Group items tagged

Mixbook (or Mixbook for Educators) is a photo-based creation platform that offers hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful. Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and edit to your heart's content.

Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding, travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or journey, to tell the story of a field trip.  Mixbook for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should you choose to print.  (A similar option is Scrapblog.)

Storybird, a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13, inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional artists and the collection of art is growing. Two (or more) people create a Storybird in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.

replace traditional textbooks with iPads as part of a yearlong study by the university’s e-publishing working group into the use of e-readers

students were more connected in and out of the classroom

said that the iPad made it easier to collaborate and manage group projects

Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."

External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.

Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.

Imagine a teacher holding "office hours" once a week in the evenings for students who need extra help.

. If your students are working on a project and are stuck on a particular section or concept, you can connect them with an expert to help them through it.

This is where Hangouts can aid in connecting people without the need for travel.

it turns out that the one thing present in every successful person is one consistent trait. It’s not a person’s education or lack of it, or their IQ, their upbringing, their financial abundance or lack, their test scores, their birth order or their gender. It’s one odd, rarely mentioned quality: Grit.

But grit is more than just an attitude. It’s about the actions we take when faced with doubt and obstacles. In 2006, Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman discovered that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement.

A clear goal Determination despite others’ doubts Self-confidence about figuring things out Humility about knowing it doesn’t come easy Persistence despite fear Patience to handle the small obstacles that obscure the path A code of ethics to live by Flexibility in the face of roadblocks A capacity for human connection and collaboration A recognition that accepting help does not equate to weakness A focus and appreciation of each step in the journey An appreciation of other people’s grit A loyalty that never sacrifices connections along the way An inner strength that helped propel them to their goal

Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them with others. Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class and classroom discussions. Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.