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I frequently hear people attempt to equate the open education movement with socialism. After all, the logic goes, what could possibly be more socialist than freely sharing things with everyone? The attempt to characterize the entire movement in a single assertion assumes a uniformity within the movement that anyone working in OER knows does not exist. I will neither agree or disagree with broad, general assertion in this post. Instead, I want to disagree with the statement in a very specific context, and carve out a specific and concrete space in the discourse about the motivations that underlie OER.

Came across this nugget of awesome today: "To link your Google Docs to your Edmodo Library : 1. Log in to your Edmodo account. 2. Select the Library option from the top navigation panel. 3. Select the Google Docs link on the left panel. 4. Select the "Connect with Google Docs" button and you will be prompted to sign in to your Google Docs account. 5. Select the "allow access" button when prompted about Edmodo permission to access your Google Docs. All your Google Docs will then sync with your Edmodo Library. This will allow you to share documents with your Edmodo groups and students can easily turn-in assignments completed via Google Docs."

Always On Teaching, Learning, and Living with laptops both in and out of the classroom. Whether you're a teacher just starting out with mobile laptop carts or working in a 1:1 environment, find the tips and techniques you need to succeed when learning goes 24/7. Join Katie Morrow and Michelle Bourgeois as they share ideas and resources for teaching and learning with laptops.

Unit One: "Creative What?"show This unit explores the general topics of intellectual property, creative content, and creative rights. Using the backdrop of a high school's Battle of the Bands, the unit will help students define intellectual property and creative content by relating it to a common scenario they might encounter. Students will begin to recognize and internalize the importance of respecting creative rights, conduct their own research to better understand the relevance of creative content to their lives, and help clear up confusion about the rights that apply to them and their peers. Unit Two: "By Rule of Law"show Intellectual property is a valuable commodity, and thus, those who develop creative content are protected by laws in the United States and around the world. In this unit, students explore creative content copyright and learn about the rights they have as creators and the laws that exist to protect the creative process. The unit's activities encourage students to form opinions about what's right, what's wrong, and how the laws affect them as creators, consumers, and good digital citizens. Unit Three: "Calling All Digital Citizens"show Copyright and other creative rights empower the artists, musicians, and writers who produce creative works. But how does the prevalence of online media - and its ease of access - change the conversation about those rights? With social media as the backdrop, this unit explores that very question, as the students learn more with the Digital Citizenship in Schools curriculum. Students analyze the use of creative content on social media Web sites, recognize the responsibilities involved with using these media, and form their own opinions about what makes a good digital citizen. Unit Four: "Protect Your Work, Respect Your Work"show This unit explores the theme of protecting creative content through a series of experiential activities. Students learn how to protect their own creative works and how to use o

Getting Started with Spreadsheets Gadgets Spreadsheet Gadget Video screenshot Watch a video of Justin explaining the basics of Spreadsheets Gadgets. A spreadsheet gadget is a small program that interacts with the content of a spreadsheet. It is visual

1. Request an educator's upgrade for Diigo; this will allow you to create private student groups that cannot be found by public search engines 2. Use Diigo to invite students to join the group; follow up with emails as necessary 3. Refer students to online videos on social bookmarking, to make sure that students understand what social bookmarking involves. 4. Seed the group with some example texts, including comments and annotations, so that students understand your expectations. 5. Ask students to practice, to find out what issues they might have. 6. Give feedback on early attempts, to reassure students they are on the right tracks.

Great stuff coming from +George Siemens in this slide deck. Paid particular attention to slide 40 "Reed's Law." I personally  and us as a team have been looking at different change models. I had not thought about the tipping point in relation to what we're doing with edmodo and getting enough users to hit that point where the sub groups have teeth and the hill from which I've been dancing alone becomes filled with other crazy hill dancer people. :) h/t +Derek Sivers 

Building Your Digital Learning Network Enriching Professional Growth Through & With Technology It's no secret that many teachers operate as islands, in a world filled with students operating as continents. Meaning, isolationist teaching in a collaborative

Turbo-Charge Your Training With "Multiple Intelligences!" (video) September 2nd, 2009 The research is in on how people learn best and it goes against the grain most of the conventional wisdom! The conventional wisdom espouses such things as:

Wouldn't it be great to invite authors into your classroom or library to video chat with students before, during, and/or after you've read their books? We are growing a list of authors who want to make that connection with you. See the alphabetical list i

Storytelling is the original teaching tool. Long before there was formal schooling grandparents and parents there were stories. These stories provided children in the community with the knowledge base they needed to survive as an adult. With the introduct

I have found that providing students with progress reports via audio files is a very motivating alternative to providing written feedback on their progress. Generally, I do both. I am required to enter written feedback in the online records kept for my students. However, there are several things that don't overly excite me about this: I sometimes find them to be overly formal and (on occasion) stilted. They occur too infrequently - usually mid- and end-of-semester - to provide students with useful information. They can (on occasion) fall prey to ticking-the-boxes syndrome and thus can (on occasion) not be so overly heartfelt.

With tweetbook you can generate a pdf e-book of your latest tweets and favorites. Also share the tweetbook with your friends!

Google is being hit with its first (of many?) anti-Monopoly inquiries by the Department of Justice this week the NYTimes has learned. The concern is over the $125 million settlement that Google came to with the Author's Guild and the Association of Ameri

The Zimmer Twins is a fun way to incorporate technology into the classroom. Watch your students expand their vocabulary, practice proper writing habits, and become junior movie producers all at the same time! Take a few minutes to explore the Zimmer Twins and so you are familiar with the site before using it with your students.

Google Hangouts keeps getting better and better. I've been really impressed thus far with its consistency, ease of use, and functionality. Screensharing is a must, Bigger video, less so for me, but the ability to draft, ,collaborate, and draw out ideas in this setting seemingly super easy is great.  As an aside, I'm wondering how much I'll be using gmail, since Google plus, pretty much does everything I would need from an email already and then some.

Stage'D is the future of the creative storytelling experience! Stage'd breathes life into your characters, allows you to become a designer, writer, and director with the touch of a button!

Click the "Create a Space" button next to each gadget to get started with your shared space.

Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about I realize there are people whose impulse is to sneer when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as "soft" or "faddish" anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between feeling and thinking, between a child's comfort level and his or her capacity to learn. Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As one group of researchers put it, "In order to promote students' academic performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and emotional adjustment." And yet, broadly speaking, we don't. Teachers and schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures (which, to make matters worse, mostly consist of standardized test scores). If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a "good school" would sound very different. Likewise, our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside-out, seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about -- or even bullied -- by adults.

Free Technology for Teachers: Good Chrome Extensions for Students with Disabilities - links to Chrome Speak, Announcify, and Readability.