Group items tagged

Edshelf is a collection of digital tools for educators. It is updated frequently and people post reviews about the digital tools.

A collection of tools used to access the 18,000 digital scan composites of the human body. Very powerful tools for helping teach health and physical education, anatomy and physiology in particular.

This is a blog that incorporates technology into language and gifted programs. It has a lot of great ideas for tools for gifted students who want to work ahead.

This is a website that has a large variety of tools that can be used in the classroom.

A drawing tool that allows you to develop pictures, charts, diagrams, etc. I am really excited to find this and be able to have students create Double Bubble maps, Venn Diagrams, etc, online.

This website is a presentation with an updated version of Bloom's Taxonomy for the 21st Century. It includes suggestions for web 2.0 tools for each department of the taxonomy.

Stevens, V. (2008). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year's most viral microblogging platform. TESL-EJ: Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 12(1). This article did not focus just on Connectivism or just on communities of practice but provided a clear example of both after my previous readings. If you think about the basic fundamental of twitter it would be easy to discount at first whether or not it would be successful. I'm sure along the way some may have even felt that it was a fad destined to fail or fade. Who would want to be limited to only one hundred and fifty characters to get out a complete thought and why would anyone be interested. Well right now according to this article twitter is the most popular microblogging tool that has existed. I found it interesting if you have read my previous articles especially about linguistics in communities of practice that twitter type has made its way into our everyday vernacular, such as saying hash tag in actual dictation. Interesting that a change in our speech and actions are indicators of belonging to a certain community of practice, much like how some groups say 'lol' instead of actually laughing out loud. This article draws these dots that are easily linked together to show Connectivism. The author spends time explaining when he "got" twitter, or when it dawned on him this is an excellent tool. From there he uses some great analogies to describe the connected world twitter produces for millions of users a day. My favorite quote from his article "To 'get' twitter, you have to have your finger on the pulse of what is pumping lifeblood through the Internet, and that is the people on it and how they come together (Connectivism), connect, and relate to one another (communities of practice) in virtual learning networks". (Stevens,2008)

I didn't realize Twitter had been around as long as it has - I also didn't know it's origins. Lost most of the social media sites it's changed a lot since the beginning!

Great post and I was cracking up at "The Twitter Curve" image. It gave a good explanation to me about what makes Twitter so powerful and its benefits but am also glad it touched on things to be leery of.

This paper, by Ana Maria Marhan examines connectivism and social media. The author points out that because today's learning is a "messy, nebulous, informal, chaotic process, we need to rethink how we design our instruction. This hit home because I just moved to a new state and a new district, and they are very strict with, well, just about everything on the computer! I teach at a Title 1 high school, and these kids would truly benefit from instruction that wasn't so linear. These learners (like all learners) form their own pathways of knowledge, and I believe I could make a stronger impact on them if I could use more tools.

Marhan, A. M. (2006). Connectivism: Concepts and Principles for emerging Learning Networks. In The 1 st Conference on Virtual Learning. In this article author, Ana-Maria Marhan does a good job exploring the principals pushing forward Connectivism as a pedagogical helper. This becomes apparent right from her abstract "Connectivism views learning as a network creation process, and looks at how we might provide 'learning ecologies' to meet the learners' needs.". In her first section, she defines learning as "a persisting change in human performance or performance potential which must come about as a result of the learner's experience and interaction with the world." As soon as I read the last few words "interaction with the world", I began to connect the dots (no pun intended) to what I've read thus far about communities of practice. She spreads out on a handful of relevant and interesting subtopics to the overall theme of Connectivism. After she describes more about the new connected and growing world we live in she tackles the basics of Connectivism as a theory of learning and the principals behind it. Again like other articles she echoes many of the same sentiments George Siemens made when he originally proposed the learning theory. After the background on Siemens theory, she begins to draw everything together. One statement that I enjoyed was "Individual is the starting point of Connectivism: personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into communities, organizations or institutions, which in turn feed back into the network and then continue to provide learning to individual". She does a great job of supporting the use of technology not as the new power of learning but as a tool to unlock that power. "When knowledge, however, is needed but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill".

I also appreciate how Marhan suggests that connected learning is cyclical: "Individual is the starting point of Connectivism: personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into communities, organizations or institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual."

Blog author Steve Wheeler summarizes several writings on connectivism in this blog post. He highlights the connectivist idea that learning occurs outside the individual via social networks and PLNs. He also points to the shift in knowledge acquisition from one of "knowing information (aka memorization)" to "knowing how to locate information." He suggests it's vital that students learn to develop their own networks and personalized learning tools.

I enjoyed the quote from Siemens where he says that students need to find a method to develop their own learning tools, environment, and communities to store their knowledge. As educators, it is more important for us to guide students to find the information they require. Then coach them as to how they can store and display the knowledge they have acquired.

I found his "nutshell" comment about how connectivism argues it's more important to know where to find knowledge than it is to internalise it to be very helpful.

Web 2.0 Science Tools for grade 5-12, categorized by sub-topic. Most are interactive.

5th grade students share horse safety advice suing Audiboo.fm as a social media tool to capture audio but also share it out to the larger community for comments and sharing. There's so much potential with this one!

Provides excellent examples from teachers, worldwide, on how they use social media tools in their classroom to enhance learning.

Lists over 100 ways that different social technologies (and tools) are being used by learning professionals worldwide - compiled from various educators.

I love discovering new sites and apps that combine cool functionality and great design, and Story Map is one of my favorites (along with Flipboard!). Also check out http://timeline.knightlab.com/ for a great timeline tool. I am planning on using one or the other to create a map of all the places I have lived and then share it with my family. Only downside is the lack of documentation or tutorials at this juncture, but it's pretty intuitive. The JS name (Java Script) implies that you might have to do some coding, but it's not the case. Check it out!

This is a good set of tools and instructions for creating and maintaining a PLN.

I found these piece both extremely interesting and valuable. So true the way the author discusses the outcomes of a one-shot workshop vs. a "job-embedded, ongoing" (love the terms!) framework such as PLCs. The main benefits of the PLCs are 1) their are embedded into each school day and are facilitated by teacher support staff and 2) they are not collaboration for collaboration's sake! Instead, they engage teachers into an ongoing dialogue that is of their concern or interest right here, right now! Thus, meaningful collaboration results in meaningful outcomes. Great read!

There's two tools I'm seeing less and less that were included in this blog post. I'm seeing less people using wikis and also Ning seems to have been replaced maybe by Google+? I see this blog as good discussion of using your time wisely and wonder how it might be updated say in 2 or 3 years with new technologies.

This article focuses on creating a link between the wide variety of social networking tools available and the principles of connectivism. Pettenati and Cigognini go so far as to define connectivism as "...social networking applied to learning and knowledge". To support this idea, the authors explore the role of the learner at present, how e-learning, personal learning environments, and Web 2.0 have emerged, and the stages of a connectivist learning experience. The article concludes with the sharing of a scenario in which all of the previously described stages are evident.