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."

Teachers can create an online community for their students. "Share inspiration, ideas, reading, thoughts. Post discussions, deadlines, homework. Instrantly create surveys for students. Keep parents informed of daily projects." "Not only will twiducate.com give your students the web 2.0 skills they need, but also expand their reading, writing, thoughts and ideas beyond the classroom setting."

"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?"

Thought provoking post about screencasting.   However, how about using screencasts as method of assessing student learning?

"n its beginnings, the prospects of educational technology were associated to the goal of making math easier. If you thought it would be impossible to improve a student's literacy and writing skills with the help of an app, you're in for a surprise. Essay writing is a huge trend in the world of educational technology."

5th Graders blogging in Oxfordshire, England. Students share their work, writing, and thoughts with the world.

Twitter memes. Global tags for Twitter. Twemes.com follows Twitter.com tweets (messages) that have embedded tags that start with a # character. These are sometimes called hashtags but we like to use the term twemes. Through the use of twemes, we can all view what people are talking about across the whole Twitter universe. In some sense, this can be thought of as an adhoc chatroom. We also pull in recent public photos from Flickr and public bookmarks from Del.icio.us. Twemes.com is particularly useful for keeping up on the real-time activities associated with a live event such as a conference.

Have you ever thought, "Gosh, I wish I had time to learn more about Flickr, wikis, or (enter your Web 2.0 tool here)?" Well, this is your chance to take the time to focus on your personal and professional development around Web 2.0 tools. It's fun to explore these tools and figure out ways to use them in the library, with your personal Web sites, or in other ways.

Interesting thoughts...

Henry Jenkins' thoughts on the implications of new media for teaching and learning. I'll try to add more later

Good grief. Should we also tell them to stay away from the road because of the dangerous cars? Sounds like another way to deny kids an increasingly important 21C literacy.

Apologies - I thought you were advocating for the bulleted section of the article.

Thanks. My general rule of thumb is to only advocate for continual improvement through on-going learning. I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy and was SHOCKED to learn that GPS coordinates get auto-embedded in images. I'd never considered this before and don't consider the extra information (GPS coordinates that can easily be mapped to an exact location) something that "should be" (yet it is) made available to anyone who can view a picture. In other words, let's say, I'm super careful to not include identifying information in my photos (my name, school name, city landmarks, etc) and take a picture of say, my stereo system. I've now included with this image the exact coordinates for where my home (with stereo) is located. Now a potential thief has this information (w/Google Map directions). It's super hard to be intentional about all of our choices and actions (including using GPS data w/cell phone images). That said, the more we all know, the more each of us is able to make decisions that best align with our own views, values and understandings. It's one thing for an adult to make a decision or not make a decision about inclusion of GPS data in their cell phone taken images, it takes another level of consideration when it involves giving that capability to children. THANK YOU for helping me to capture and better articulate my thoughts in this area!

Thought provoking article from eSchool News about "Teaching innovation in our schools".

Organize thoughts with Padlet

Collection of mindmapping sites to ease stress of writing.