" * About Russell Stannard
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* 9 Great Spelling Sites for ELT
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* Great Text Tool called WordSift
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* Fun Viral Marketing Tools
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* 2 amazing presentation tools
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* Best ELT sites 2008
* Great dictation site
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* My favourite Listening Site
* 10 vocab sites for kids
* ELT Videos with subtitles
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* 7 Great Fun sites for ELT
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* Really Fun Dialogue Building Tool
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* 11 great sites for teaching English
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* 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
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* Blog at IH Barcelona
* Ozge's Blog
* Carl's Blog
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"AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15.
05.04.15
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM.
7:00 AM
INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION
Click to Open Overlay Gallery
Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED
SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it.
At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird.
On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about.
Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say.
And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
"If you were one of the 10,000 ISTE 2013 attendees in San Antonio this past June, congratulations.Along with all that juicy professional development, you received a free Microsoft RT Tablet just for showing up. You also were taken for a ride and you were used as Microsoft Marketing Tools for a failed product.
"
For most marketers, trying to organize and analyze spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel can feel like walking into a brick wall over and over again. You're manually replicating columns and scribbling down long-form math on a scrap of paper, all while thinking to yourself, "There has to be a better way to do this."
Truth be told, there is -- you just don't know it yet.
Excel can be tricky that way. On the one hand, it's an exceptionally powerful tool for reporting and analyzing marketing data. On the other, without the proper training, it's easy to feel like it's working against you. For starters, there are more than a dozen critical formulas Excel can automatically run for you so you're not combing through hundreds of cells with a calculator on your desk.
A few weeks ago, a Social Media Cheat Sheet was doing the round. A nice visualization of the pro’s & cons of each social media channel, but with a business/marketing focus. I thought I should do one for social media use in education. However for most of the teachers I work with, our Moodle (EIT Online) is still their primary online teaching environment. So instead I set out to create this poster size guide for teachers, allowing them to compare the functionality and pedagogical advantages of some standard Moodle tools, adding a column to indicate how tricky the tool is to set up.
Dive Brief:
Implementing new technologies can yield challenges for students, faculty and other campus users that are not accustomed to these tools, especially if instruction on their use is "nebulous and frustrating," writes Eric Stoller, a student affairs and technology blogger for Inside Higher Ed.
Stoller suggests institutions provide quality customer service around digital services, and pressure "old-guard" technology companies to provide systems that meet or exceed users' expectations or aligning themselves with "solutions/providers with less built-in corporate rigidity."
He also advises that institutions' marketing teams and communications offices make sure that digital services like campus mobile apps make sense for their students' preferred user experiences, so that the technologies enhance the overall student experience and boost branding and recruitment efforts.
edWeb.net is a highly-acclaimed professional social and learning network that has become a vibrant online community for exceptional educators, decision-makers, and influencers who are on the leading edge of innovation in education. edWeb won the 2012 Edublog Award for Best Free and Open Professional Development for Educators and was ranked the #1 professional social network specifically for educators by the SIMBA PreK-12 Professional Development Market Forecast 2012-2013, CoSN's K-12 IT Leadership Survey 2013, and the 2012 Survey of K-12 Educators on Social Networking, Online Communities, and Web 2.0 Tools.
edWeb.net is a highly-acclaimed professional social and learning network that has become a vibrant online community for exceptional educators, decision-makers, and influencers who are on the leading edge of innovation in education. edWeb won the 2012 Edublog Award for Best Free and Open Professional Development for Educators and was ranked the #1 professional social network specifically for educators by the SIMBA PreK-12 Professional Development Market Forecast 2012-2013, CoSN's K-12 IT Leadership Survey 2013, and the 2012 Survey of K-12 Educators on Social Networking, Online Communities, and Web 2.0 Tools.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Video tours of college campuses aren't a new phenomenon; many universities have provided video tours and information about their campuses to prospective students for years. But Boynton Beach, Fla., startup YOUniversity LLC is hoping to draw users to its sites by offering prospective college students an unbiased, third-party source of information about hundreds of schools in an interactive, social environment. "Most of our employees are recent grads, who are best able to share their campus experiences with others getting ready to go to college," said co-founder Ron Reis, who launched the company in January 2008. The 17-person staff has three full-time camera crews that travel around the country, shooting high-definition footage of college campuses and the surrounding area. They've already taped more than 400 top schools throughout the country and have interviewed administrators, faculty, and students about their campus experience. "They've done a really good job, and they seem to have found a niche market that people really need," said Gordon Chavis, associate vice president for undergraduate admissions at the University of Central Florida
Creates a learning community that encourages collaboration and interaction, including student-teacher, student-student, and student-content (SREB D.2, Varvel VII.B, ITS 6.a)
What I see in these is that many of these we should be doing already.
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Iowa Online Teaching Standards
Composed from Iowa Teaching Standards and Other Resources
1. Demonstrates ability to enhance academic performance and support for the agency's student achievement goals (ITS 1)
• Knows and aligns instruction to the achievement goals of the local agency and the state, such as with the Iowa Core (Varvel I.A, ITS 1.f, ITS 3.a)
• Continuously uses data to evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of instructional strategies (SREB J.7, ITS 1.c)
• Utilizes a course evaluation and student feedback data to improve the course (Varvel VI.F)
• Provides and communicates evidence of learning and course data to students and colleagues (SREB J.6, ITS 1.a)
2. Demonstrates competence in content knowledge (including technological knowledge) appropriate to the instructional position (ITS 2)
• Meets the professional teaching standards established by a state-licensing agency, or has the academic credentials in the field in which he or she is teaching (SREB A.1, Varvel II.A)
• Knows the content of the subject to be taught and understands how to teach the content to students (SREB A.3, Varvel II.A, ITS 2.a)
• Is knowledgeable and has the ability to use computer programs required in online education to improve learning and teaching, including course management software (CMS) and synchronous/asynchronous communication t
Recently I read 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins a book that describes the processes and structures that allowed eleven companies to transition from good to great and outperform the market by a factor of three for sustained periods. One story stands out as a metaphor for a growth mindset.
