Group items tagged

Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008. Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online. Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people).

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know

reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

For Australians wanting to try the Flip, I might point out Price USA -- www.priceusa.com.au. This is a mob in Mildura that work with an agent in the US and will order anything you can get in the US but can't get here. Go to their site, enter the URLs and details of the products you want, and they'll send you a quotation to confirm. Have used them in the past and prices (shipping and exchange rate) were quite reasonable; I can't make any guarantees, but it should be easy to land a Flip in Australia for well under $200.I think the reason Australian companies aren't importing this device is that it would cannibalise much of the low end of the video camera market. The most comparable device here -- a waterproof model from (can't remember off hand) is priced at $699.

Diigo Tutorials Last edited September 19, 2008 More by Cliotech - Jennifer Dorman »

#6: Hate photocopying and assembling bulky, wasteful handouts? Save time and money. Just tag the pages, including highlights and notes, you want to include, then quickly Extract all the information under that tag. Give students CDs containing copies of the HTML file which has links to all the original pages and includes highlighted passages and your notes, or print copies as you need them. Watch this demo to see how it's done.

#11: Whether you write a blog for colleagues or to keep your students infromed, Diigo offers several useful features. You can blog directly from the Diigo toolbar, with a link to the page you're writing about as well as your highlights and notes already added to the post. Diigo will also send a linkroll of resources you've saved directly to your blog with no extra effort on your part.

And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons

digitally nimble

And they think of knowledge as infinite

But some people do care, especially when someone else has uploaded an unflattering photo or video. Los Angeles screenwriter Mike Bender, who runs AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com devoted to such photos from the past, said a woman who shared a family photo later wrote to say that she was drunk when she submitted it and that her family was upset with her. Bender removed the picture immediately, but it was already all over the Internet. What happens online can have a direct effect on someone's real life reputation, Van Der Heide said, yet people posting photos of others aren't giving them a chance to respond or control how they appear. He said unwarranted photos, videos or comments made about you could potentially "assassinate your credibility."

Today, Rea is a high school math teacher in St. Louis, having given up her modeling dreams. "It's making fun of myself, letting the world know we've all had embarrassing moments," she said. What if her students saw that photo online? "I think it would be funny," she said. "It's good for my students to know that it's OK to make mistakes."

Goof-off time shouldn’t be limited to summer vacation: it’s important all year.

st American children in the not-so-distant past, “going out to play” was the norm. Today, according to a University of Michigan study,

Just an hour a day of vigorous play — running, chasing, games like tag or dodge ball, and even dealing with or avoiding being excluded from these activities — can provide intense skill learning.

Since I also use Ning for blogs and forums, I don't use these much on Moodle, though I do use Moodle forums somewhat like an essay question on the test. I set it so a student can't read any other answers until after they post their own response--then they can read and comment on what others' wrote. I like that quite a lot. I just haven't been able to get Diigo to work through the password log on, so I don't have a really good way to comment on their responses.

Additional motivation comes from the opportunity for outstanding posters to be inducted into The Scribe Post Hall of Fame wiki.

no better place for my children to watch that speech (or any other, for that matter) than in a place where ideas are encouraged, where critical thinking about those ideas is a natural part of the conversation, and where appropriate response and debate can flourish. Where the adults in the room lead my kids to dig deeper, to validate facts, and consider the many levels of context in which every speech and every debate takes place. Where the discussion around it is such that it lays to rest the concern that many seem to have about this particular speech in general, that in some way the President will be able to “indoctrinate” our kids into some socialist mindset. If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. That, however, is not the message we are sending.

In the midst of all of the “uproar” over the President’s planned speech to school kids on Tuesday, I keep thinking about what all of this says about schools, about what they are for, and about the perception that a lot of people in this country have of them.

Programming -OK, on the programming thing, here are my thoughts.In our curriculum our objective is not as much a specific LANGUAGE. One year I may use HTML with Javascript, this past year I used LSL — what I want kids to know that when they encounter programming and coding that there are certain conventions. Some are case sensitive, some are not. How do you find out how to add to what you know about programming? Do you know where to go to find prewritten code? Can you hack it to make it work to do what you want it to do?We spend about a week – two weeks but I require they know how to handcode hyperlinks and images – they are just too important.But to take 12 weeks or 6 weeks to learn a whole language – yes maybe some value – but to me the value is HOW is the language constructed or built. What are the conventions and how do I educate myself if I am interested in pursuing. What comes out of this time is kids who say either “I never want to do that” or “this is really cool, I love coding.”They are doing very simplistic work (although the LSL object languages were pretty advanced) but since we don’t have a full course nor time in our curriculum, I do see this as an essential part of what I teach.I’m not teaching it for the language sake but for the sake of understanding the whole body of how languages work – we talk about the different languages and what they are used for as part of Intro to Computer science and have an immersive experience.To me, this is somewhat a comprimise between leaving it out entirely or forcing everyone to take 12 weeks of it. I just don’t know where 12 weeks would go in the curriculum.

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors

we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed