to integrate systems across intranets and extranets.
  • Government agencies and lawmakers need to engender the broad necessity and the vision as well as provide adequate support and development mechanisms for those institutions and innovators wishing to further semantic applications within e-learning. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the learners and tutors must embrace the new opportunities and pedagogical frontiers that a web of meaning could ultimately deliver.
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    The goal of the Semantic Web is to provide the capacity for computers to understand Web content that exists on systems and servers across the Internet, ultimately adding value to the content and opening rich new data, information, and knowledge frontiers.
Ruth Howard

GAME School Opens in New York:Quest to Learn | HASTAC - 0 views

  • In an atmosphere of academic excellence, Quest aims to foster the type of learning that is possible today—learning based on access to online resources and tools from around the globe, learning that supports customized content for every student on demand, learning that is game-like in its ability to inspire and motivate. “In an age when low-income urban kids continue to drop out of school at alarming rates, yet research is consistently showing the high levels of engagement youth are exhibiting in various media platforms, it is incumbent upon educators to take notice and indeed redirect teaching methods to meet the needs and interests of students,” says Schwartz.
  • a robust industry mentorship program allow students opportunities to learn alongside experts, s
  • critical pedagogic tool in secondary education.”
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  • 21st century learning materials and assessment
  • teacher training and digital arts
  • “learn by doing” through coursework focused on helping students make connections between ideas and skills in real world contexts. Enhanced literacy and math instruction occurs daily and all students have opportunities to gain expertise in reading, writing, and designing with digital media, including taking courses in computer programming, media arts, and game design. A fully integrated Wellness curriculum supports students in achieving healthy hearts, minds, and bodies.
  • based on research on how students today learn best
  • daily workshops in numeracy and literacy for struggling students,
  • cues from the media-rich learning kids are engaged in outside of school
  • expect a school that is all about beauty, science, thinking, learning, excitemen
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    A new New York school-curriculum by game designers fully integrating a new learning ecology.
Tero Toivanen

Digital Citizenship | the human network - 0 views

  • The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system.
  • While some may be content to sit on the sidelines and wait until this cultural reorganization plays itself out, as educators you have no such luxury. Everything hits you first, and with full force. You are embedded within this change, as much so as this generation of students.
  • We make much of the difference between “digital immigrants”, such as ourselves, and “digital natives”, such as these children. These kids are entirely comfortable within the digital world, having never known anything else. We casually assume that this difference is merely a quantitative facility. In fact, the difference is almost entirely qualitative. The schema upon which their world-views are based, the literal ‘rules of their world’, are completely different.
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  • The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.
  • We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.
  • As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village.
  • The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.
  • Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.
  • We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.
  • We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins.
  • A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.
  • before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.
  • Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK.
  • Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.
  • As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.
  • Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent.
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    Mark Pesce: Digital Citizenship and the future of Education.
Ruth Howard

Welcome to BetterLesson - 1 views

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    (Beta) BetterLesson is a free organizational tool and curriculum development community that helps educators connect and share high-quality resources, best practices, and ideas. Use BetterLesson to: * Organize and share your complete, 180-day curriculum * Connect and collaborate with innovative educators in your field * Tag and search lessons using state standards * Access your files and instructional content from anywhere * Control who sees your curriculum
Tero Toivanen

Education Futures - Arthur Harkins on Leapfrogging - 0 views

  • Leapfroggingmeans to jump over obstacles to achieve goals.
  • This process marks an extension of Vygotsky’s and Dewey’s work, while ever looking toward the future.
  • One example of Leapfrogging is Finland’s jump to wireless phones, saving that country the cost of deploying an expensive copper wire system.
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  • Kent, Washington public schools
  • now permit students to use wireless Web devices to help them access information to better pass tests.
  • Leapfrogging has become a major strategy of developing countries wishing to avoid catch-up efforts that otherwise portend a high likelihood of continued followership.
  • teaching, research, innovation, and service.
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    John Moravec: Earlier this month, I interviewed Arthur Harkins on our approach to innovating in human capital development (Leapfrog!).
Tero Toivanen

Education Futures - Going global and purposive - 0 views

  • Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students.
  • So, there we go. The question isn’t access to technologies, but how we make the most of the technologies and knowledge resources available. Rather than blindly advocating for technological adoption, is it now time to focus on the purposive use of technologies for human capital development?
Maggie Verster

Social networking guidelines for teachers - 0 views

  • But ignoring this risk doesn't make it go away; indeed, it leaves many students ill-equipped to make intelligent decisions about what to do when they encounter this kind of material in real life, as they are certain to do. Learners who have access to social media and adult support for reflecting on their engagement with it in their homes will be prepared, of course
    • Maggie Verster
       
      Well put!!!
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    A set of nine guidelines, not intended to be the final word but intended to start a conversation "in the best of social networking tradition." Some refinements included.
Steve Ransom

Leaving 'Friendprints': How Online Social Networks Are Redefining Privacy and Personal ... - 0 views

