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This site is free for teachers, who can create accounts for their students. Games are engaging and very interesting to compete live against students from all over the world!
A great site for learning maths with competitive flash games against the computer, the class or the world. Signing up is quick, ease and free. I've just signed up over 200 children in 15 minutes! A must have for Primary Schools.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
Hi Laurie,
Google+ is a new social network from Google. If you have an account (they are limiting access at the moment) you can use this link to create a short address, instead of a bunch of numbers google gave you.
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Some salient and relevant advice for 21st century learners!
"I would have actually networked."
"I would have gotten more involved in career-relevant extracurricular activities.""I would have focused more on becoming 'professional.'""I would have kept better track of my achievements.""I would have focused more on developing relevant skills."
Most educators agree that the one-size-fits-all curriculum needs addressing
emergence of technology in education has certainly created a renewed interest in personalizing learning and providing teachers with the tools necessary for differentiating curriculum.
True personalization requires more than just looking at achievement levels and trying to compensate for deficiencies
differentiation of content requires adding more depth and complexity to the curriculum rather than transmitting more or easier factual material.
achievement levels, information about student interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression allow us to make decisions about personalization that take multiple dimensions of the learner into account.
Respect for learning-style variations can be achieved by using instructional strategies such as simulations, Socratic inquiry, problem-based learning, dramatizations, and individual and small-group investigations of real problems. Expression-style preferences can be accommodated by giving students opportunities to communicate visually, graphically, artistically, and through animatronics, multimedia, and various community-service involvements.
Our obsession with content mastery and Skinner's behavioral theory of learning are slowly but surely giving way to an interest in personalization and differentiation.
While it is understandable that our early use of technology was mainly an adaptation of Gutenberg-online and a teaching-machine mentality of what learning is all about, we now have both the pedagogical rationale and technological capability to use the many dimensions of student characteristics that clearly and unequivocally result in higher engagement, enjoyment, and enthusiasm for learning.
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:
uture is not
out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.
Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge
recording or absorption.
Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their
existing knowledge to construct new knowledge.
Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which
it takes place.
Learning needs to account for distributed cognition
requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world.
Learning is affected as much by motivational issues
as by cognitive issues.
previous
notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer
tenable.
Professional activity has become so
knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral
and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.
require educational tools
and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to
learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced
from meaningful and personalized activity.
current
uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices
rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should
be about in the next century
information technologies have been
used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally
rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create
artifacts and knowledge.
important challenge
is that the ?ld basic skillsº such as reading, writing, and arithmetic,
once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a human life; modern
?asic skillsº (tied to rapidly changing technologies) will change over
time.
We need computational environments to support "new" frameworks
for education such as lifelong learning, integration of working and learning,
learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information
contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative
learning, and organizational learning.
Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that
information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.
Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring
and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed
problems.
ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning
are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that
they are not well motivated to learn.
Most of what any individual "knows" today
is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human
heads or embedded in media).
technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at
the 'right' time in the 'right' way
challenge of whether
we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because
they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception
that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful,
empowering, engaging, and even fun.
making information relevant to the task at hand,
providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among
peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.
What "basic skills" are required in a world in which
occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than
decades?
reduce the gap between school
and workplace learning
How can schools (which currently rely on closed-book
exams, the solving of given problems, and so forth) be changed so that
learners are prepared to function in environments requiring collaboration,
creativity, problem framing, and distributed cognition?
problem solving in the real world
includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking
students to solve mostly given problems.
teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers
and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors
engaging with learners
assigning a pool of points for a team, say 40 points for four students, and having the students divide the points up depending on who did which percentage of the work, was effective in raising students’ participation in a group project.
the students realize that there is a tangible effect if they do not do their work.
Another, very quantifiable, way of discerning and holding students accountable for what they accomplish during group writing/projects is using Google Drive to track participation.
the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
teachers don't use them.
Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
constant juggling act
greater collaboration among teachers.
But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
professional development is a massive undertaking.
Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
The first challenge is the cost.
measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
I personally think social bookmarking is one of the key areas of growth both on the internet as a whole and in education, and I’m really excited about Diigo’s product. They’ve been trying out lots of new features and the offering has been getting more than robust.