In my experience, what makes diigo better?
it saves the content of the page you bookmark, not only the link. Magnolia used to do that before they lost all their user’s data
You can highlight! Important, as sometimes you don’t remember what was interesting in a page
Posts are Private by default
There’s a bunch of community features behind it. Example: pop psych
you can post to other sites, including delicious (they are an example of openness)
On top of all this, there’s another feature that may well become revolutionary: adding sticky notes to pages, in a way that other people can see it. When using the Diigo toolbar, you can see what other people have highlighted, and also comments (sticky notes) they added. That means that you are no longer limited to leaving comments on blogs, you can do so in any type of page (even static pages). Diigo enables you to drop your comment exactly where it is relevant, not at the end of a long list.
All in all, I’ve never seen an entrance in a monopolized market (social bookmarking) with this strength and resolution. Diigo is very impressive, and my bookmarking tool of choice.
So it's worth taking a careful look at whether the company will once again create a new category of device that make waves in education -- as it did with personal computers, digital music players, and smartphones -- or whether the iPad and other tabletss might be doomed to remain a niche offering.
Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company's partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses -- watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won't later promote the iPad's use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.
the biggest impact of the iPad would be in the textbook market.
only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.
The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.
If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.
Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.
He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said.
Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.
Building sustainability through engagement
The !gnite team realizes that the ultimate success of the program will be measured by how thoroughly it is adopted. So getting everyone on board with how powerful wikis and other web tools can affect pedagogy and content has been a priority.
Marketing oneself in society today is a skill that all students MUST have, but too many schools are ignoring.
Of course, some people want a formal education. I do not think everyone should leave college, but I challenge my peers to consider the opportunity cost of going to class. If you want to be a doctor, going to medical school is a wise choice. I do not recommend keeping cadavers in your garage. On the other hand, what else could you do during your next 50-minute class? How many e-mails could you answer? How many lines of code could you write?
The key is balance. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we need is to construct learning environments and experiences that connect with the real world. NOt the world within the school's four walls.
People who are successful in this area have a drive to be successful. We need to meet our students where they are, and we need to construct learning experiences in a way that engages their passions and promotes this drive. Schools and teachers can do this, but school and classroom structures need to change.
I rather think of this as many schools are failing to give students the skills they need to empower themselves. We can't take the responsibility away of students empowering themselves. It's a small, but vital thinking shift.
I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.
36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college.
college as a stepping-stone to success rather than a means to gain knowledge. College fails to empower us with the skills necessary to become productive members of today's global entrepreneurial economy.
Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity.
Learning by doing
A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work. The Internet is replacing this signaling function.
creating personal portfolios to showcase their talent.
document our accomplishments, and have them socially validated with tools such as LinkedIn
My work as chief privacy and security officer at a large public university has, however, given me pause to ask if our posture toward risk prevents us from fully embracing technology at a moment of profound change.
Consequently, faculty members are accepting major personal and institutional risk by using such third-party services without any institutional endorsement or support. How we provide those services requires a nuanced view of risk and goes to the heart of our willingness to trust our own faculty and staff members.
The technologically savvy among us recognize that hard physical, virtual, and legal boundaries actually demark this world of aggressively competitive commercial entities. Our students, faculty, and staff often do not.
But can we embrace the cloud? Can the faculty member who wears our institution's name in her title and e-mail address, to whom we've entrusted the academic and research mission of the institution, be trusted to reach into the cloud and pluck what she believes is the optimal tool to achieve her pedagogical aims and use it? Unfortunately, no. Many faculty and staff members simply use whatever service they choose, but they often do not have the knowledge or experience needed to evaluate those choices. And those who do try to work through the institution soon find themselves mired in bureaucracy.
First we review the company's terms of service. Of course, we also ask the company for any information it can provide on its internal data security and privacy practices. Our purchasing unit rewrites the agreement to include all of the state-required procurement language; we also add our standard contract language on data security.
All of this information is fed into some sort of risk assessment of varying degrees of formality, depending on the situation, and, frankly, the urgency. That leads to yet another round of modifications to the agreement, negotiations with the company, and, finally, if successful, circulation for signatures. After which we usually exhume the corpse of the long-deceased faculty member and give him approval to use the service in his class.
We go through this process not from misguided love of bureaucracy, but because our institutions know of no other way to manage risk. That is, we have failed to transform ourselves so we can thrive and compete in the 21st century.
But our faculty and staff are increasingly voting with their feet—they're more interested in the elegance, portability, and integration of commercial offerings, despite the inability to control how those programs change over time. By insisting on remaining with homegrown solutions, we are failing to fall in lockstep with those we support.
Data security? Of course there are plenty of fly-by-night operations with terrible security practices. However, as the infrastructure market has matured (one of the generally unrecognized benefits of cloud services), more and more small companies can provide assurances of data security that would shame many of us even at large research-intensive institutions.
If higher education is to break free of the ossified practices of the past, we must find ways to transfer risk acceptance into the faculty domain—that is, to enable faculty to accept risk. Such a transformation is beyond the ability of the IT department alone—it will require our campus officials, faculty senates, registrars, and research and compliance officers working together to deeply understand both the risks and the benefits
anonymous on 18 Dec 09" * 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: "
