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J Black

11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress - 0 views

  • the end result is a moderated directory
  • reate a directory on your website or blog where users can submit information about themselves or their business.
  • ort of image bookmarking service for those who have access
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  • RecruitPress is a fee job board option.
  • Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager Using WordPress and FeedBurner.
  • hosting a forum on your site,
  • contact manager.
  • WordPress Wiki is a premium theme ($30)
  • review site
  • WP e-Commerce is a surprisingly powerful free plugin that will allow you to sell items through your WordPress-powered site or blog.
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    In this article we'll take a look at a combination of tutorials, plugins and themes that can help you to use WordPress in non-traditional ways. Hopefully you'll find something that you can use, or at least something that will be a valuable learning resource for extending your knowledge and skills of working with WordPress.
Bruce Vigneault

President Obama 'has four years to save Earth' | Environment | The Observer - 0 views

  • 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.
    • Bruce Vigneault
       
      America probably won't care until this directly affects their pocket book.
anonymous

anyone who might have time to drop one enaging unit you have done here! - kevinh - #7fihu - 0 views

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    Really interesting use of PLN to share lessons
Henry Thiele

Footprints in the Digital Age - 0 views

  • the online portfolios of who we are, what we do, and by association, what we know—are becoming increasingly woven into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives
  • They're creating all sorts of content—some, as we all know, doing so very badly—and they're doing all sorts of things with online tools that, for the most part, we're not teaching them anything about. In the process, they're becoming Googleable without us. By and large, they do all this creating, publishing, and learning on their own, outside school, because when they enter the classroom, they typically "turn off the lights"
  • these shifts demand that we move our concept of learning from a "supply-push" model of "building up an inventory of knowledge in the students' heads" (p. 30) to a "demand-pull" approach that requires students to own their learning processes and pursue learning, based on their needs of the moment, in social and possibly global communities of practice.
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  • They need to know that publishing has a nobler goal than just readership—and that's engagement.
    • Henry Thiele
       
      Our teachers need to focus on engagement as well
  • "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online
  • And older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online.
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    Will Richardson In the Web 2.0 world, self-directed learners must be adept at building and sustaining networks.
Morris Pelzel

How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom - 0 views

  • it's going to take a long time for academe to figure out what to do with all the technology it already has
  • If an institution truly wishes to encourage innovations in its curriculum, it must devote resources to those innovations.
  • IT-staff members with teaching experience and an understanding of the mission of liberal-arts education need a place in which to demonstrate the latest technologies. And they need both space and time to help professors develop new types of lessons, assignments, and grading methods that can fundamentally change how teaching and learning happen.
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  • But that is how IT-staff members must help in the development of teaching methods for the wired world. They are the ones who should try out the newest technologies, winnow out the fads or the tools that can't be adapted for use by thousands or millions of students, and figure out how to align the best tools with the best teaching methods. Without that experimentation, the instruction we offer will never be truly innovative.
Dave Truss

Pearson Presents: Learning to Change - Practical Theory - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Because nowhere in that talk
  • "If we just change it all up, the kids will all suddenly just start learning like crazy" when that misses several points -- 1) we still have an insanely anti-intellectual culture that is so much more powerful than schools. 2) Deep learning is still hard, and our culture is moving away from valuing things that are hard to do. 3) We still need teachers to teach kids thoughtfulness, wisdom, care, compassion, and there's an anti-teacher rhetoric that, to me, undermines that video's message.
  • We cannot pretend these ideas "save" our schools, they create different schools -- better ones, I believe -- but very, very different ones, and that's the piece I see missing.
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    I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world.... 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.
Sarah Hanawald

Technology Review: Social Networking Hits the Genome - 0 views

    • Sarah Hanawald
       
      OK, I'm scared.
    • Sarah Hanawald
       
      remember Gattica?
  • a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA.
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  • encourage consumers to get DNA testing, potentially creating a novel research resource in the process
  • people can find each other by their alleles
  • most of the controversy centered on the medical applications. Customers can learn their genetic risk, compared with the general population, of myriad diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes, macular degeneration, and cancer. But many scientists and physicians say that it's unclear whether the average user can truly comprehend this information, and whether knowing her genetic risk will actually improve her health
  • allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data
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    Freaky. Reminds me of the sci fi of the 90's.
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    Worth a mention?
Jennifer Maddrell

Twubble - 0 views

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    Looking for more people to follow? Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble-it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow. Click the button below to get started. Loading...
Bruce Vigneault

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) - 0 views

  • It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
    • Bill Guinee
       
      I have a stack of books I should be reading right now, but I am cruizing the internet instead.
  • Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
    • Bruce Vigneault
       
      Maybe we are learning a new mental skill and as a choice are letting go of a skill that we no longer find useful?
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  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
    • Bruce Vigneault
       
      I'm not sure that this is necessarily a 'bad thing'?
  • I’ve lost the ability to do that
  • “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • “We are how we read.
  • mere decoders of information
  • Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
  • our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • Bruce Vigneault
       
      It is scary to beleive that this organic change to our brain is being driven by commercialism!
  • In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”
    • Bruce Vigneault
       
      Ahhh... so with each new step in technology this same 'scare' is felt by the elite ;)
  • The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.
  • I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.
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    What the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Jeff Johnson

