Group items tagged

"A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser. Wikis allow content to be easily created and updated. They also allow previous versions of documents to be accessible. PBWorks is a Website that allows the creation of wikis. These wikis can be used for educational purposes, for work or in community organisations. This free online course shows you how to create a wiki with PBWorks in an easy, step-by-step manner. This course is ideal for learners who want to learn how to set up a wiki and lack the skills or knowledge to do it. "

Great Web 2.0 Tool list

Exhaustive list of online creation tools for all categories

Learning styles are a way to help improve your quality of learning. By understanding your own personal styles, you can adapt the learning process and techniques you use. This site is dedicated to helping you better understand learning styles, as well as providing an easy way to discover your own styles.

Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.

The strength of Khan Academy's tutorials is content and clear presentation of this content. I didn't find either in Educreations' showcased examples: most could just be presented as a good old slideshow. Granted, a few do have an audio comment. But you can do that with slidecasts too (e.g. you can synch an audio file with your slides on Screencast.net or on MyPlick.com) Moreover, there is no way to caption such Educreations presentations including audio for the deaf, which means they can't be used in schools in US, Italy and other countries that have laws imposing accessibility for all for educational materials. And you can't subtitle them for people who don't know the original language, which severely curtails the potential use. Khan Academy, on the other hand has an international captioning/subtitling team - see http://gigaom.com/video/khan-academy-universal-subtitles/ . So OK, Educreations have an iPad app - the point is that Khan Academy's tutorials don't need one. The real difference is that Educreations' content is crowdsourced and the content of Khan Academy's tutorials isn't: not enough to outweigh the accessibility and internationalization issues above. Teachers can already produce their own online tutorials as slideshows, slidecasts or videos that can be captioned/subtitled in other languages with other platforms.

Virtual instruction has the potential not only to give a large number of students access to top instructors at lower cost but also to provide the incentives to attract and retain top teaching talent in the first place. 

There's a big push on at our school for explicit teaching; this guide provides a useful summary of the main instructional methods available to teachers.

Your cell phone, IM, and social networks are all a digital extension of who you are. When someone you're with pressures you or disrespects you in those places, that's not cool.

Online safety for middle school students.

Join us and fellow ELT professionals from around the world to discuss, reflect on and develop ideas. The 43rd IATEFL Conference will offer many opportunities for professional contact and development. The programme offers over 400 workshops, posters, talks, panel discussions and symposiums by international presenters from over 60 countries.

Alarmist article? Research evidence?

Amid the rhetoric about the validity of concepts such as Digital Natives, GenY, Net Gen etc. an important issue is often overlooked - the need to address the development of skills and competencies required to work, learn and live online in the future. Too often this debate polarises people and disintegrates into arguments over skills vs integration etc.

London times blog about edublogging

London Times article on their picks for education blogs.

Teens are really moving a lot of their relationships to cell phones as Danah Boyd said recently on a Wow2 show. This example of teenage habits of sharing photographs on cell phones is an example. Discussions of cell phone use should be a part of what parents and teachers do with kids. This makes me think twice about allowing cell phone cameras on my children's phones, but I'd rather help them be wise in using it.

Great wiki with best practices in all types of areas.

eToolbox wiki is a wonderful resource, on the Edublogs list of Best Educational Wikis of 2010.

This eToolbox wiki is a wonderful resource, on the Edublogs list of Best Educational Wikis of 2010.

Teaching with maps (whether on the whiteboard or using a set of personal computers) makes learning much more visual, exciting and personally relevant. uLearn is the easiest way to access a range of Ordnance Survey mapping in the UK, plus stunning aerial imagery and historic maps, all in a safe educational environment. Much more than just Geography Use maps as an index, not only to study geographical locations but also alongside uLearn's enormous library of geo-referenced resources. Explore the historic, cultural and factual aspects of your chosen locations across the planet. Just select a topic, zoom in to a place of interest and the resources available will automatically light up. And uLearn's mapping tools are interactive - stitch maps together, add your own photos and videos or annotate them to highlight your teaching focus. uLearn's maps and resources can be manipulated to meet your classroom needs, whatever the curriculum area. Really simple tools for creating lessons Whether using the resources already in uLearn or uploading your own resources, uLearn allows you at the click of a button, to capture the maps and resources for your lesson, ready to use in the classroom. It's as simple as clicking the 'Save current view to playlist' button!

Having just gone through one of those start-of-the-year induction programs at school this article was particularly relevant. If I see another YouTube video telling me that the jobs students are going to have haven't been created yet I'm going to scream!