A wonderful, child-friendly online video editing site. Make your videos with uploaded images and clips and download them to your computer with no watermark. Easy sign in with Facebook, Google or Yahoo accounts.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams
"Rubrics hold a mirror up to your objectives for an assessment task. Matt Townsley remembers well the day he looked into this mirror and didn't like what he saw. "I realized my criteria were mostly about how neat the project looked. It hit me that students could do well without knowing a whole lot about the learning objective."
"Rubrics hold a mirror up to your objectives for an assessment task. Matt Townsley remembers well the day he looked into this mirror and didn't like what he saw. "I realized my criteria were mostly about how neat the project looked. It hit me that students could do well without knowing a whole lot about the learning objective."
This sounds like an interesting article that someone took the time out to put up here on Diigo. There's only one problem, this seems to be some sort of "pay to view" site. Visitors actually cannot see the article in question (well, they get a 2-paragraph preview).
Diigo friends, please don't point to sites that don't give the full information.
Actually, one need not pay, but to read the whole article, one does have to sign in - the account is free, and I understand some don't want to sign in. Still, the article raises some good points.
American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.
journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”
“new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.
And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”
s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.
unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before
The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.
The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.”
But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.
“For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.
“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.
includes short VIDEO
"Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master's programs would kill the novel."
find ReadTheWords.com to be one of the most useful services on the Internet today. Many LD (learning disabled)
students struggle with auditory processing.
these students are very capable,
they tend to favor auditory processing, versus the more common visual processing. It is important that these students
learn how their mind works and modify their learning techniques accordingly.
5 students incorporate this service for study of their weekly vocabulary words. We started by making an audio file of the words and definition, and turned it into an mp3 format. The students spent 10 minutes each day on the computer. Each student has averaged a minimum of a full letter grade higher. Two students have received perfect scores for the past 2 weeks.
ReadTheWords.com been created to cater to these students.
ReadtheWords.com is an AMAZING SERIVCE for young students.
ReadTheWords.com allows me to create listening material for some learners that struggle a little bit. It allows my
students to read along with the Virtual Avatar Reader. This saves a lot of time so I can focus on certain children
without slowing down the rest of the class.
We create links to audio files that read our
upcoming events, and we use it to help visually impaired patrons read anything - articles, letters they have received,
emails that can be copy/pasted from their email account...the possibilities are endless! On a personal level, I have been
using ReadTheWords toolbar plug in.
service with my university students who are learning English
brings the text to life, and stimulates my second language learners in a
dynamic way. I would recommend this program to all foreign language teachers,
I have been assisting students to create audio files of study review materials. This greatly helps them decode and
analyze the material for comprehension. I have seen a great improvement on test scores
Students listen to a piece of their own writing, so they can
hear if what they wrote sounds correct. It helps students with comprehension, spelling, grammar and structuring
sentences.
This service is godsend for many students, especially auditory learners. I cannot even begin to imagine how many people this will help in the future. We just received approval to offer this service to our entire school. (Email webmaster@readthewords.com to get a special deal like we did.
I believe that the audio could act as a reinforcer of the written word as students read. This could be helpful not only with students who are Language Impaired, but also for students who struggle with reading comprehension.
Something not mentioned by these teachers is the possible benefit to Autistic and Aspergers students. I can this being used as a reward or incentive because the work could be done independently. Since these students generally feel more at ease working independently, it would a motivator to them.
This could be a great tool for Language Impaired students, but also Learning Disabled in reading as well. The audio would act as a reinforcer of the written material. Even though this is learning or reading comprehension tool, students may see it as a reward thereby motivating them to read more. This could a aid to any teacher attempting to motivate reluctant or struggling readers.
Read The Words could be a beneficial tool to students who are Language Impaired and/or Learning Disabled in Reading. The audio can reinforce the written word and increase comprehension. Also, it could be a valuable tool for autistic students who prefer to work independently. They can use this to aid comprehension and also it could be a reward. This tool could also add interest to text for any student.
Sheri Edwards on 05 Jul 11About your content Google does not assert any ownership rights in your content. What belongs to you, stays yours. We do require that you give us a licence to the content you post so that we can host it and, if you ask us to, make it available to others. Content on our services usually isn't ours. We may not monitor what we host or link to, although in some limited cases we might. Don't be surprised if you see something you don't like. You can always tell us about it or stop looking.
