Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged texts technology reading

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ross Davis

islt9440 - Group 7: Diigo for Education - About diigo.com - 86 views

  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page
  • The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points.
  • About diigo.com page Details and Tags Print Download PDF Backlinks Source Delete Rename Redirect Permissions Lock discussion history notify me Protected Details last edit by cmh459 Sunday, 7:53 pm - 36 revisions Tags none About diigo.comDiigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark and tag websites. Users are also able to highlight information and put sticky notes directly on the webpage as you are reading it. Your notes can be public which allows other users to view and comment on your notes and add their own or it can be private. Sites can be saved and stored for later reading and commenting. Users can also join groups with similar interests and follow specific people and sites. Teachers can register for an educator account that allows a teacher to create accounts for an entire class. In an education account, students are automatically set up as a Diigo group which allows for easy sharing of documents, pictures, videos, and articles with only your class group. There are also pre-set privacy settings so only the teacher and classmates can see the bookmarks and communications. This is a great way to ensure that your students and their comments are kept private from the rest of the Internet community. Diigo is a great tool for teachers to use to have students interact with material and to share that interaction with classmates. Best Practices for using Diigo tools Tagging Tool Teachers or students can tag a website that they want to bookmark for future reference. Teachers can research websites or articles that they want their students to view on a certain topic and tag them for the students. This tool is nice when researching a certain topic. The teacher can tag the websites that the students should use eliminating the extra time of searching for the sites that would be useful and appropriate for the project.Highlighting Tool Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page . 1The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points. Sticky Notes Tool The sticky note tool is a great addition to the tools of diigo. Students may add sticky notes to a passage as they are reading it. The sticky notes could be used to make notes or ask questions by the students. Teachers could postition the sticky notes in the passage for students to respond to various ideas as they are reading. Students could use sticky notes to peer edit and make comments on other student's work through Google docs. These are just a few ideas of how to apply the diigo tools to your teaching practices. Both students and teachers benefit form using these tools. The variety of uses or practices give both groups a hands on way of dealing with text while making it more efficient. Bookmark/Snapsho
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • islt9440 - Group 7: Diigo for Education guest · Join · Help · Sign In · Join this Wiki Recent Changes Manage Wiki Group 7 Project HomeDiigo RSS FeedsSample Lesson Plans Social Studies Spanish Math (Functions) Math (Geometry) Collaboration Pages Collaboration Home Job Assignments Project Info Lesson Plan Ideas About diigo.com page Details and Tags Print Download PDF Backlinks Source Delete Rename Redirect Permissions Lock discussion history notify me Protected Details last edit by cmh459 Sunday, 7:53 pm - 36 revisions Tags none About diigo.com Diigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark and tag websites. Users are also able to highlight information and put sticky notes directly on the webpage as you are reading it. Your notes can be public which allows other users to view and comment on your notes and add their own or it can be private. Sites can be saved and stored for later reading and commenting. Users can also join groups with si
  • Diigo or Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to bookmark
  • and tag websites
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page.
  • The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page. The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page. The key concepts or vocabulary words could be highlighted to check for understanding. Some students have problems determining what should be highlighted in an article or passage. Teachers could use this tool to demonstrate how to correctly highlight and find the key points.
  • Diigo highlighting tool allows the teacher or student to highlight in an article or a web page.
  • Teachers or students can tag a website that they want to bookmark for future reference. Teachers can research websites or articles that they want their students to view on a certain topic and tag them for the students.This tool is nice when researching a certain topic. The teacher can tag the websites that the students should use eliminating the extra time of searching for the sites that would be useful and appropriate for the project.
  • The sticky note tool is a great addition to the tools of diigo. Students may add sticky notes to a passage as they are reading it. The sticky notes could be used to make notes or ask questions by the students.Teachers could postition the sticky notes in the passage for students to respond to various ideas as they are reading.Students could use sticky notes to peer edit and make comments on other student's work through Google docs.
  •  
    My group for my grad class, "Learning with the Internet" created this wiki about using and implementing Diigo in the classroom.
Chad Evans

Response: Advice From The "Book Whisperer," Ed Week Readers & Me About Teaching Reading... - 1 views

