Did you receive a gift of a new iPad this year? If so, you’re probably
spending this holiday vacation week trying out all kinds of new apps. Here are
ten that I recommend getting started with.
Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. I use
Evernote for
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Listen and Write - Dictation - 76 views
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Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.
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Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.
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Great resource for practicing dictation based on real news stories. Large library in English. Several other languages offered including Japanese, Hebrew, Polish, and many others.
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Online Dictation - Online Speech Recognition - 84 views
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An easy to use online dictation tool. Just speak and this site types the words for you. Requires Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
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The purpose of education - The Learner's Way - 45 views
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Behind the rhetoric and politics, education is about the outcomes it achieves for its learners. More than being about the nuances of technology, learning space design, curriculum structures and pedagogical practices schools should have effective answers to questions that focus on what they hope to achieve for their learners. How we answer this question should then dictate the measures we utilise to achieve these goals and it is to these ends that we must apply our efforts.
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Thinking for the Future - NYTimes.com - 60 views
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shared by Martin Burrett on 02 Jul 12
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TalkTyper - 111 views
talktyper.com
speech voice voice to text speech to text mfl English French German Spanish Italian Mandarin Chinese Japanese speech recognition
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A useful site that allows users to dictate and generate text. A great resource for children with writing difficulties to get their ideas written quickly. It works with a range of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and more. For mistakes, the site offers alternative words with similar pronunciation. Only works with Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
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How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education le... - 40 views
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Teacher Training Videos created by Russell Stannard - 101 views
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" * About Russell Stannard * ELT/ESL Videos * Web 2.0/ICT Videos * Russell's Research Videos * 9 Great Spelling Sites for ELT * Free on-line screen capture tool * Zimmer Twins-Brilliant Cartoon/Dialogue Tool for Kids * Word Magnets-Great vocabulary/Grammar Tool * How to use Survey Monkey * My favourite Website on the Web * 5 Simple but brilliant ELT tools * Great Text Tool called WordSift * Wolfram Alpha Great Question Making Tool * Fun Viral Marketing Tools * Amazing 3D dialogue builder * 2 amazing presentation tools * Best Pronunciation Sites * Best ELT sites 2008 * Great dictation site * Wordle-Great Vocab Site * My favourite Listening Site * 10 vocab sites for kids * ELT Videos with subtitles * Brilliant Comic Site * 7 Great Fun sites for ELT * Unusual Vocabulary Site * Really Fun Dialogue Building Tool * A site for drawing&Recording * 11 great sites for teaching English * Recording & Searching Podcasts with Podamatic * Good sites for ELT Video content * Review of the best ELT podcasts * Voicethread- Presentation tool * Fun drawing tool Humanising Language Teaching The Blogs I use most for ELT * Larry Ferlazzo's blog * Nik Peachey's blog * Blog at IH Barcelona * Ozge's Blog * Carl's Blog Newsletter For extra free materials and training videos, sign up to our monthly newsletter! Email Address: Confirm Email Address: Name: Organisation/Institution: "
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shared by trisha_poole on 16 Apr 11
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BBC News - Language universality idea tested with biology method - 18 views
www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-13049700
language brain bbc EML504 EML510 language acquisition SLA research culture vygotsky news
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A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt. A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families. The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage. The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.
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10 Great Apps for a Teacher's New iPad | iPad Apps for School - 182 views
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a little bit of everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to myself. The app automatically syncs with my online Evernote account so that I can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files from any computer or device that is connected to the web. Learn more in the video below.
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Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. I use Evernote for a little bit of everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to myself. The app automatically syncs with my online Evernote account so that I can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files from any computer or device that is connected to the web. Learn more in the video below.
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shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
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Ant Heald liked it
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One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
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Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
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In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
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We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
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And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
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by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
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We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
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A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
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The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
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Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
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If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
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The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
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the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
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If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
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We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
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Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
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But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
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Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
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You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
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if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
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They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
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And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
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They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
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As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
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Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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Book: Hairdresser or Footballer by @year6missNW with @RossMcGill via @JohnCattEd - 1 views
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"We often tend to think about gender as the biological differences between women and men - however, this is incorrect. Gender is what actually gets expressed - how we look, how we act and how we feel. While sex is determined by what is dictated by our biology or what is written into the chromosomes, known as genotype, it is the interaction between the genes and the environment that determines gender. The amazing thing about gender is that it is completely created by society. It is a social construct that has been accepted by many, and from the moment a child is born, they are faced with gender stereotypes from clothing to how boys and girls are treated and expectations of behaviour. The question is, how do we as educators eliminate gender stereotypes?"
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10 Things School Leaders Do to Kill a Teacher's Enthusiasm for Technology - 115 views
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9. Fail to provide training and additional resources needed for tech implementation. Training with an expert user is always a plus, even when using someone on staff as that expert. Even more important is providing time for the teacher to explore, experiment, and "play" with the technology. As far as resources, school leaders need to make sure teachers have all they need to implement new technologies: everything from powerbars to tables. Nothing can be more frustrating than having your greatest tech plans foiled by a lack of power outlets.
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5. Fail to provide adequate hardware and/or software. I've seen so many examples of this over the years. Teachers are encouraged to get students writing and engaging in online blogging, but they don't have access to computers. Another example is even more ludicrous; students being asked to create 21st century projects yet they aren't given anything but 20th century tools such a colored pencils and construction paper. It is the school leader's responsibility to ensure teachers have adequate hardware and software for implementing technology.
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While school districts are obligated under CIPA and common sense to provide some level of protection for young students, a filtering system is inadequate or faulty when it dictates what teachers can and can't do with the technology.
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shared by Marc Hamlin on 29 Mar 13
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Teaching fact-checking to students using social media tools - 3 views
www.pbs.org/...-pope-and-the-dictator087.html
social media Twitter Facebook fact-check news resources tools
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Promoting a Growth Mindset - 60 views
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We all want to see our students and our children grow into happy, balanced and successful adults but exactly what that means and how it is to be achieved are areas of uncertainty. Into this debate comes Carol Dweck's research into 'Mindsets' and how individual differences in our approach to the world dictate our ultimate experiences of success or disappointment.
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21 Rules for Social Media Engagement| The Committed Sardine - 30 views
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It’s the devices we employ, the intentions that motivate engagement, and the value we offer that dictate the significance of the brand-specific social graphs we weave. It’s a simple investment in either visibility or presence. In social media, just like in the real world, presence is felt.
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Establish and nurture beneficial relationships online and in the real world as long as doing so is important to your business.
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The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics | The Heritage Fou... - 33 views
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Government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
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In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns. First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on. Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.
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Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did.
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The trend to turn power over to multinational organizations also begins in this period, as may be seen in Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America would have delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that body.
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The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing.
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Government, it was thought, needed to be led by those who see where history is going, who understand the ever-evolving idea of human dignity.
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Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear and be replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy.
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Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding from their teachers, the Progressives.
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That is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity.
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Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are lowest are extolled as the sacred other.
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The first great battle for the American soul was settled in the Civil War. The second battle for America's soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging. The choice for the Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal administrative state is yet to be fully resolved.
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The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises with the Founders' constitutionalism.
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Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities.
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I hope you know better than to use any resource from such a biased source in the classroom without one from the opposite side, say the Brookings Institution in this case. I found your posting of this article from this anti- free thought organization that is a puppet of big business and the far right on an education site plain wrong.
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Well, the truth is I did not intend to share this bookmark with Diigo Education, but somehow it was posted in the group. I had intended it only for myself as part of research I am doing.