Goodreader or iannotate - I currently have iAnnotate.
IMHO iAnnotate is far superior. There are a couple of areas GoodReader excels (like in the automatic page fit, having two up, etc), but by and large iAnnotate does everything else more effectively. These are just a few reasons why it suits my workflow better than GoodReader:
- Tabs. It speaks for itself, but having several documents open with the ability to flick between them is useful.
- Sharing features. The ability to email or paste to clipboard a summary of all notes/highlights/annotations you've made is just brilliant, and makes light work of noting the most poignant areas in an academic article.
- Annotation tools. They are far quicker to access than in GoodReader. If you want to highlight something in iAnnotate, you just tap the icon in the toolbar and drag it over the text (as much as you want – you can scroll through the document even with the highlight tool selected) before confirming your selection. You can set as many different colour highlighters up as you want. By contrast, in GoodReader you must tap-and-hold, drag the handles to select a continuous chunk of text, then tap highlight from the popup. If you want to change the colour of the highlight you need to tap, choose colour, confirm your choice; using multiple colours is just too time consuming. I prefer the behaviour of notes in iAnnotate too, for reviewing and revision purposes. Tapping every note in GoodReader is tiresome.
You make some very good points but I think you could go further. The reason we put so much emphasis on "originality" is because we were preparing students for a world in which they would have to prepare written and oral presentations individually. In the modern workplace, very little is done that way anymore. Authorship is not what it used to be. Now, everything seems to be collaborative, generated at "stand-up" meetings of the whole "team". I'm not sure the end result is better, but it's clear that the very concept of plagiarism needs reconsideration. What if we created exercises around the task of correcting other people's work? Wouldn't that be more useful and "creative"?
With a connection to his previous Texas home, Ashby has helped set up collaborative student projects between North Carolina and Texas schools, among others.
"We're just trying to basically let our students get connections, and then we want our students to take it from there," Ashby said.
These connections — both in the U.S. and globally — help students understand that their work is not just for their teacher, but for a broader audience. He hopes that will give them intrinsic motivation to perform better.
Consider for a moment the repercussions,
for example, of helping people in your workplace get up to speed on a new
system implementation.
This
is expensive, of course. But even more problematic, it’s likely that the
classes would be held prior to the implementation, and then people would forget
much of what they learned by the time the implementation occurred
you could
try another scenario, which better fits the way people learn
keep a number of volunteers across the
organization well trained, then provide asynchronous training and performance
support tools for the new system and allow these local volunteers to support
people at their site.
Bandura is the person whom we
can credit with the actual phrase “social learning.”
They fail fundamentally because it is conceived as an outside-in process, moving about parts of the organization, rather than an inside-out process which focuses on change within individuals.
70% of large-scale change programs didn’t meet their goals
Kind of how we kept our vision statements, but also added the mission, instead of getting rid of the vision altogether.
alignment with their own life purposes
cognitive dissonance
Linking strategic and systemic intervention to genuine self-discovery and self-development by leaders is a far better path to embracing the vision of the organization and to realizing its business goals.
design thinking is a set of tools, methods, and processes by which we develop new answers for challenges, big and small.
Through applying design thinking to challenges, we learn to define problems, understand needs and constraints, brainstorm innovative solutions, and seek and incorporate feedback about our ideas in order to continually make them better. The more we apply design thinking to the challenges we see, the deeper we strengthen the belief in our ability to generate creative ideas and make positive change happen in the world.
If you are interested in finding a program or resources to help integrate design thinking in your school, the directory offers a great set of organizations already listed for inspiration and new connections.
We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.
As we help today’s students build their foundation of core academic knowledge and skills, we also need to look at the ways we are helping our youth build their confidence in their abilities to create.
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:
The blurred line between gaming consoles and real life educational / scientific devices has just been erased. No it's not April 1. Fascinating. Thanks to Craig Crossley for the link. If you haven't seen the Johnny Lee video under this one, it is amazing as well. A great webpage to share with your friends.
If you want the fastest, most intuitive and most stylish browser available, Firefox 4 BETA is probably still the best. But if you are bound by certain departmental, political or operational constraints, or if you don't know any better, you will probably have to use Internet Explorer (IE). Well the good news is that IE9 is actually VERY good. The similarities to Firefox do feature prominently, but don't take my word for it - this video will showcase the wicked new features. Enjoy. You'll need Windows 7 to run IE9 though. There's always a catch ...
ITC has released ThinkDrive, a digital version of their very popular Bloom's based thinking strategies. If you would like a trial version with a view to purchasing for your school, please emailmatthew@plana.net.au.
What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.
A broad focus on testing and new standards can lead schools to neglect the individualized needs of students,
unless U.S. schools can better align learning strategies and objectives with fundamental aspects of human nature, they will always struggle to help students achieve their full potential
Researchers classified 31 percent of teachers as “engaged” at work under that index, compared with 30 percent of respondents overall.
But, among all occupations tracked in the survey, teachers were the least likely to say that their opinions counted at work.
HOW would you rank "important" languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money: surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power).
The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing
university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.
Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.
How do we set ourselves apart? In our case, by the development of these interactive learning space classrooms, we are demonstrating to everyone that we are committed to the concept of faculty development.”
researchers found at-risk students who took the course in classrooms that promoted active learning (which included some rooms other than the renovated ones) were 2.8 times more likely to succeed -- that is, to earn a grade higher than a D -- than students in traditional classrooms.
The company has surveyed hundreds of students and faculty members at the universities it has worked with, and says it has found a statistically significant correlation between classroom configuration and student engagement. The survey doesn't include any academic results.
“We actually found a fairly moderate to strong correlation between what they think of these areas and if they think they have the ability to get a higher grade -- or their motivation to attend class and also their engagement in class,”
“Perception-wise, students are telling us ‘I can do better when I’m in these spaces,’ ” Jones said. “Maybe that’s enough of a win?”
at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
Kate Pok on 04 Nov 11Goodreader or iannotate - I currently have iAnnotate.
