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  Web 2.0 in Education Add a linkTop of page The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book http://www.ictineducation.org/web2/ The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book (free)# 87 projects# 10 further resources# 52 aplications# 94 contributors# The benefits of using Web 2.0 applications# The challenges of using Web 2.0 applications# How the folk who ran these projects handled the issues... The Important Role Web 2.0 Will Play in Education http://bit.ly/6Z5xsk

Liora Bresler, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the U. of I. College of Education, says that the inherently performative and improvisatory aspects of teaching, along with the temporal, polyphonic aspects of scholarly research, compares favorably with musicianship.

"When you teach, you have a lesson plan, but you're not bound to follow it. You play, follow up, improvise and adapt, as the situation dictates. It's intellectual engagement, and you want to be engaging. So having a real, live audience makes a difference." Bresler said that the commitment to a third-party audience helps the teacher "see, perceive and make sense of what they're trying to communicate on a very different level."

Teachers have to act in real-time, in the moment, and have to make a lot of decisions on-the-fly.

Laurel Trainor, director of the Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University in West Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues compared preschool children who had taken music lessons with those who did not. Those with some training showed larger brain responses on a number of sound recognition tests given to the children. Her research indicated that musical training appears to modify the brain's auditory cortex.

Even a year or two of music training leads to enhanced levels of memory and attention when measured by the same type of tests that monitor electrical and magnetic impulses in the brain.

“We therefore hypothesize that musical training (but not necessarily passive listening to music) affects attention and memory, which provides a mechanism whereby musical training might lead to better learning across a number of domains," Trainor said.

Carol L. Tilley, a professor of library and information science at Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other types of books.

If reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or comprehension, readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic and cultural conventions," she said. "And if you really consider how the pictures and words work together in consonance to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature.

Although commercial publishers of comics have yet to recapture children's imaginations, Tilley says that some librarians and teachers are increasingly discovering that comics can be used to support reading and instruction.

We will continue to build on using the iPads as a relevant learning device and to further develop and explore innovative ways and methods to best utilise them as tools for teaching and learning. Through the continued DEECD iPads 4 Learning trial Evaluation, i am sure that the data we gather from this will certainly give a great insight in to iPads for Learning.

Giving students the option to direct their own learning goes a very long way in giving them ownership of the task. It allows them to play to their strengths and their learning styles. This in turn increases engagement and with the massive amount of creative app’s available for students to use, this can only be a positive.

The best offense always begins with a solid defense. This is true in sports and is directly applicable to responsible use of classroom technology and social media. In my last post I encouraged educators to "Just Get Out There," but in this post I am pulling back on the reins a bit. While we want our students to get out there and use new and emerging technologies, we need to give them the fundamentals to play the best defense. Educate, before you integrate.