Group items tagged

"This page lists all the Icebreaker, Diving In and Hands on Hacking Hacktivities found in the various Hacktivity Kits."

Series of 42 video segments about how brain functioning can used by teachers to improve student learning. Online teacher resources and guide for teacher professional development.

StudyEgg is a new tool that can be used to augment already existing educational content on the Internet by adding new learning features. With StudyEgg teachers can create quizzes based on YouTube videos like Khan Academy or any other freely available lesson/material. GradeCam enables teachers to grade assignments instantly with any document camera or webcam, no special tools needed. The data is then displayed, showing the teacher if all students understood the concepts. Tests can be created on the go to check what students have learned instead of testing them days or weeks later. GradeCam then lets users import the data easily into the gradebook service,  Always Prepped combines different educational resources and services like Khan Academy, Edmodo or Study Island and puts all the learning related data of the students into one unified dashboard. Also able to add non-educational data such as social data to the dashboard. For example, if the teacher knows that the parents of a particular student are getting divorced or that a grandparent has died, the teacher is able to add this information to the data set and can see immediately whether the performance in class might somewhat be related to the happenings in the student's personal life.

"Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any Internet-connected device including iPads and Android tablets. Infuse Learning allows teachers to push questions, prompts, and quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. In an Infuse Learning room a teacher can give students a wide variety of formats in which to response to a question or prompt. Students can reply to prompts and questions in standard multiple choice, true/false, and short answer formats. But Infuse Learning also offers an option for students to reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their iPads, Android tablets, or on their laptops."

Advocates say that "flipped classrooms" help overburdened teachers differentiate their instruction to reach more learners, provide an avenue into more hands-on and student-driven learning during classtime, and shift the teacher's role from "sage on the stage" to learning coach and facilitator. Critics say it's just a fad, relies too heavily on rote instruction, and doesn't go far enough in making the needed changes for teaching and learning reform. I've rounded up this list of videos so you can learn more about the challenges and benefits of flipped classrooms.

Informative article on Flipped Classroom with links to the 'Flipping the Classroom' video playlist and Mary Beth Hertz's excellent blog post, "The Flipped Classroom: Pro & Con" 

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

An interesting take on Twitter as a learning tool.

I learned that a Google search will now yield results by reading level. We  can check out search results that are designated either basic, intermediate or advanced.

An interesting reflection on the positives and negatives from Royan Lee after five years of having gone BYOD/T.