    • Chad Evans
       
      Highlighting text is really easy with Diigo. And adding a sticky note is very simple is well. It can be made private or shared with groups of people who are working with the same document
  • Other ways I encourage these kinds of discussions includes having students choose their own groupings and books for independent book "clubs" and using the Web as a vehicle to create audio and/or video "book trailers."
    • Chad Evans
       
      From a technology end, our kids are beginning to do more and more with tools like voicethread, animoto, imovie, etc. Digital storytelling is a great way for students to be creative, share insights and show what they know and can do. 
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • One facet of our reading instruction that cannot be overlooked is the importance of teacher readers in building a classroom reading community. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school."
    • Chad Evans
       
      I wonder how open ALL teachers are about what they are reading? How much conversation do teachers as a whole have about what they are reading? 
  • If we don't read, why should our students?
  • Share your reading life with your students. Show your students what reading adds to your life. If you are reading a nonfiction book at the moment, tell them what you are learning. Pass the children's books you are reading to them when you are done. Describe the funny, sad, or interesting moments in the books you read. When you read something challenging, talk with your students about how you work through difficult text. It will surprise them that you find reading hard at times, too, but choose to read, anyway.
  • Many students in today's world do not read books outside of school. When they do read, it is text-messages, web pages or homework assignments. For students who did not grow up in homes with books, with adults who read and who read to them, this time to read in school is both necessary and pleasurable. Many of my students need catch-up time when it comes to "hours-in" reading. The 10 minutes at the beginning of each period that I allow my juniors each day equals hours of reading across the months of the school year. My most dedicated readers begin books in the classroom, finish them at home, and return to the classroom/school library to check out new books.
    • Chad Evans
       
      This is an important distinction in that I believe (and research indicates) that our kids ARE reading more than ever before. But it comes in non-traditional forms. We must acknowledge that web based reading is still reading, but it differs. Research also indicates that when kids read digitally, they read in a different pattern. In traditional reading, they read in a z pattern down a page. Digital reading is more of an F pattern,indicating skim and scan. 
navclarke

Layers Magazine « The How-to Magazine for Everything Adobe Layers Magazine - 1 views

shared by navclarke on 20 Jun 12 - Cached
  • DR Expose 2 Plugins Processing HDR images to get just the right effect can be as much art as science. The new HDR Expose 2 from Unified Color Technologies (UCT) aims to help you find the right balance between the two, so you get just the finished image you want without headaches and frustration. 0 Continue Reading Using Scripted Patterns in Photoshop CS6 CS6 One of the problems with pattern fills in Photoshop is the complete lack of randomness you get in shape, color, and position. Just think about it: a real brick wall isn’t made from perfectly identical bricks; each brick varies in color, texture, and even size. That’s why Adobe added the ability to apply scripts to pattern fills in Photoshop CS6. 0 Continue Reading 2D to 3D in Photoshop CS6 Extended CS6 Stephen Burns shows viewers how to take an image of a 2D object and transform it into a 3D object using depth maps in the new Photoshop CS6 Extended. 1 Continue Reading Corel AfterShot Pro Product Reviews Corel’s first professional photo catalog and RAW editing software, AfterShot Pro, is based on a number of technologies—Bibble Pro, Noise Ninja, and Perfectly Clear—that are widely known and respected in the photography world. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. 0 Continue Reading Photoshop CS6 Type Styles CS6 http://layersmagazine.com/photoshop-cs6-typ
Clint Heitz

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific ... - 25 views

  • The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
  • Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
  • Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
  • Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
  • An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
  • In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
  • Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
ekpeterson

Educational Leadership:Teaching Screenagers:Too Dumb for Complex Texts? - 72 views

