Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Young students use Facebook in the classroom What do you think?

Poor idea. First of all, it models disrespect for terms of service: One item on Facebook's terms of service page says "You will not use Facebook if you are under 13." Second, we know from a growing body of psychological and neuroscience research that once people (esp young people) have developed friends networks, that they spend hours and hours of their time at home doing facebook, at the expense of real-time face-to-face socializing, exercise, and homework. The quality of work they do goes down dramatically when they switch back and forth from Facebook to their homework (the Facebooking activity impairs their ability to remember what they were doing before they switched). This can also contribute to sleep deprivation, which itself results in a whole host of poor health/cognitive problems. A better alternative: teaching kids alternative exciting ways of social networking and working collaboratively online that don't have the massive distraction factor of Facebook: teach them how to make flip videos and post them on drop box; teach them how to make wikis; use a Ning social network; teach them how to use Google Docs, forms, etc. Teach them how to use Diigo! Even teaching them how to twitter is a wiser idea. . . just.

Excellent article on where we are (could not use diigo highlight)   research suggests that experts literally don't have conscious access to 70% of what they do. In well-defined domains, like mathematics and programming, we've created intelligent tutoring systems that can develop specific outcomes, but even those have problems transferring into practice. Real learning comes from approaching complex problems, experimenting with alternatives, and accessing resources in the process of solving them

Glogster.com - Poster yourself - Make your interactive poster easily and share it with friends. It is fantastic!

Really is a powerful tool in the classroom, with so many ways to implement it for any subject. Also, teachers can set up student accounts and monitor activity.

Glogster EDU Premium is a collaborative online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas and skills in the classroom.

A collection of stories read by actors - could be used as a reading center, an alternative to read alouds, or a home alternative for students.

A website made in conjunction with the Screen Actors Guild thaf has famous actors reading a range of picture story books with accompanying pictures from the book. Includes activities to do in class as well.  Needs Flash but you can just go to the YouTube channel to access the stories themselves. http://www.youtube.com/StorylineOnline

Storyline is a website that brings stories to life, it helps that each one is told by a great storyteller.

"When we first purchased our class set of iPads we needed a secure storage and charging solution. Unfortunately the purpose built trolleys were too expensive. At $4.50 each these drying racks were a great alternative while we saved up the money."

Presentation by Vermont superintendent Dan French (@danfrench on Twitter) for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (posscon.org). Dan describes an alternative vision for ed organizational change utilizing "lateral innovation networks" based on the concepts described by David Hargreaves (http://www.demos.co.uk/people/davidhargreaves) in "Education Epidemic."

A useful site that allows users to dictate and generate text. A great resource for children with writing difficulties to get their ideas written quickly. It works with a range of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and more. For mistakes, the site offers alternative words with similar pronunciation. Only works with Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Young people are often characterised as cyberkids in reference to an assumed intense engagement and natural affinity with the internet. This article critiques the empirical basis for such claims and explores two alternative perspectives: namely, continua of use and typologies of use. Using UK data on 12-15 year old home internet users, a series of descriptive and latent class analyses of young people's internet use is presented. Results show there is little support for cyberkid characterisations and a proposed continuum of use is also shown to not fit the data. A three-way typology of use is instead presented which suggests a third of young home internet users make only limited use of the internet and the remaining two-thirds diverge into informational and creational/communicative users. These findings are used to argue that Mannheim's notion of generational units may be a useful way to characterise young people's internet use.

AMAZING LIST

The award winning series, Time Travelers, is an animated adventure series about the future. The series showcases future careers in science such as geoengineering for alternative energy, nanobiolology and neuroscience for learning and health care.

Science teachers move away from textbooks and embrace tech alternatives with this collection of apps 

"What's the "problem" with MOOCs? In case the quotes didn't clue you in, this post doesn't argue against massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the ones offered by Udacity, Coursera, and edX. I think they are very worthy ventures and will serve to progress our system of higher education. I do however agree with some criticisms of these courses, and that there is room for much more progress. I propose an alternative model for such massive open online learning experiences, or MOOLEs, that focuses on solving "problems," but first, here's a sampling of some of the criticisms of MOOCs."

Site addressing the overfiltering and blocking of web 2.0 sites in school and libraries and provide reasonable alternatives to support broader student and teacher access.

"Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock")."

digital visitors and digital residents - an alternative to prensky's digital native s and digital immigrants

Short news item on the OED's new words for 2013. Notes Australian origins of word of the year "selfie", as well as noting alternate spellings.