Group items tagged

If you watch a lot of online videos for education or research, you'll find VideoNotes a really useful tool. It's as simple as this: sign in with a Google account (VideoNotes uses Google Drive for storage) and then paste in the URL for a YouTube video. Then as it plays you can start making notes on the right-hand side of the screen. The clever bit is that as you click on previous notes you've made, the video will jump to that point, making this a really useful tool for navigating documentaries, study guides and other long, involved videos.

A ready-made course of study with activities and resources to support a digital literacy programme.

"The purpose of this set of learning resources is to help students: explore the educational uses of Web 2.0 tools and services; familiarise themselves with a range of useful applications for study-related purposes; highlight good practice in the use of social software and the internet, in general."

"The teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students' research habits and the impact of technology on their studies."

Teens love their cell phones. Duh! But just how often are they using their mobile phones and why? Leveraging the data provided by the recent Nielsen study, "New Mobile Obsession: U.S. Teens Triple Data Usage", FunMobility decided to explore cell phone usage patterns further. The result of our FunChat and FAADChat customer survey with over 10,000 respondents generated even more interesting data points. The survey found teens are spending more time on mobile devices than any other media device, and 40 percent are spending more than four hours per day on their mobile devices. And that's just the beginning. We turned this data into an infographic: "Generation OMG: How Teens Use Mobile Devices", that we just announced and was recently covered by ZDNet's iGeneration blog.

A research study exploring teachers' views on game-based learning.

This is a very relevant and interesting article about some research that applies in Australia as much as the rest of the world.

"Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations."

The twelve units of work in Global Words have been produced by World Vision Australia and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) to integrate the teaching and learning of English and global citizenship education. At the centre of both global citizenship education and the study of English is the aim of supporting students to become ethical, thoughtful and informed citizens, predisposed to take action for change. These units, and the supporting resources of Global Words, aim to build the essential knowledge, skills and values young people need to participate actively, critically and creatively as global citizens.

Every once and a while something comes along that causes me to wonder: Why isn't everyone using this (or something like it)? I look around college classrooms and libraries I find people using the usual suspects of programs:  MS Word and Pages.  I use Pages too, but it's only really good for the final composition of a paper, and it's a terrible research and note taking tool (it's a word processor, not a note taking tool). I've come to the point where nearly all my studies are done with Evernote.  I know there are are a ton of other programs out there (like Zotero, Scrivener, OneNote etc...) and this is not to say that those aren't good programs (I use Zotero with Amazon.com to make bibliographies super easy - but Zotero's note taking tool feels tacked on), but I just happen to use Evernote, heavily.  If you're a student and you are not using something like Evernote, you are probably missing out on being more productive and doing better work.

"More than six in ten (62 percent) online citizens around the world use the internet for social networking"

"CodingBat is a free site of live coding problems to build coding skill in Java, and now in Python (example problem), created by Nick Parlante who is computer science lecturer at Stanford. The coding problems give immediate feedback, so it's an opportunity to practice and solidify understanding of the concepts. The problems could be used as homework, or for self-study practice, or in a lab, or as live lecture examples."

From Google, this survey is designed to gain insights into how consumers use the Internet on their smartphones. It contains:  * Facts and figures about smartphone adoption and usage  * Internet usage in general, search, video, social networking, mobile advertising  and m-commerce behaviour via smartphones  * This country report is part of a global smartphone study conducted in multiple countries. Visit OurMobilePlanet.com for  access to additional tools and data  

HERE'S a scene in my house: My almost 9-year-old is on the internet doing something or other, and I am not standing over her shoulder or otherwise monitoring her. Is this negligent? Am I throwing her to the wolves? I have no idea how to approach these thorny questions, so I have lunch with the academic and Microsoft researcher, danah boyd (she spells her name in lowercase letters for complicated philosophical and aesthetic reasons), who has studied this cluster of issues in an original and challenging way.

FOMO, you're not alone with your FOMO. There are other people out there just like you, and they've gone public with their problem. The iPhone and Android app TimeRazor, which finds and suggests fun activities in your area, recently pulled research from studies and articles by JWTIntelligence, comScore and The Wall Street Journal to produce the infographic below. It gives a good snapshot of how much time people spend online and whether it makes them feel like they're missing out on great experiences. Check it out for the full rundown.

In some ways, the flipped model is an improvement. Research shows that tailored tutoring is more effective than lectures for understanding, mastery, and retention. But the flipped classroom doesn't come close to preparing students for the challenges of today's world and workforce. As progressive educational activist Alfie Kohn notes, great teaching isn't just about content but motivation and empowerment: Real learning gives you the mental habits, practice, and confidence to know that, in a crisis, you can count on yourself to learn something new. That's crucial in a world where, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, adults change careers (not just jobs) four to six times or where, as an Australian study predicts, 65% of today's teens will end up in careers that haven't even been invented yet. We don't need to flip the classroom. We need to make it do cartwheels.

Every Australian student will study the arts from their first year of school under the new national arts curriculum, which was released today for public consultation.

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.

" A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a "reasonably well-executed search." Wrote researchers, "The majority of students - of all levels - exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process." That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don't understand how to best find the information they seek using Google. Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it's a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master."

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England's schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary has announced. It will be replaced by an "open source" curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry.