Group items tagged

Long Beach, CA (Vocus/PRWEB ) November 20, 2008 -- Moodlerooms, a full-service provider for Moodle, the popular open source online learning management system (LMS), announced today that it will be collaborating with the California State University to provide essential services such as hosting, training, and support for the CSU campuses that choose Moodle for their LMS needs. Moodlerooms will be one of two options, Angel Learning was also selected, to provide learning management services for the CSU.

An expert on children and computing, Dr. Seymour Papert is a mathematician and one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence. He is a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of major books on children and learning. Here he describes learning environments in which children collaborate around meaningful projects and powerful ideas.

WOW! Free tools related to literacy skills. The book builder tool has a section which reads a story (here's a link for "A Tortoise and a Hare") - They offer professional development and multimedia learning tools. ....."A Tortoise and a Hare" - just this one book offers an amazing variety of learning tools including: activating background knowledge, self assessment and reflection, collaboration and communication, action and expression, coping skills and strategies, challenge and support, recruiting interest, goal-centered learning, and designing flexible curriculum. Each of these skills has a specific activity within the story to address it (almost every page has a different one!). Every page also has a question to think about and respond to. At the end it discusses the moral in another activity and the story itself offers extension activities for follow-up. The story is read by a young girl, but there is also a text reader built in, a glossary, and word-by-word English/Spanish translations.

An educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.

CAST is an educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.

Learning should always be an active process and a two-way partnership between teaching and learning. In essence, learning and its counterpart exist as a vibrant dialogue between individuals whose role in the relationship is continually transformative. I'd like to explore this thinking further.

"Educators spend most of their time distanced from their colleagues. Instead of forcing them to compete with each other, we should help them find new ways to work together."

Digital publishing tools for creating story books

Darwin said it best: "Those who have learned to collaborate + improvised have most effectively prevailed." http://bit.ly/gx51ML

This video demonstrates how products are being developed using open source and open funding. I am going to show this to teachers in a PD session to discuss how the workplace is changing and why students need to learn how to work in collaborative groups. This is important because workplaces are going in this direction. In our classrooms, teachers need to have students involved in collaborative work where they are using higher order thinking skills to create. This methodology supports Common Core curriculum and teach to the future.

"Picturing the 1930s," a new educational web site created by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with the University of Virginia, allows teachers and students to explore the 1930s through paintings, artist memorabilia, historical documents, newsreels, period photographs, music, and video. Using PrimaryAccess, a web-based teaching tool developed at the university's Curry Center for Technology and Teacher Education, visitors can select images, write text, and record narration in the style of a documentary filmmaker. They can then screen their video in a virtual theater. PrimaryAccess is the first online tool that allows students to combine their own text, historical images from primary sources, and audio narration to create short online documentary films linked to social studies standards of learning, said Glen Bull, co-director of the Curry Center. Since the first version was developed in collaboration with U.Va.'s Center for Digital History and piloted in a local elementary school in 2005, more than 9,000 users worldwide have created more than 20,000 short movies. In creating digital documentaries, students embed facts and events in a narrative context that can enhance their retention and understanding of the material, said Curry research scientist Bill Ferster, who developed the application with Bull. Besides increasing their knowledge about the period, "Picturing the 1930s" enhances students' visual literacy skills, Ferster noted, adding that PrimaryAccess "offers teachers another tool to bring history alive."

The Partnership for Innovative Instruction is a project of the MN Learning Commons. Our goal is to leverage the power of collaboration and digital resources to launch teachers and students into new learning frontiers.

Collaborative mind mapping tool which blends the Cognitive Learning Theory and the Constructionist Learning Theory of education

HASTAC ("haystack") is a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities. We are motivated by the conviction that the digital era provides rich opportunities for informal and formal learning and for collaborative, networked research that extends across traditional disciplines, across the boundaries of academe and community, across the "two cultures" of humanism and technology, across the divide of thinking versus making, and across social strata and national borders.

Using protocols

The National School Reform Faculty® (NSRF®) is a professional development initiative that focuses on increasing student achievement through skillful use of collaborative professional learning communities called Critical Friends Groups use protocols and activities that result in meaningful and efficient communication, problem solving and learning.

Jeffrey McClurken's contribution to CHE's ProfHacker series; great collaborative learning tool

an open online, collaborative course on creativity and learning, mechanical mooc style

The question of what learning matters most to our students is one that I return to regularly. A fascinating range of models are available each with similar elements but presented in a slightly different manner. Most could be summarised by the 'Four C's' model outlined in 'Most Likely to Succeed' by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith. Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity are vital and each plays an important role in allowing us to manage the complexity of modern day life. Beyond being relevant to success in the classroom the Four C's are the foundations of life-long learning but I question if alone they are enough. I believe we must include a fifth; compassion.

I'm about 80% of the way through Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn. (Yeah, I know... I'm the last one to read it.) There's a lot that's very interesting about the book, and while we should critically examine the book, it is still a fascinating read. If nothing else, it is continuing to make me think about how much more could happen in our classrooms if we created more opportunities for students to learn basic skills and content outside of class, rather than inside class. I've been thinking a lot about math class. How many students would learn math more efficiently if they could watch math videos, narrated by a teacher with problems done "on the board" as they watched with multiple examples of concepts (think geometry here, as an example) that speak to different learning modalities.

Intel offers free, easily integrated tools and teaching resources to support collaborative student-centered learning. Our online thinking tools provide active learning places where students can engage in robust discussions, analyze complex information, pursue investigations, and solve problems. You'll also find teaching resources such as exemplary lesson plans, assessment strategies, and technology-enriched project ideas for all K-12 subjects. Developed by educators, these free tools and resources support 21st century learning, with project-based approaches in the classroom.