  • "Our kids today will give everything [in terms of personal information] away, but it's not at all clear how this will shake out in the long run,"
    • Steve Ransom
       
      A marketer's gold mine, among other things.
  • And what about the person you don't really know who wants to be your friend because you have some friends in common? According to Hoffman, that new friend may just be mining your social circle for information. As networks grow and more friends of friends (and their friends) are accepted by users, it's unclear who can be trusted.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Hmmmm... this has occurred to me before, but I'm not sure how real it is our how paranoid we should be. However, we do need to take a look at our followers' digital footprints (blogs, tweets, posts, pages,...) if suspect.
  • Hoffman illustrated how social connections are made online and the ease with which a stranger can become part of a network.
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  • When a business contact from the LinkedIn world wants to become your friend on Facebook, do you accept the invitation, giving them access to the photos on your Facebook profile from last summer's rowdy beach party?
  • Third-party applications, he argued, can take that data outside of the friendly confines of a social networking site and combine it with data from other sources to piece together enough information to steal a person's identity.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      That's always been my feeling about 3rd party apps. I don't use them for the most part.
  • According to Acquisti, people are more likely to divulge key personal information -- their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number -- on social networking sites than they would on other web sites
  • In one study, Acquisti found that that people will divulge information when they see others doing so. That tendency, he believes, may explain why so many people are willing to dish out personal information on the networks.
  • Holy Grail for marketers is to track consumers and their friends -- and what they say about a product -- via social networks. "People are more willing to divulge information for social purposes, and the lead users are 18 to 25 years old," Bradlow notes. "The social norms around privacy aren't going to be what they were before."
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    The information provides opportunities not only for legitimate business purposes, but also for the nefarious aims of identity thieves and other predators, according to faculty at Wharton and elsewhere.
Ruth Howard

Students as 'Free Agent Learners' : April 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views

  • 51 percent of teachers are interested in learning how to integrate gaming into daily learning activities;
  • Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
  • Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
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  • Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent).
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    Students want more control over their own learning experiences through technology and want to define their own educational destinies and determine the direction of their learning. "This free agent learner is one that is technology-enabled, technology-empowered, and technology-engaged to be ... an important part of driving their own educational destiny. To some extent they feel ... it's a responsibility. They also feel it's a right to be able to do that. So technology has enabled this free agent learner. We have the opportunity in education to make sure they're on the right track and to be supportive of their learning experiences." Ive been waiting for this! This is exciting it points to the idea that students will co-create their curriculum. In my mind it will become imperitive that individuals choose their highest bliss-subjects and projects that reflect their passions. In the new collaborative work environments students will be more highly valued for their contributions to areas that they are most naturally motivated to explore. Their resulting contributions will result in inventiveness and cutting edge investigations via passion, self motivation and peer inspiration and direct access to thought leaders/mentors in the field. Teachers might become guides to ensuring students intentions are achieved- teachers as arbiters of human potential. Students will no longer be compared to each other. They will score according to their own self affirmed destinations-allowing of course for reviews and changes of destiny.Teachers might also need roles in law and ethics to ensure students are safe in their online world activities, monitoring students and their online peers, intercepting or prompting inside the conversations?
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    Of those who have some interest in gaming, responses were varied as to its value in education. Sixty-five percent said it appeals to different learning styles; another 65 percent said it increases student engagement. Others said it allows for student-centered learning (47 percent), helps develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills (40 percent), helps develop creativity (39 percent), allows students to gain experience through trial and error (37 percent), and helps students visualize difficult concepts (35 percent). But perhaps the most significant trend in education technology, Evans said, is the emergence of the student as a "free agent learner": Students want more control over their own learning experiences through technology and want to define their own educational destinies and determine the direction of their learning. "This free agent learner is one that is technology-enabled, technology-empowered, and technology-engaged to be ... an important part of driving their own educational destiny. To some extent they feel ... it's a responsibility. They also feel it's a right to be able to do that. So technology has enabled this free agent learner. We have the opportunity in education to make sure they're on the right track and to be supportive of their learning experiences."
Wayne Basinger

Social-Networking Sites Draw Teens In | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Social-Networking
    • Wayne Basinger
       
      This is clearly the main topic of the article.
  • Teens
    • Wayne Basinger
       
      This is the age group the article will discuss.
  • "Teens gather in networked public spaces to negotiate identity, gossip, support one another, jockey for status, collaborate, share information, flirt, joke, and goof around,"
    • Wayne Basinger
       
      This is the list of things that students do at the sites.
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  • To the uninitiated, however, the photos, videos, and cryptic comments that kids post on their personal pages often appear as impenetrable as a tenth grader's cluttered locker. Because schools tend to block access to social-networking sites, many educators have a tough time harnessing their potential as a teaching tool and modeling appropriate networking-site behaviors.
    • Wayne Basinger
       
      Blocking of the sites makes it difficult for teachers to use it effectively.
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