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Micro-student loans for students in 3rd world countries. Outside of the United States and a handful of other countries, student loans just don't exist. No matter how well you did in school, no matter how good your grades were, no matter how hard you worked, if you don't have the cash up front or a rich uncle to co-sign for you, you just can't go to college. In many cases, Vittana loans are the first and only source of college loans for students in countries where we operate.

Great post by Shelly Wright. It's not about the videos.

When I recently re-read the post, I didn't disagree with anything I'd said. Yet my brief love affair with the flip has ended. It simply didn't produce the tranformative learning experience I knew I wanted for my students .

Direct instruction is direct instruction no matter how you spin or flip it. While it does have its place, as all things do, we're reminded that the paradigm shift is not simply a matter of shifting an order of events. This is a solid post on the power of personalized learning.

"I collect rocks. Not on purpose. I don't go looking for them.  But when I bend to look more closely, inevitably they end up in my pocket, or in my car .. For Unplug'd 2012, I needed a rock that was easy to decorate, fit in the palm of my hand, and somehow represented me."

Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.

A free design course to encourage programmers/hackers into developing solid design skills, but most of the content is relevant to anyone wanting to improve their design skills (covers design in general including industrial design, web design, UX, etc). Some excellent resources are already available.

"An easy to follow design course for hackers who do amazing things. Receive a design lesson in your inbox each week, hand crafted by a design pro. Learn at your own pace, and apply it to your real life work - no fake projects here."

This video works best as a conceptual overview of how the Diigo slides feature can be used to create a variety of different web-based presentations. I'd recommend this video as an 'eye opener' to the potential uses for this remarkable social bookmarking site. On the other hand, it is is not a 'How to' video. Well worth watching for anyone involved in e-learning, collaborative research, blended teaching environments, library media studies, web 2.0 communications.

"It's a challenging process, and it requires experienced educators and technologists to find value in the data. For that reason, Duke University's Randy Riddle has been working with professors and other faculty for more the last 13 years, honing his expertise and delivering tools that boost engagement and learning. "

Please join me on Wednesday, April 29th for Picks from the App Store! This is the first in a series of free workshops for SIGHC members by SIGHC members. Even if you know nothing about SIGHC, you're still welcome join in. Here's the description of the online workshop:

I like the idea of reinforcing the valued behaviors using the technology tools in our hands. Promoting key self-descriptors such as resilient, innovative, self-determined, integrated, and the like, on the pages of our training materials both paper and electronic, would create added value.

Learn to play guitar with this beautifully designed site. Work through the lessons using your own guitar along with your computer's microphone so the site can interact with you as you play in real time. The site will even help you tune it. If you haven't got a guitar to hand, you can use the on-screen virtual guitar. The course is designed for beginners, but lessons progress quickly. The site seems to work best on Google Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Music%2C+Sound+%26+Podcasts

Creative Educator articles focus on constructivism and creativity and share ideas about the power of technology as a learning tool when put in student hands.Topics include ideas, inspiration and strategies to help the educator grow professionally and design their classroom to meet the needs of your learners. Most articles focus on K-12 but they relate to any professional educator.

A study by the Royal Economic Society, to be presented this week, finds that parental effect on test results is five times that of teachers' influence. This comes in the wake of warnings by Sir Michael Wilshaw last week that teachers were unable to properly do their own jobs because parents were expecting them to cover their own parenting skill shortfalls and to become surrogate family for the students.

It all happens well before school comes into the equation. If a child grows up in a literature rich, engaging environment with adults that spend quality time giving opportunities for great learning experiences in the world, the worst teachers still can't decoy that child's enthusiasm for learning. He can always learn at home. But if the child grows up neglected, not nurtured with rich learning experiences ( and I'm not talking about helicopter parents spending every waking moment ramming study down their throats - just quality conversation and hands on experiences )l doesn't get read to or taken out to shop, teachers are fighting an uphill battle with a disengaged individual. Parents, don't wait for school teachers to teach your kids. Start straight away..

Project Based Learning using hand held devices.

At Google, we support the education of families on how to stay safe online. That's why we've teamed up with online safety organization iKeepSafe to develop curriculum that educators can use in the classroom to teach what it means to be a responsible online citizen. The curriculum is designed to be interactive, discussion filled and allow students to learn through hands-on and scenario activities. On this site you'll find a resource booklet for both educators and students that can be downloaded in PDF form, presentations to accompany the lesson and animated videos to help frame the conversation.

Engineering lesson plans.  Sort by grade level.  

...by a a team led by two biologists, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall,- "The work builds off the thinking behind the Eigenfactor score, a method of assessing journals' relative influence that Mr. Bergstrom and Mr. West unveiled in 2007. The Eigenfactor algorithm takes into account the source of citations. A citation in a high-profile journal like Nature, for instance, counts for more than a citation from a journal only a handful of people ever see or cite. That's a more nuanced way to evaluate a journal's standing than the widely used impact factor, which tracks how many citations a journal gets but does not weight the sources."

Wow researchers can engage with the human side of research thru viewing connected networks, they can find the patterns in data sets and discover new fields as they converge amongst many possibilities... You can see overview where your research fits in etc too.

This is fascinating. I'm trying to figure out if this is something that could become useful to undergraduates learning about research. It seems like it has potential to reveal connections, trends, and patterns for students just starting in a discipline. It certainly makes disciplines seem less rigid and confined (which I think is a good thing).

Society confronts educational change in an odd, entirely counter intuitive manner. On one hand we acknowledge that education can and should do a better job of preparing our children for the future while on the other we cling to the models of education that we knew. This led educational writer Will Richardson to state that 'the biggest barrier to rethinking schooling in response to the changing worldscape is our own experience in schools'. Our understandings of what school should be like and our imaginings of what school could be like are so clouded by this experience that even the best evidence for change is overlooked or mistrusted.

"Over time, we as educators have become used to listening to and reading from gurus with simple truths. So many of us feel that we are well below the expertise of these edugurus (and I don't mean to single out the examples above as being the only ones going around) so we pack into venues, feverishly copying dot points from slideshows, handing over cash to buy the book and match up the dispensed wisdom against our own learning, our own classrooms and schools to see if we are headed in the prescribed direction"