  • Willingness to Probe
  • readers may need to sit down with them for several hours of concentration.
  • hey insert a hesitant question before moving on.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • That willingness to pause and probe is essential, but the dispositions of digital reading run otherwise. Fast skimming is the way of the screen. B
  • they have grooved for many years a reading habit that races through texts, as is the case with texting, e-mail, Twitter, and other exchanges, 18-year-olds will have difficulty suddenly downshifting when faced with a long modernist poem.
  • They are deep and semiconscious behaviors that are difficult to change except through the diligent exercise of other reading behaviors.
  • Texts like this one are too complex to allow for rapid exit and reentry. They often originate in faraway times and places and discuss ideas and realities entirely unfamiliar to the modern teenager. To comprehend what they say requires a suspension of present concerns.
  • Finally, the comprehension of complex texts depends on a receptive posture in readers. They have to finish the labor of understanding before they talk back, and complex texts delay the reaction for hours and days.
  • Digital communications, on the other hand, especially those in the Web 2.0 grain, encourage quick response.
  • Complex texts aren't so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb.
  • reserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. One hour a day of slow reading with print matter, an occasional research assignment completed without Google—any such practices that slow down and intensify the reading of complex texts will help.
Christian Howd

How to Make American Teens Smarter - The Daily Beast - 51 views

  • "People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."
  • That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.
  •  
    Americans may be reading more words today than ever before, but the content is less challenging. Dana Goldstein on kids' dismal reading scores-and a movement to get them to put down Twilight and pick up nonfiction.
  •  
    You're absolutely right! Our students need to be provided opportunities to read a variety of text!
Thieme Hennis

Reading Comprehension: Paper or Screen? | DMLcentral - 61 views

  • What makes for effective reading, then? Before trying to answer this question, one has to acknowledge that the answer is complicated and depends on individual users' familiarity with the reading tools that they are using and the purpose for which they are reading. With that in mind, these studies suggest at least a few features. Readers should be able to clearly see the text, and the more text that can be placed within their field of vision at a time, the better. They should have a means for accessing their current place within the text, as well as the ability to quickly move through the text to find information. Finally, they should be familiar with the reading technology, so they can ignore it and simply read. 
  •  
    I argue that the differences revealed in these studies are not between paper and screen, as Jabr suggests, or even between print and digital. Rather, these differences in reading comprehension seem to be a product of how readers interface with these print and electronic technologies and the affordances that each provides to these readers. 
Siri Anderson

This Insane New App Will Allow You To Read Novels In Under 90 Minutes | Elite Daily - 164 views

  •  
    A new way of presenting text that makes it considerably easier to read and comprehend text quickly.
  •  
    It's not an app. It's a proposed API. It has lots of potential I agree. But nothing downloadable yet unfortunately. It's meant for developers right now to incorporate into their apps. To my knowledge, no app has launched with it. Not on iOS anyways.
  •  
    Sadly, as an educator, I am not big on reading books as I just can't find the time. I find myself reading more informational texts from sources such as NGM and The Week Magazine (Flipboard on my iPad is my friend for this reason). HOWEVER, I would really like to see how this works for reading a book. I might actually start reading more biographies and such.
Sarah Horrigan

Read The Words - 3 views

  •  
    Great accessibility tool
  •  
    "ReadTheWords.com is a free, web based service that assists people with written material. We do this by using TTS Technology, or Text To Speech Technology. Users of our service can generate a clear sounding audio file from almost any written material. We generate a voice that reads the words out loud, that you request us to read."
  •  
    A great resource, particularly for kids who struggle with literacy. Thankyou for posting.
Lauren Rosen

Texting With Teachers Keeps Students in Class -- THE Journal - 2 views

  • While much of the deluge was back-and-forth banter on tardiness, homework, or grade anxiety, Campbell also began using the constant communiqués as a means to engage students in learning. He began texting a daily journal topic every morning and encouraged students to think about it before they came to class. So far, it's been largely effective, perhaps as a result of the psychology that makes cell phones so addictive for teens in the first place.
  • "Everyone has a compulsion to read that text message when it bleeps, bings, chimes, or vibrates. No exceptions," Campbell has written of the program. "Sooner or later you have to open that text and read it. It's like captive-audience advertising, but for the good guys in education, rather than marketing."
  •  
    Nice article on reaching the less advantages and using technology to meet their needs. Teachers can engage students before they enter the classroom.
Ian Woods

AJET 26(3) Drexler (2010) - The networked student model for construction of personal le... - 77 views

