By all accounts, the iPad will be running current iPhone OS 3.1 which does allow you to listen to music while doing other things...the rub will be creating a presentation in Keynote for iPad without direct access to the web for photos...or having to shut down Safari to check your Twitter client, etc.
I think a big miss on this article is any discussion of content creation capabilities of netbooks and iPad. Kindle and Dead Tree books don't allow extensive content creation, the iPad has limited capabilities, but netbooks open up a whole range of creative possibility. Also, it's obvious this article is geared toward college students, not middle or high school.
In the web 2.0 world, there's only one rating for content--and it's self-imposed: Not Safe For Work. What can we learn about our students' viewing culture from this rating system?
Here's what looks to be a viable alternative for those who would like to make HTML5 (iPod, iPad, iPhone) friendly content. A good designer/web guru friend of mine enlightened me about this app earlier today.
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:
Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
Build, Play and Share Games Anytime Anywhere\nBest for mobile web or unlimited text plans. CHECK game location to prevent international charges...Beware of adult restricted content. Very new site so not much there. The fun is creating clever games with a good narrative.
All schools in England are being told to filter inappropriate content and teach pupils about staying safe including online harm. Plans unveiled by the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan will require all schools to put in place strengthened measures to protect children from harm online - including cyber bullying, pornography and the risk of radicalisation.
danah body (she prefers lowercase.) is a highly regarded thinker on all things internet. In this piece she addresses the dynamics involved in being connected to networked information.
struggling to strike a balance between print and digital curricula for students, textbook publishers are taking to the cloud to house new digital resources and curricula.
Just as with "hybrid education" schools must find a way to balance the types of resources we are providing our students. Funding is key here as well as the consideration of sustainability.
nformation and power available from servers hosted by a separate, off-site entity
bandwidth and hardware support,
cloud-based textbook is stored on the Internet by servers not operated by school districts themselves
Web 2.0 forma
start discussions with each other about the content, complete interactive assessments and activities, and search Google or Wikipedia for further information.
Students are able to interact with the content and not act as passive consumers. This is key as the classroom struggles to catch up with the true status of society.
In actuality, this publishers has provided a CMS embedded with their curriculum. This is probably where text-book providers will need to move to in order to stay competitive.
Newsela is an easy, creative way to build reading comprehension with informational text that's always relevant through articles on current events. The beautiful thing about this innovative tool is that it allows you to take one article and differentiate it in up to five different lexile levels, which Newsela does by changing vocabulary and sentence structure. All of your students can read the same content at the level just right for them.
Newsela is an easy, creative way to build reading comprehension with informational text that's always relevant through articles on current events. The beautiful thing about this innovative tool is that it allows you to take one article and differentiate it in up to five different lexile levels, which Newsela does by changing vocabulary and sentence structure. All of your students can read the same content at the level just right for them.
"NY Times writers collaborated with the Common Sense Media writer Kelly Schryver to focus on the increasingly important and nuanced question "Who Are You Online?" Times and Learning Network content as well as offerings from Common Sense Media's K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum for teaching and learning about this complex issue." Lots of avenues to take this material in working with students.
Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
very cool mini-series on setting up virtualized Linux servers and a host PC took learn about web servers, email servers, DNS, etc. Looks like a great resource for a classroom
WaSP InterAct is a living, open curriculum based upon web standards and best practices, designed to teach students the skills of the web professional. Adapt and reuse our resources. Contribute your own content and ideas.
Exercise
Briefly look at 2-3 examples of courses run on "loosely coupled technologies," that is, outside of a CMS using contemporary Web 2.0/social software tools and methods.
Todd Williamson on 17 Mar 10Obviously talking about the collegiate level...middle school textbooks would be roughly $50 per class (~$200) and used for multiple years
