Engaging Digital Natives

Omnidrive sign up login

The Bugscope project provides free interactive access to a scanning electron microscope (SEM) so that students anywhere in the world can explore the microscopic world of insects. This educational outreach program from the Beckman Institute's Imaging Technology Group at the University of Illinois supports K-16 classrooms worldwide.

Bugscope allows teachers everywhere to provide students with the opportunity to become microscopists

The Metiri Group's report disputes the widely debated Cone of Experience theory, which says each of us learns 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see, 50 percent of what we hear and see, 70 percent of what we say or write, and 90 percent of what we say as we do a thing. (The rampant misrepresentation of researcher Edgar Dale's valid model of classifying learning styles is discussed in this entry in the blog of educational consultant Will Thalheimer.) After an extensive search, the report's authors were unable to find any empirical evidence supporting this breakdown. Contrary to popular opinion, research shows that lessons in which students interact with material, rather than passively absorb it, are not always better.

The works below may not explicitly address young people and social networking directly, but they all offer useful context and insights. I can't promise that I've managed to adequately take account of them all in my writing (indeed, I'm quite aware that I haven't - for that I'd need to be working on this full time rather than having the day or so a week I have right now) - but I hope that offering a summary of them here helps others in following these trains of thought....

iPhones in the classroom? Are you kidding? No I'm not! Cell phones are often banned in the classroom or banned entirely from schools. Most cell phones today have more computing power than those available to NASA during the Apollo space program, however. In this session we'll explore ways cell phones, including the iPhone but not JUST the iPhone, can be used to help learners access web-based content, remix it, share it, collaborate with others, and create media-rich deliverables for the classroom teacher as well as a global audience. A specific focus on using cell phones as mobile recorders for digital storytelling projects, like the Library of Congress' Veteran Oral History Project, will also be included.

Try to communicate with your kids using these new social media and software tools and you've probably thought Forget it Don't Forget it.Get it, with the help of Remarkable Parents. Use technology as an ally, not an enemy . Remarkable Parents don't fight the flow, they roll with it.

Google Reader

ber? Login. Welcome!  English (US)

Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

Zapr lets you create URL links to any files or folders on your PC. You can then send these links to others (via email or IM or YOURNAME.zapr.com) and they can get the files or see the folders directly from your PC via any browser. They do not need to register or install software.