  • Web application(networked studentcomponent) Tool usedin test case Student activitylevel of structure Social bookmarking (RSS) Delicioushttp://delicious.com/ Set up the account Subscribe to each others accounts Bookmark and read 10 reliable websites that reflect the content of chosen topic Add and read at least 3 additional sites each week. News and blog alert (RSS) Google Alerthttp://www.google.com/alerts Create a Google Alert of keywords associated with selected topic Read news and blogs on that topic that are delivered via email daily Subscribe to appropriate blogs in reader News and blog reader (RSS) Google Readerhttp://reader.google.com Search for blogs devoted to chosen topic Subscribe to blogs to keep track of updates Personal blog (RSS) Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com Create a personal blog Post a personal reflection each day of the content found and experiences related to the use of personal learning environment Students subscribe to each others blogs in reader Internet search (information management, contacts, and synchronous communication) Google Scholarhttp://scholar.google.com/ Conduct searches in Google Scholar and library databases for scholarly works. Bookmark appropriate sites Consider making contact with expert for video conference Podcasts (RSS) iTunesUhttp://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/itunesu.html Search iTunesU for podcasts related to topic Subscribe to at least 2 podcasts if possible Video conferencing (contacts and synchronous communication) Skypehttp://www.skype.com Identify at least one subject matter expert to invite to Skype with the class. Content gathering/ digital notebook Evernotehttp://evernote.com/ Set up account Use Evernote to take notes on all content collected via other tools Content synthesis Wikispaceshttp://www.wikispaces.com Post final project on personal page of class wiki The process and tools are overwhelming to students if presented all at once. As with any instructional design, the teacher determines the pace at which the students best assimilate each new learning tool. For this particular project, a new tool was introduced each day over two weeks. Once the construction process was complete, there were a number of personal web page aggregators that could have been selected to bring everything together in one place. Options at the time included iGoogle, PageFlakes, NetVibes, and Symbaloo. These sites offer a means to compile or pull together content from a variety of web applications. A web widget or gadget is a bit of code that is executed within the personal web page to pull up external content from other sites. The students in this case designed the personal web page using the gadgets needed in the format that best met their learning goals. Figure 3 is an instructor example of a personal webpage that includes the reader, email, personal blog, note taking program, and social bookmarks on one page. The personal learning environment can take the place of a traditional textbook, though does not preclude the student from using a textbook or accessing one or more numerous open source texts that may be available for the research topic. The goal is to access content from many sources to effectively meet the learning objectives. The next challenge is to determine whether those objectives have been met. Figure 3: Personal web page compiles learning tools
  • Table 2: Personal learning environment toolset Web application (networked student component) Tool used in test case Student activity level of structure Social bookmarking (RSS) Delicious http://delicious.com/ Set up the account Subscribe to each others accounts Bookmark and read 10 reliable websites that reflect the content of chosen topic Add and read at least 3 additional sites each week. News and blog alert (RSS) Google Alert http://www.google.com/alerts Create a Google Alert of keywords associated with selected topic Read news and blogs on that topic that are delivered via email daily Subscribe to appropriate blogs in reader News and blog reader (RSS) Google Reader http://reader.google.com Search for blogs devoted to chosen topic Subscribe to blogs to keep track of updates Personal blog (RSS) Blogger http://www.blogger.com Create a personal blog Post a personal reflection each day of the content found and experiences related to the use of personal learning environment Students subscribe to each others blogs in reader Internet search (information management, contacts, and synchronous communication) Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Conduct searches in Google Scholar and library databases for scholarly works. Bookmark appropriate sites Consider making contact with expert for video conference Podcasts (RSS) iTunesU http://www.apple.com/itunes/ whatson/itunesu.html Search iTunesU for podcasts related to topic Subscribe to at least 2 podcasts if possible Video conferencing (contacts and synchronous communication) Skype