Site claims clip art will motivate students and make boring assignments fun. Is that all it takes or are our 21st century students way beyond clip art in what they find engaging?
Each week, two students led a discussion in class on the week's readings and ideas -- and those students determined whether or not their fellow students had met the standards.
While the students are ending up with As, many of them are doing so only because they redid assignments that were judged not sufficient to the task on the first try
didn't complain,
They reworked their essays,
"peer pressure
changed the dynamic from "a single teaching-student interaction to multiple teacher-student/student-student interactions
equal plane."
I wanted to give the feedback." But reducing the feedback to a letter grade? "It's intellectually stultifying.
a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.
Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law,
Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit.
Alternatives - Microsoft's BING - DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. check them out when you get time
Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.
How do you connect your post/content to future searches? Tagging only gets you so far. Thus, Google "tinkers" with the algorithm to product "the best" results. Interesting & concerning!
ALGORITHMS ARE effectively recipes in code form, providing step-by-step instructions for how computers should solve certain problems. They drive not just the internet, but the apps that populate phones and tablets.
Yet, we never (almost never) eat the same thing (recipe) twice in a day. We indulge ourselves with comfort food, yes. And we seek out new taste sensations.
So project time is here to stay, with a few tweaks requested by the kids. More resources, computers if they are available, and study hall rather than dedicated spelling time.
my students are examples of what can happen when we trust kids to take control of their learning, when we give them freedom to learn.
21st Century Skills: Does the app require users to engage “21st Century” skills, which includes the ability to collaborate, make data-driven decisions, and solve complex problems?
Connections to Future Learning: Does the app’s content build users’ literacy or numeracy skills so they are more prepared to engage future content area learning and are on track to become “college and career” ready?
This is an interesting site that feels like a cross between coding and story writing. Make branching stories where readers choose what happens next.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English