Group items tagged

a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags. I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.

for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.

I highly recommend Diigo Educator to any teacher!

I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world.

is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way... you can't have traditional credit hours... you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment -- everything we do in schools -- has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about. The only thing that shouldn't be on the table, and that the video actually hints that it should be, is the need for teachers in their day to day lives-- the adults who can make a deep profound impact in kids' lives.