http://www.skype.com Identify at least one subject matter expert to invite to Skype with the class. Content gathering/ digital notebook Evernote http://evernote.com/ Set up account Use Evernote to take notes on all content collected via other tools Content synthesis Wikispaces http://www.wikispaces.com Post final project on personal page of class wiki The process and tools are overwhelming to students if presented all at once. As with any instructional design, the teacher determines the pace at which the students best assimilate each new learning tool. For this particular project, a new tool was introduced each day over two weeks. Once the construction process was complete, there were a number of personal web page aggregators that could have been selected to bring everything together in one place. Options at the time included iGoogle, PageFlakes, NetVibes, and Symbaloo. These sites offer a means to compile or pull together content from a variety of web applications. A web widget or gadget is a bit of code that is executed within the personal web page to pull up external content from other sites. The students in this case designed the personal web page using the gadgets needed in the format that best met their learning goals. Figure 3 is an instructor example of a personal webpage that includes the reader, email, personal blog, note taking program, and social bookmarks on one page.
  • The personal learning environment can take the place of a traditional textbook, though does not preclude the student from using a textbook or accessing one or more numerous open source texts that may be available for the research topic. The goal is to access content from many sources to effectively meet the learning objectives. The next challenge is to determine whether those objectives have been met.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • AssessmentThere were four components of the assessment process for this test case of the Networked Student Model: (1) Ongoing performance assessment in the form of weekly assignments to facilitate the construction and maintenance of the personal learning environment, (2) rubric-based assessment of the personal learning environment at the end of the project, (3) written essay, and (4) multimedia synthesis of topic content. Points were earned for meeting the following requirements: Identify ten reliable resources and post to social bookmarking account. At least three new resources should be added each week. Subscribe and respond to at least 3 new blogs each week. Follow these blogs and news alerts using the reader. Subscribe to and listen to at least two podcasts (if available). Respectfully contact and request a video conference from a subject matter expert recognised in the field. Maintain daily notes and highlight resources as needed in digital notebook. Post at least a one-paragraph reflection in personal blog each day. At the end of the project, the personal learning environment was assessed with a rubric that encompassed each of the items listed above. The student's ability to synthesise the research was further evaluated with a reflective essay. Writing shapes thinking (Langer & Applebee, 1987), and the essay requirement was one more avenue through which the students demonstrated higher order learning. The personal blog provided an opportunity for regular reflection during the course of the project. The essay was the culmination of the reflections along with a thoughtful synthesis of the learning experience. Students were instructed to articulate what was learned about the selected topic and why others should care or be concerned. The essay provided an overview of everything learned about the contemporary issue. It was well organised, detailed, and long enough to serve as a resource for others who wished to learn from the work. As part of a final exam, the students were required to access the final projects of their classmates and reflect on what they learned from this exposure. The purpose of this activity was to give the students an additional opportunity to share and learn from each other. Creativity is considered a key 21st century skill (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009). A number of emerging web applications support the academic creative process. Students in this project used web tools to combine text, video, audio, and photographs to teach the research topics to others. The final multimedia project was posted or embedded on the student's personal wiki page. Analysis and assessment of student work was facilitated by the very technologies in use by the students. In order to follow their progress, the teacher simply subscribed to student social bookmarking accounts, readers, and blogs. Clicking through daily contributions was relatively quick and efficient.
  •  
    Scholarly and important but also practical. Scroll down for an incredible chart of ideas that challenges older students to take charge of their own learning.
Jeff Andersen

