Group items tagged

education, learning to adapt course delivery accordingly can provide quite a few benefits for both teaching and learning.

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students

Post fron Richard Byrne "Both Diigo and Jing have been written about on numerous occasions here at the Free Technology for Teachers blog, but I wanted to share my experiences using both tools when grading assignments. I teach an information literacy course for the college where I work as a librarian"

"Over the last 12 months both Facebook and Twitter have quietly removed RSS links from their webpages, eliminating an easy way to receive notifications without the need to interact with the services directly. Meanwhile Google+ has never offered RSS feeds. Of course it's clear that these social media services have an interest in killing off RSS. They all want to usurp its role as the web's universal subscription platform and become the de facto gatekeepers of the web."

"We all love free apps, but it's hard to track when apps go on sale, and whether they're worth the trouble. Here's a trick for keeping track of on-sale apps, and making those sales last forever. We've shared a few tools that help you track app sales, but they can be a pain. A lot of the apps that go on sale aren't very good, and while you can make a wish list, this doesn't help you discover new apps at all. Of course, we occasionally share cool apps in our Dealhacker posts, but what if you could get automatic email notifications for cheap, good apps whenever they went on sale? Here's a method-inspired by this Reddit post-to make that a reality."

The SparkNotes YouTube channel offers 23 short animated video overviews of literature commonly read in US high school courses.

But the good news is that, despite the hobby's sprawling growth into new areas like digital, cloud and social games, once you've mastered the basics, grasping more offbeat turns of phrase quickly becomes second-nature. (Or you could do what even the best of us are often forced to do in a pinch: Google the darn term.) Consider the following gaming dictionary a crash course in all things interactive entertainment -- memorize it, and who knows? You may even become proficient enough to talk with your kids about the latest games without making them burst into tears of laughter.

We got so many additions and updates to our 2011 list we thought it was time to bring you the most up-to-date list for 2012. So, without further ado, here's the 2012 A-Z list of educational Twitter hashtags. We went through all the comments on the 2011 version, wrote down all the Twitter and Facebook updates, and compiled this list over the course of several months. What follows is our best effort to bring you the biggest and baddest list of hashtags.

This week, Microsoft rolled out its new tablet, simply called Surface, which gives you another way to enjoy our courses, movies, ebooks, audio books and the rest. In many ways, Surface resembles the iPad in its look and feel. And when it came to unveiling the tablet, Microsoft's execs couldn't think outside the box created by Steve Jobs. A video made by ReadWriteWeb makes that rather painfully yet amusingly clear….

These useful tools give students the right tools to narrate, animate, and dictate. The post will explains them to teachers by giving some examples of how to incorporate art and design lesson plans into their existing courses.

"Advocates of the learning style theory argue that instructors can achieve much better results when they take their student's learning style under consideration and create a course that best fits this exact style. The adversaries of the learning style theory say that this concept is misunderstood and not scientifically proven, and they argue that learning styles do make instructors understand what motivates and cerebrally stimulates their students, but they can't guarantee a successful outcome nor predict it. So where is the truth in that and where lies the Learning Styles myth?  "

"Welcome to the The Granny Cloud! "Grannies" Skyping with children in India and Colombia! Not only "grannies" of course, but grandpas too! And mums and dads and aunties and uncles and… While we do have many grannies it's the attitude that matters - encouraging, nurturing, praising and offering guidance rather than directing, instructing and examining. In this blog you'll find reports from grannies about how their Skype sessions went - grannies sharing and learning from each other."

"...a pedagogical alternate reality game we developed over the course of two years under the aegis of The University of Texas at Austin's Digital Writing & Research Lab. Battle Lines offers a compelling game experience that allows student-players to develop rhetorical, community-building, and digital literacies, crossing boundaries between academic and ludic practices."

"Would any of my students turn down a 1:1 MacBook Pro? Of course not. Still, I believe there is great value in the limitations of resources. When we engage in Device Wars on twitter and the blogosphere, we all seem to exercise significant bias in equating the best classroom tool with the one that we find most productive in our personal or professional lives (I touched upon that in disagreeing with folks who contend that the iPad is not a creation tool). Do I have a vision of what technology I'd like in my class in the perfect scenario? Sure I do. Do my students and I really need that state of shiny utopia, especially when it is (in my view) impossible to achieve in an equitable fashion? I don't think so."

"With more and more schools launching, 'Bring Your Own Technology' or 'Bringing Your Own Device' (BYOT/BYOD) I created a symbaloo of all apps and web tools that work on all devices to help educators get started. Even though I am a firm believe, it doesn't matter what site/app the students use to show mastery of a concept, some educators need a starting place and many have loved this symbaloo so I, of course, want to pass it along."

New site promises "create your online classroom, for free" but site doesn't describe features well. Anyone else use it?

Introducing Sphero 2.0. Choose from over 25 apps and launch a whole new world of mobile gameplay. Drive circles around your friends with Sphero's new engine, turn your living room into a video game with augmented reality apps like The Rolling Dead, and upgrade family game night with multiplayer apps like ColorGrab. You can even get a crash course in programming Sphero with MacroLab. Sphero rolls 7 feet per second and pairs to your device via Bluetooth. Powered by induction charging and an internal smart robot, Sphero also glows in millions of colors and is pet proof, waterproof, and ready for any adventure.

"Through Wikiproject Medicine, some medical professionals (and other health-savvy Wikipedia editors) have taken it upon themselves to improve the quality of medical information available on the site. And, in the same spirit, the University of California, San Francisco will be offering a class this year that gives fourth-year medical students course credit in exchange for editing Wikipedia articles."