"Like to create treasure hunts, audio feedback printables, easy links to video instructions and more? Use this Bulk QR code generator. Simply add the link or text to this spreadsheet and the QR code will pop up ready to print."
Students did not agree on the merits of the wiki. Some were deeply offended when other students eliminated or modified their contributions. Others found the chance to pick apart other’s words and conclusions exhilarating. Regardless, most students seemed to grasp the important lesson I hoped to share: that history is the conversation we have about the past. History is about the authorial choices scholars make. History is about the evidence included and the evidence excluded. By asking students to participate in a joint-writing exercise, they were compelled to pay attention to the language others used, the phrasings and structure employed, the anecdotes emphasized, the facts obscured. I told them the story of an undergraduate English professor I had who spent an entire class session discussing why Shakespeare began Macbeth with the word “when”. Words matter. Words shape arguments. They determine meaning, and they form our view of the world around us, including our view of the history of the world around us. Students also came to appreciate that history was not a bag of facts we historians force them to memorize. Instead, as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob suggest, history is the product of that collective effort of truth seeking.
I still caution students about using Wikipedia. But I think the wiki can help our students see themselves as part of that democratic conversation so important to our profession. Throwing their ideas into the ring for others to challenge forces students to defend their ideas, modify their conclusions, and reconsider their assumptions. The wiki, while not perfect, may help us change the way our students think about history. It may help them be more attentive to language and argument. Importantly, it may help them value civil discourse as a civic virtue. These are good lessons for history students and for their professors.
—Kevin B. Sheets is associate professor of history at the State University of New York, College at Cortland and project director of the “American Dream Project,” a Teaching American History grant-based project in upstate New York. He regularly teaches courses in historical methods and American intellectual and cultural history.
of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't s
A collection curated by Product Hunt, featuring products like Code4Startup, Hackr, Swifty, Code School , and DataQuest Beta
A really nice list of sites and apps to learn coding...
I am IN LOVE with this idea! And now that I know about Remind101, I can actually communicate via text WITHOUT giving out my own cell phone number!
Disposable fun
"An idea for teaching kids about angles in math class is having a scavenger hunt and giving them a disposable camera so they can take pictures of different angles."
For math, I would use a Voki to explain the problems to my class.
What it is: Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts! The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related. If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web. Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.
Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together. Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo. Students can collaborate online to solve the problem. Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.” This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web. Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!
There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009
America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.
PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days.
In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.
in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.
The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%
PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees
the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses.
In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting.
The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records.
Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience.
Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.
A website for Primary School from Kew Gardens - Find a categorise plants, look at germination and look at seed 'design' for different environments.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
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:
Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
the News Hunt is a way of getting young journalists to critically examine the work of professionals. For Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker about the online world and the man credited with coining the phrase “virtual community,” it’s all about teaching them “crap detection.”
last year Rheingold wrote an important essay about the topic for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site
What’s at stake is no less than the quality of the information available in our society, and our collective ability to evaluate its accuracy and value.
“Are we going to have a world filled with people who pass along urban legends and hoaxes?” Rheingold said, “or are people going to educate themselves about these tools [for crap detection] so we will have collective intelligence instead of misinformation, spam, urban legends, and hoaxes?”
I previously called fact-checking “one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.” But, as Rheingold noted, the opposite is also true: the manufacture and promotion of bullshit is endemic. One couldn’t exist without the other.
That makes Rheingold’s essay, his recent experiment with NewsTrust, and his wiki of online critical-thinking tools” essential reading for journalists. (He’s also writing a book about this topic.)
I believe if we want kids to succeed online, the biggest danger is not porn or predators—the biggest danger is them not being able to distinguish truth from carefully manufactured misinformation or bullshit