Distance Learning: How Accessible are Online Educational Tools | American Foundation fo... - 5 views

  •  
    More and more schools, colleges and universities are using online educational tools that students are required to use to obtain course syllabi, access lectures and associated material, participate in class discussions, read course material, and receive grades and feedback from instructors. These popular tools, such as Blackboard, can frequently pose significant barriers to students with vision loss because they do not work well, if at all, with computer programs commonly used by students who are blind or visually impaired to access content displayed on the computer screen. For example, screen reading software reads the contents of the screen aloud. Screen magnification software enlarges text and graphics displayed on the computer screen in a customized way.
Björn Hedin

Princeton University - Kindle pilot results highlight possibilities for paper reduction - 20 views

  • However, e-readers must be significantly improved to have the same value in a teaching environment as traditional paper texts, participants said.
  • but they also said the ability to highlight directly on traditional text, to take notes and flip pages for ease in navigation suffers in the e-reader.
  • With hopes of assisting industry with the refinement of e-readers, and providing useful information to other academic institutions considering the devices, information and data from the one-time pilot have been compiled on an Office of Information Technology (OIT) website.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • About 65 percent of the participants in the pilot said they would not buy another e-reader now if theirs was broken. Almost all the participants said they were interested in following the technology to its next stages, because they think a device that works well in academia would be worth having.
  • "I found the device difficult to use and not conducive to academic purposes," he said, and added, "But I can see how it can be used for pleasure reading."
  • What they liked best about the devices was: the battery life, the wireless connection and the portability of the e-reader; the fact that all the course reading was on one device; the ability to search for content; and the legibility of the screen, including the fact it could be read in full sunlight. The top five suggestions students had for improving e-readers were: improving the ability to highlight and annotate PDF files; improving the annotation tools; providing a folder structure to keep similar readings together; improving the highlighting function; and improving the navigation within and between documents on the reader (including having more than one document open at the same time for comparison).
  • "The Kindle would be better for an academic setting if the PDF format worked more effectively,"
  • "There would be a greater benefit realized if the devices could develop a better way to deliver the ubiquitous PDF document, which is used by many journals and libraries to deliver documents, and is the common format in which dissertations and theses are published and read by faculty," Temos said. "Some students said they spent a considerable amount of time printing PDF documents during the semester, and hardly ever referred back to them once the semester was over. I don't expect that is unusual."
anonymous

text2cloud - 63 views

  •  
    Text2cloud is a collaborative effort to explore idea-driven writing with the web imagined as the primary destination. Engaging with the end of privacy, school violence, censorship, and the transformation of literacy, text2cloud aims to spur similar uses of multimedia for reflection, meditation, deliberation, and speculation--in sum, the introspective arts on associates with the life of the mind.
  •  
    Threads on campus violence, how the loss of privacy in the digital age is transforming life on campus, and how public life is changed by the proliferation of concealed cameras. Navigational makeover introduced to improve reading experience. Feedback welcome.
mgranger

Media and Technology Resources for Educators | Common Sense Media - 15 views

  • gital driver's license
  • with complete confidence. Our online trainings show you how. More about parent professional development Research Credentials Check out our DNA. Our programs are built on respected digital ethics research. More about parent research credentials Turn wired students into great digital citizens Get all the tools you need with our FREE Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum and Parent Media Education Program. The relevant, ready-to-use instruction helps you guide students to make safe, smart, and ethical decisions in the digital world where they live, study and play. Every day, your students are tested with each post, search, chat, text message, file download, and profile update. Will they connect with like minds or spill ... read more Get started Browse our classroom lessons and parent education resources by grade level or topical area. select gradeK123456789101112 select topicCell phones & digital communicationCyberbullying & online relationshipsDigital creation, plagiarism & piracyFamily media managementGaming & online worldsInternet safetyMedia's influence on kidsOnline privacy and securityOnline research & learningSocial networking & communityViolence in media Get Started Educator Updates Common Sense announces di gital driver's license Common Sense Media announced plans to create a digital driver’s license, an interactive online game that will teach kids the basics of how to be safe and responsible in a digital world. Read more about our plans for interactive curriculum modules
  •  
    Digital citizenship curriculum targets 4th, 5th graders
  •  
    Lesson plans, articles, and tools to teach Digital Citizenship and Internet Safety
  •  
    Internet safety FREE curriculum and implementation guides. The site has admin, teacher, and student resources. Digital Passport is one of the Internet Safety programs available.
anonymous

Through the Keyhole: Observations on the Ravi Trial | text2cloud - 1 views

  • martphone and the webcam have made it possible for all manner of sexual activity to be recorded and distributed for all the world to see free of charge. This is one way to explain why none of the people who read Ravi’s original tweet, none of the young women crowded around Wei’s computer to see what Clementi and his guest were up to, and none of the people who received Ravi’s invitation to view Clementi’s next liaison bestirred themselves to stay his hand. As Cicco testified, they “really didn’t think that it was that big of a deal.”
  •  
    The trial in the cyberspying case at Rutgers is now underway. There is so much here for students and teachers at all levels to consider about ethics, privacy, and the digital life sentence for the accused in the Age of the Google Search. I don't think even our most technologically adept students quite realize that what they text and tweet is there forever.
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
Tracy Tuten

