Group items tagged

Video worth watching. Great for a discussion point with students.

Thousands of young people around the world are sharing their dreams and visions with the guidance and support of an Adobe Youth Voices participating educator.

"These iPad mini ads, released late last year, were placed on the back covers of several national magazines-including Time, Wired and The New Yorker."

"BBC News School Report gives 11-16 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience. Using lesson plans and materials from this website, and with support from BBC staff and partners, teachers help students develop their journalistic skills to become School Reporters."

Shared this with my students and we decided to create a class Diigo library of public domain images to help reduce everyone's legwork. It takes a little while longer to find pictures, but it's worth it.

"While we've witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we're struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We're sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn't have to make them. "

"While we've witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we're struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We're sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn't have to make them. "

A superb wiki/web hosting site with lets you create web pages for your class or school or use it as a Wiki and let your pupils/colleagues create and build the page together. The basic account is free and if you sign up as an educator you can get extra storage space. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools

Members please take note of this page!

"The group that only saw social tweets ended up rating that professor higher in credibility than the group that saw only scholarly tweets. Researchers also said there was an especially significant difference in ratings when it came to whether a professor was "caring" or not. "These results support previous research that shows revealing personal information can increase a professor's perceived credibility," says the paper. "[I]t was interesting to note that the scholarly tweets did not significantly raise competence ratings in the groups that saw the scholarly posts. This could be an indication that caring, not competence, is the most important dimension when it comes to assessing perceived credibility on social networking sites." Not all students felt good about the social tweets, though. The researchers found that older students tended to rate the professors lower in credibility after having viewed their Twitter accounts. These students were also more likely to think it was a bad idea for profes"

Note the limitation of the study: (fake) professors were all female. Also, younger and older students responded differently.

Play, design and share games.  Focuses on game design

a very popular web-based game design environment. Global Kids http://olpglobalkids.org/ is using it to run social benefits game design contests and badging programs. They are getting 100+ new game design entries per week. From the parents' guide: Gamestar Mechanic is currently supported by a partnership between the Institute of Play and E-Line Media. The game was originally developed by Gamelab in partnership with the Institute of Play and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab (AADLC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initial funding for the game and companion learning guides came from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The design of the game is based on research by some of the leading academics in the field including Katie Salen (Executive Director of the Institute of Play and curriculum author for the New York City Public School Quest To Learn) and James Paul Gee (author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy).

This site has students creating games from scratch and putting them out into the world for feedback within the Gamestar Mechanic community. Students use math, problem solving, writing skills and more to make their games interesting. I think this could be used in the classroom as a theme-based project or just to get students interested in coding.