EDC604

cootPad activities can be played on just about any device including iPads, Android tablets, and Chromebooks.

s a free service offering mathematics and reading practice activities to elementary school students and their teachers.

Silk Slides is a new service for easily sharing and discussing slideshows. It is very easy to use the service.

upload your slides

then enter your email address.

Visualizing Math"

llowing students to create their own books helps to develop visual literacy, the ability to understand, use, think or learn in terms of images.

Each word is accompanied by a sentence in which the word is used and, in some cases, defined, and has a brief video illustrating the concept.

eading Bear links abstract concepts and visual images in a way that reminds educato

But the obvious thing to do was to evolve the potential of this very stable listserv in a number of social media ways. While I am not sure which of these will be the favourites, the idea looks something like this: share a link on the listserv and store it for easy retrieval any time in the Diigo group! share your library images in Flickr, because we need to collect the ideas from around Australia Like us on Facebook – and include us in your News Feed. Share things you find, and get into the conversation. Perhaps 140 characters on Twitter will be just the thing for you – just another way to stay in touch and build the teacher librarian community.

Most K-12 classrooms in the United States today don’t use interactive blogs. By “interactive,” I mean a blog website which permits posts from students as well as the teacher, and comments from blog visitors as well as class members. As I explained in my post earlier this week on the iThemes education blog,

The past two months, I’ve had opportunities to ask different groups of educators the same question via an interactive SMS poll powered by PollEverywhere. The question I’ve asked has been: How many different assignments last year did you invite students to share on your interactive, classroom blog? The graph below summarizes responses in early June in Fort Bend ISD, which is in Houston, Texas. Of 156 respondents, 78% answered “zero.”

Students get to share their ideas in a way they can be proud of. Blogging is great for this because the posts are read not only by classmates, but also by anyone else who stumbles upon them online. Blogging promotes the development of good writing skills, so helping students take ownership of the project can help them write well. Blogging provides students with an outlet for things they may not get to share in the classroom, so giving looser guidelines on topics can bring about more interesting blog posts.

Gaming teaches students survival skills that they use in school and throughout their lives

Practical skills

The following five-step “Describe-Identify-Interpret-Evaluate-Reflect” process can help students: Understand and interpret the visual images they see in the world around them Develop critical thinking skills, particularly in regards to visual images Enhance their observation and interpretive skills Develop conceptual learning techniques

It can be used to guide students’ analysis of any visual image, including visual art, photographs, political cartoons, propaganda posters, video clips, and film

Step one: Preparatio

We need to play with media to become more effective communicators

As you learn to play with digital text, images, audio and video, you will communicate more creatively and flexibly with a wider variety of options

Although written primarily for educators, anyone who is interested in learning more about digital communication will learn something new from this book. As children, we learn to progressively make sense of our confusing world through play. The same dynamics apply to us as adults communicating with new and different media forms.

When it comes to traditional literacy we have thousands of years of experience to draw on and thousands of generations of literates to learn from. T

Other than in the area of basic computer and Internet skills it is difficult to find agreement on exactly what digital literacy is or what needs to be learned simply because it is so heavily contextual and changing so rapidly. If textual were evolving as fast digital we would need a new grammar book each week.

Increasingly, institutions are seeing their students not only as consumers but also as creators of digital media--requiring a greater fluency in the use of new media tools.

It used to be necessary to learn how to type so that you could write your papers and use Microsoft Word…. Now, we teach [students] the technical foundation of the media-creation tools and then build upon that." --