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 28 views

  • In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.”
  • Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.”
  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
  • Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
  •  
    Highly insightful and developed argument for how Web 2.0 is changing how we process information, learn, and develop opinions. 
Maggie Tsai

The Classroom » Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class - 13 views

  • Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class 31 07 2007 A good friend of mine, Randy Lyseng, has been telling people of the tremendous power and educational value that can be gained from social bookmarking in the classroom. His personal favourite is Diigo. My preference is a social bookmarking tool called http://diigo.com. With diigo, you can highlight, add stick notes and make your comments private or public. (Randy Lyseng, Lyseng Tech: Social Bookmarking, November 2006) After listening to Randy praise Diigo at every opportunity, I finally started playing with the site (and corresponding program, more on that in a bit) this summer (I know Randy - I’m slow to catch on…)As I started to play with the system, my mind started reeling with all the possibilities. First off, like any other social bookmarking tool, Diigo allows you to put all your favorites/bookmarks in one “central” location. Students can access them from ANY computer in the world (talk about the new WWW: whatever, whenever, where ever). They just open up your Diigo page, and there are all the links. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Diigo’s power lies in it’s group annotations. That’s right, people can now write in the margins of webpages. You can highlight passages of interest, write notes, and even write a blog entry directly from another webpage, quoting passages right from the original text. Sounds great - but to do all that it must be complicated right? Nope. To use these advanced features all you need to do is run the Diigo software. This can either be done using a bookmarklet or by downloading and installing the Diigo toolbar. While both have basically the same features, the toobar is less finicky, and allows you to use contextual menus to access features quickly. I also find the toolbar’s highlighting and sticky notes to be easier to read. Ok fine… I can leave notes on webpages - so what? Here’s an example. I’m thinking about having my 7B’s record radio plays. I’ve looked them up online and found many scripts from all the old classics available. However many also contain the old endorsements from tobacco and other companies. So I go to a play that I’d like to my students to record and highlight the old commercial. If they’re using diigo when they access this page they’ll see the same text highlighted in pink, and when they mouse over the highlighted text they’ll get a hidden message from me - “I’d like you to write a new advertisement for this section. What other advertisement do you think we could write for here? Write an ad for a virtue or trait that you think is important. For example - “Here’s a news flash for every person in Canada. It’s about a sensational, new kind of personality that will make you the envy of all those around you. It’s call trustworthiness. Why with just a pinch of this great product….” They now have a writing assignment to go along with the recording of the radio play. Adding assignments is just one possibility. You can ask questions about the site, or have students carry on conversations about the text. Perhaps about the validity of some information. These notes can be made private (for your eyes only), public, or for a select group of people. You could use the same webpage for multiple classes, and have a different set of sticky notes for each one! Diigo will also create a separate webpage for each group you create, helping you organize your bookmarks/notes further! This technology is useful for any class, but I think is a must have for any group trying to organize something along the lines of the 1 to 1 project. I’m hoping to convince all the core teachers to set up a group page for their classes, and organize their book marks there! I’ve already started one for my 7B Language Arts Class! One of the first questions I was asked when I started looking at this site, and more importantly at the bookmarklets and toolbar was is it secure? Will it bring spyware onto our systems? How about stability? I’ve currently been running the Diigo bookmarklet and toolbar on 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (sorry, there’s no Safari toolbar yet), across 4 different computers and 2 different platforms with no problems. I’ve also run every virus and spyware scan I can think of, everything checks out clean. I’ve also done an extensive internet check, and can’t find any major problems reported by anyone else. To my mind it’s an absolutely fantastic tool for use in the classroom. Thanks Diigo! And thanks Randy for pointing me in the right direction!
Beth Panitz

www.browsealoud.com | Online Text-to-Speech Technology to Make Websites Talk! - 76 views

  •  
    Free download software reads web pages aloud. Also reads pdf and word files. 
1 - 20 of 48 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page