Group items tagged

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

Too often the conversation surrounding the flipped classroom focuses on the videos- creating them, hosting them, and assessing student understanding of the content via simple questions or summary assignments. I wish the conversation focused more on what actually happens in a flipped classroom. If we move lecture or the transfer of knowledge online to create time and space in the physical classroom, how are we using that time to improve learning for students? What is our role as the teacher in the flipped classroom? How are we maximizing the potential of the group when students are together to design collaborative, creative, student-centered activities and assignments? This is the part I want to hear more about!

Pinball comes from the BBC and takes you on a 'journey' around different sections of a pinball table, helping you create and refine ideas as you go. It's a different idea for a site, and one you'll either love or hate immediately. However, there is a Help section, you're encouraged to dive straight in and use the freeform tools in whatever way you see fit. The four sections of the site all give you different ways of working through the creative process. Dot Dash allows you to quickly and easily build a Mind Map complete with images and customisable colours while Wild Reels mixes up different combinations of text and images to create new combinations. Most instantly enjoyable is Snap Shot, which allows you to quickly and easily manipulate images by drawing on them, rotating and scaling them and more.

From an industry point of view but... Letting your employees use their personal mobile devices for work makes them leap for joy - they literally love their iPads, iPhones, Droids, BlackBerrys, Galaxies and other devices of choice. Research shows it also makes them more productive and increases their engagement with the workplace, including after hours.     On the other hand, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon opens doors to all sorts of tricky issues so it's important to plan ahead.

"Julia Gardiner is taking photos of what appear to be the most mundane objects - sugar bowls and random wall shots - in the cafe where we meet for a chat. But she's an Instagrammer, one of a growing number of people using their smartphones to take pictures of the world around them and then uploading them for the world to see."

"With budgets tight, many schools are hoping to bring technology into the classroom without having to shell out for a device for each student. A solution for many has been to make classes BYOD (short for "bring your own device"), which allows students to bring laptops, tablets, and smartphones from home and to use them in the classroom and share them with other students. It's a promising idea, especially for schools that don't have big tech budgets, but it has met with some criticism from those who don't think that it's a viable long-term or truly budget-conscious decision. Whether that's the case is yet to be seen, but these stories of schools that have tried out BYOD programs seem to be largely positive, allowing educators and students to embrace technology in learning regardless of the limited resources they may have at hand."

This is an account of what happened when the author took fifty "budding entrepreneurs", gave them with atwitter-like tool and asked them to 'tweet' their way through a series of online tasks.

"Drag photos, videos, documents, websites, text snippets, and more directly from your desktop or browser. Drop them into your Dropmark collection. They're automatically uploaded to the cloud. Share your collections with anyone, add collaborators, or keep them private and just for yourself."

"Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnowLearn is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal."

In the future, business people will not need to carry a laptop around with them to get their work done, Microsoft believes. Instead, smart devices in connected rooms will change their settings according to the person using them, it has predicted.

As more teachers and students adopt new technologies, including Evernote, they're looking for useful resources to help them along the way. We're excited to introduce them to Evernote for Schools, our new microsite devoted to helping those in the education community use Evernote more effectively.

Gooru is a new service (still carrying the Alpha label) that aims to provide teachers and students with an extensive collection of videos, interactive displays, documents, diagrams, and quizzes for learning about topics in math and science. As a Gooru member you have access to hundreds of resources according to subject areas such as chemistry, biology, ecology, algebra, calculus, and more. Within each subject area you can look for resources according to media type such as video, interactive display, slides, text, and lesson plans. When you find resources that you want to use, drag them to the resources folder within your account. Gooru also offers you the option to add resources to your folders even if you did not find them within Gooru.

60second Recap® wants to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today's teens. Through 60second Recap® video albums, we seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but to help them build better lives.

"Google does let you opt out, and every Gmail user will get an email from the company notifying them and pointing them to the privacy settings when the feature goes live. Here's what those privacy settings look like:"

"Back to the title: was the SMART Board a dumb choice?  I'm going to say yes, only because of the way that it was brought to bear.  Without a plan, without training, and without supplement, it was nothing more than an expensive, fancy toy for teachers (and the occasional student).  If we are to justify the funds that we need for instructional technology, we must be smarter about how we approach and implement them.  We must be ready to show real power to boost student achievement and motivation using these magnificent tools.  To do so, we must be prepared to use these tools in the same ways that our colleges and top employers are using them-to solve real problems."

"You are teaching a class and want to collect feedback at the beginning of the class to see whether everyone is on the same page. You can do tests, collect them and grade them, or you can use quizsocket. You get instanteneous feedback about problems. As a teacher you learn what was difficult to understand in the last class and can immediately react"

Simple alternative to response systems

Electronic portfolios are gaining so much popularity among teachers and students. Their easy accessibility and availability anywhere anytime make them really worth trying. There are actually several web tools that you can use to create digital portfolios and I have already reviewed some of them in this post, however, today I am sharing with you an excellent video tutorial from EdTechTeacher on how to use Google Drive as a portfolio solution in iPad classroom. Check it out below

"The British Library's collections on Flickr Commons offer access to millions of public domain images, which we encourage you to explore and re-use. The release of these collections into the public domain represent the Library's desire to improve knowledge of and about them, to enable novel and unexpected ways of using them, and to begin working with researchers to explore and interpret large scale digital collections."

"According to a recent survey of people in 65 countries, 73.4% of people own a smartphone. Those with smartphones check them an average of 110 times per day, which amounts to every five or six minutes spread out over a twelve hour period. Another study found a slightly higher frequency - 150 times per day. That's a lot of people with instant, constant access to email, social networking, and text messaging. Not all of them will suffer all or most of these negative effects, but the draw of checking  your phone "just one more time real quick" is obviously difficult to resist. Heck, most people don't even try to resist it, because staying connected and apprised of everything everywhere can only be a good thing, right? Let's take a look at some of the possible consequences:"

"Twitter is rolling out an option to ease the use of direct messages. Traditionally, Twitter has allowed users who follow each other to send direct messages back and forth, or for users to send direct messages to accounts that follow them. A new setting, that appears to have been rolling out over the past week, allows Twitter users to receive direct messages from any follower. "If you check this option, any Twitter user that follows you will be able to send you a DM, regardless of whether you decide to follow them back," says a note before the option is turned on."