Group items tagged

"Collaboration is the real step to education transformation. When we gather to produce, our ideas, talents, and skills embody our final outcome. Each person who participates has the ability to add full attention to the designated task versus one person spread thin over several tasks. Collaboration is also important for students who will have to work with others in some capacity to be able to problem solve or brainstorm."

Excellent use of public domain video clips and voiceover to communicate "Creating Great Things Through Collaboration". Part of the #ETMOOC course I'm involved in. 

Katlin Tucker, a dynamic high school teacher presents her approach-pedagogy-instructional strategies to transform teaching and learning. She demonstrates ways she helps engage students and grow skills in several areas, including communication, comprehension & critique, collaboration, content knowledge, etc. A couple of her main tools include Collaborize Classroom and Google Docs. 

One teacher shows how they use Voicethread. The examples are great and shows how he has thought through how to make it a collaborative tool.He also has done a couple on poetry, hate, and genocide. Interesting stuff! http://ed.voicethread.com/share/1106060/  http://ed.voicethread.com/share/88781/  http://ed.voicethread.com/share/62276/

Enter the Group is a new free service offering collaborative project management for groups. Enter the Group features a calendar, messaging, and file sharing for your group members. If you want to keep your project just between friends, you can create a private group. If you want the whole world to see your project, you can make a public group. Users can also login using FB login/passwords.  I'm interested in checking out the possibility of virtual classrooms and using it to manage PBL projects. This might be a good tool for SISUHSD's emphasis on PBL. 

Ready for the next generation of textbook creation that utilizes good pedagogy? Imagine a living, breathing, dynamic textbook that offers different assignments for each individual based on their learning styles, allows for student-created work to be posted and featured based on accuracy/creativity votes and having students all around the world discuss content and share resources in real time through an integration with Google's new social networking service Google +.  Imagine all of this in a new dynamically changing interactive living 21st Century textbook ecosystem. Brain Mannix  would like to use the Blackboard/Collaborate platform as an engine to bring students and teachers around the world together to make this happen. Check it out!

Join.me allows Mac and Windows users to quickly share their screens with each other and work together. The person offering the screen share must download the software, and then just give your nine digit access number to your collaborators to give them access to your screen and to converse with you. It could be a very handy tool for sharing your screen with students to walk them through an application or give to give a virtual presentation. Join.me could also be useful for professional development in which you're introducing colleagues to the ins and outs of a program.

What it is: Join Me is an incredibly simple way to share your computer screen with others. It works on both Windows and Mac allowing you to share your screen (and whatever is on it instantly). The simplicity of this site is brilliant. If you have even a sparkle of being a "techie" among family, colleagues, or friends, you most likely get regular phone calls asking for your help with something. The problem: those asking the question don't usually know enough to accurately articulate what their hang up is. Join Me is a simple solution, it lets you share screens so that you can see what the problem is and walk them step by step through the solution. Join Me is also great for the classroom, it lets students and teachers quickly share their screens for instant collaboration, feedback, or virtual meetings.

Nice article & video on student collaboration using Google Docs

Check out this great use of Livebinders to help students add content to a curriculum. This teacher did it with 3rd graders...me thinks older students could do even more with it. Great collaborative application and think of the possibilities for PBL. 

Great resource for U.S. History teachers and a place to collaborate with other history teachers

"NY Times writers collaborated with the Common Sense Media writer Kelly Schryver to focus on the increasingly important and nuanced question "Who Are You Online?" Times and Learning Network content as well as offerings from Common Sense Media's K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum for teaching and learning about this complex issue." Lots of avenues to take this material in working with students.

Some ideas on how Google+ can be used effectively in professional learning, collaboration, etc.

"In Project Based Learning (PBL), students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Rigorous projects help students learn key academic content and practice 21st Century Skills (such as collaboration, communication & critical thinking)."

My response: Patrick, thanks for bringing the issue to us to consider. No matter how we see it, it is a discussion that is important to have. It does mean we have quite a responsibility to use the tools we have well. On a Classroom 2.0 Live webinar today, there was a discussion of the technology needing to be transformative, not just a substitute for paper/pencils/books, etc. or just an electronic version of the same curriculum. That brings us to the pedagogical approach of each teacher. If they just place their old methodology on top of the technology, nothing much different will occur. BUT...if they see their method of how students will interact with them and course material differently, the technology can be a tool both the teacher and student can enjoy and in the process they can become more creative, collaborative, and communicative.

iCivics has just released its seventeenth educational game for students. The new game is called We The Jury. We The Jury puts students in the role of a juror for two trials. Looks like a great activity for students. I would also use it and have discussion groups. Those using an LMS with online discussions or Collaborize Classroom, this would be a great online activity for interactive discussions.

This list is considered the "best of the best" by AASL and is comprised of free, user-friendly sites that encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. They also provide a foundation to support AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. The sites offer tools and resources in content collaboration, content resources with lesson plans, curriculum sharing, digital storytelling, managing and organizing, and social networking and communication.

Talkwheel creates a visual roundtable collaboration platform to allow groups in enterprises, e-learning and social networks to interact more effectively than anywhere else online. -Enterprises use it to improve communication internally, as well as externally to engage their customers around different interactive focus groups.

"Poetica is a neat new service for collaborative editing of documents. The best feature of Poetica is its similarity to writing on a paper document. While reading a document you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you write your comment. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above the line. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red." Supports imports of .docs, .pdfs, .rtf files.- definitely want to use this as a tool with Chromebooks

LDC offers a framework for building the college-and-career-ready literacy skills specified by the Common Core State Standards. There are some excellent inquiry units under modules tab - all for secondary years.