Group items tagged

Discusses the role of teachers in the learning  process through social networks: He gives seven roles 1. Amplifying, 2. Curating, 3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking, 4. Aggregating, 5. Filtering, 6. Modelling, 7. Persistent presence. He ends with this provocative thought: "My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality."

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

This site is designed especially with the young learner in mind with its age-appropriate content and emphasis on visual and auditory learning. Glossopedia is the kind of site that you can leave open for students to explore and find a fast fact of the day, find their favorite image, or video Glossopedia Categories Geography and Places Nature and the Environment Technology Animals Earth and Space People and Cultures Human Body Chemistry Natural Forces This site is simple and visually pleasing. The font size is great for young learners. Words are hyperlinked to an audio pronunciation that is a real person, speaking really slowly at first then more quickly, and finally the written meaning of the word. Images and photos have a print button prominently displayed.

Along with the new G3 has come a typhoon of new apps for iPhoneheads, serving a myriad of zany purposes. Us being education-centric, we're doing a quick roundup of all the most education-relevant ones...

Technology is a tool that can be used to help teachers facilitate learning experiences that address the diverse learning needs of all students and help them develop 21st Century Skills, an idea supported by the Common Core. 

This is our space to share exciting digital possibilities to help learners develop 21st century multiliteracy skills through active learning.

Digital storytelling about the history of Oklahoma.

In a recent post about Tuition-Free Education Courses for Teachers, I pointed out a number of online education courses that are free to self-learners around the world. Most of these courses are provided through well-known colleges and universities. While these courses are an excellent way to broaden your knowledge of specific topics, they aren't the only sources of free teacher education on the web. There are many other organizations that provide tuition-free education courses to teachers. A few more worth checking out include:

"I'm currently teaching first year university students and require them to blog. There are many benefits for having them blog but I've found it to be one of the greatest ways I've been able to get into the thinking and process of my their learning. Asking them to describe their learning and thought process provides me with insight not only to appreciate their efforts but to inform my instruction and decide on what further supports I can provide to take them to the next level. This technology remains a powerful way for learners to reflect and share their thinking on a variety of endeavors. As much as teachers and schools say that process is as important as product, this often is more lip service than practice. Process takes time and talking about learning can be tiresome. The transparency of blogs make this a shared experience that no doubt can provide all students a greater opportunity to learn from each other. The advent of blogs in schools often is deployed as a way to bring technology into schools. That's the wrong reason. I recently read this quote on Doug Johnson's blog: At a conference last week, Mark Weston from Dell computing stated that asking the question, "Does technology improve student learning?" is the wrong question. The question should be, "Does technology support the practices that improve student learning?"

An online library of free videos for learners everywhere - find resources to help you learn just about anything, meet people who make a difference in their communities, and even discover new parts of the world. And Next Vista for Learning wants to post your educational videos online, too.

The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a global imperative. Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared. As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 24,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being "open," these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.

An Animated Educational Site for English Language Students of all ages. Games, Lesson Plans, Teaching Tools, Activities, Animated Movies, for TESOL, TOEFL, ELL and EFL learners

new ways to look at data, helps visual learners access to data

Teachers are tapping into technology and digital media for learning. Watch How Google Saved a School and discuss the hype and the hopes for improving education through technology. More and more educators are tapping into the power of digital media and technology for teaching and learning. The variety of information resources available online is simply staggering. Explore how teachers and students are using the power of social media to promote students' active engagement, critical thinking and literacy skills. New Forms of Learning. It doesn't need to happen in school. Because it's visual, interactive and social, learning can happen anywhere with digital media as people collaborate and share about a wide range of topics and issues that matter to them. Technology and School Improvement. Technology may transform schools by promoting student engagement and creativity. But critics fear that too much focus on technology takes attention away from what's really needed to improve schools: capable, well-trained teachers; student-centered learning methods; and smaller class sizes. Hope, Hype and Reality. Are today's learners really different from previous generations? Compelling images of students using digital technology are impressive, but the research evidence on the impact of technology on learning is more mixed. And it's sometimes hard to separate the scholarship from the marketing hype, given the deep investment of technology companies in promoting the idea of technology's transformative potential.

Learn the basics of using Scratch with a series of video tutorials. Dozens of videos are broken up into courses, units, and individual lessons. Would be useful for helping learners teaching themselves Scratch.

An interesting way for educators that are interested in inquiry based learning to share resources, videos, and other discrepant events for use in the classroom. Most resources shared via twitter contain the tag #anyqs, which stands for "any questions" to encourage learners to ask questions about what's going on, and provide their own guiding questions.