Literacyworks: Improving Literacy Skills through Comic Books - 1 views

  • One of the tenets of literacy programs is that people will learn more when it's related to a subject that interests them. Voice of America reports that educators in New York are applying that idea with their grade-school students by offering opportunities to create comic books. Michael Bitz, who created the Comic Book Project, acknowledges that it's difficult to determine a definite link between the project and its effect on students' literacy skills, but the program focuses just as much on the writing of comic books as the artwork. But the success of the program is clear: engage students with subjects that interest them, and they'll show dedication to learning.
Rick L

Schreiberling from MOApp - 0 views

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    To me, this a much cleaner alternative to Scrivener for those who want an environment conducive to writing (as opposed to word-processing). Mac OS X only.
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    a lightweight writing application for OS X
S Buhner

On-line Mentoring Logs - 43 views

I need to develop on-line mentoring logs for my teacher mentors. Anyone done it before or know of a site or group who is using these already? I just need some pointers. Our district uses SharePoint...

started by S Buhner on 03 Jun 08 no follow-up yet
John Onwuegbu

Questechie - Trends In Internet Technology - 0 views

    • John Onwuegbu
       
      Twitter ready to launch Search Engine??? Read More: http://questechie.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-ready-to-launch-search-biz.html
  • According to the Twitter's official blog post on wednesday, the company is getting ready to launch a search engine that would make it possible for users to search for keywords and phrases being used by the people they follow on the popular messaging site.
  • Although IE8's security promise has already been marred to an extent -- it was hacked the day before its official rollout -- it may escape the potentially serious fallout from using JavaScript. IE8 was cracked at the 10th annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada, Wednesday by a hacker who identified himself only as "Nils." To be fair, the first browser to go down at the hacking contest at CanSecWest was Apple's Safari.
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    Trends in internet technology, news articles and reviews
J Black

The End in Mind » A Post-LMS Manifesto - 0 views

  • Technology has and always will be an integral part of what we do to help our students “become.” But helping someone improve, to become a better, more skilled, more knowledgeable, more confident person is not fundamentally a technology problem. It’s a people problem. Or rather, it’s a people opportunity.
  • The problem with one-to-one instruction is that is simply doesn’t scale. Historically, there simply haven’t been enough tutors to go around if our goal is to educate the masses, to help every learner “become.”
  • Through experimental investigation, Bloom found that “the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average” of students who studied in a traditional classroom setting with 30 other students
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    • J Black
       
      I agree - for example, blogging within a LMS does not allow this, whereas blogging with a known host (Blogger, WP) does help students to connect with others inside and outside of the learning environment/institution.
    • J Black
       
      This is a very profound statement that we should closely look at. Do LMS do nothing more than perpetuate the traditional classroom model?
  • here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.
  • We can extend, expand, enhance, magnify, and amplify the reach and effectiveness of human interaction with technology and communication tools, but the underlying reality is that real people must converse with each other in the process of “becoming.”
  • Because the LMS is primarily a traditional classroom support tool, it is ill-suited to bridge the 2-sigma gap between classroom instruction and personal tutoring.
  • undamentally human endeavor that requires personal interaction and communication, person to person.
  • n the post-LMS world, we need to worry less about “managing” learners and focus more on helping them connect with other like-minded learners both inside and outside of our institutions.
  • We need to foster in them greater personal accountability, responsibility and autonomy in their pursuit of learning in the broader community of learners. We need to use the communication tools available to us today and the tools that will be invented tomorrow to enable anytime, anywhere, any-scale learning conversations between our students and other learners
  • However, instead of that tutor appearing in the form of an individual human being or in the form of a virtual AI tutor, the tutor will be the crowd.
  • The paradigm—not the technology—is the problem.
  • Building a better, more feature-rich LMS won’t close the 2-sigma gap. We need to utilize technology to better connect people, content, and learning communities to facilitate authentic, personal, individualized learning. What are we waiting for?
    • J Black
       
      Bingo
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    A very insightful look into LMS use and student achievment. Highly recommended read for users of BB or Moodle.
Jez Cope

Why Technology? by Ben Grey - 0 views

  • asked as a pedagogical inquisition rather than the way it's being framed in too many districts as of late.
  • many districts who have been increasing the use of technology in the classroom steadily over the past ten years, yet their test scores remain static.
sontimalonti

Here Be Dragons: An Introduction to Critical Thinking - 0 views

  • Here Be Dragons is a free 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. It is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display.
    • Russel Tarr
       
      I thought this would be a very nice video to use with students who are studying "Theory of Knowledge" at IB.
  • Here Be Dragons is a free 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. It is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display.
  • Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media. Here Be Dragons offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.
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    "science never suppresses good science! - intrduction to debunking claims of paranormals & pseudoscientists.
J Black

Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:The World at Our Fingertips - 0 views

  • Teaching students to contribute and collaborate online in ways that are both safe and appropriate requires instruction and modeling, not simply crossing our fingers and hoping for the best when they go home and do it on their own.
  • "Now more than ever, students need teachers who can help them sort through choices, apply technology well, and tell their stories clearly and with humanity."
  • Among our authors' guidelines for promoting the skills crucial to using social media well: Value reading and writing more than ever; Blend digital, art, oral, and written literacies; and Teach students to search, evaluate, summarize, interpret, and think and write clearly.
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  • As a result, the way we communicate, read, write, listen, persuade, learn from others, and accomplish community actions is changing. Or, as someone said when we were planning this issue of Educational Leadership, "Literacy—it's not just learning to read a book anymore."
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