Overview from the educators at CAST aligning the digiteen project with UDL guidelines. Digiteen is a project that uniquely allows for digital citizenship education in a project based learning format that also differentiates in powerful ways. Thank you so much for the people at CAST who provide so many great tools and also provide excellent resources for UDL.
My new friend at CAST (and UDL expert) shared this cool resource with me called bookbuilder. This is a link to a presentation and a podcast can be found at - http://www.cyberears.com/cybrss/6373.mp3 about how bookbuilder can be used as a product or tool used students to demonstrate their content knowledge.
I love how each student can have comments or information they post on their slides about a topic. This is very very cool and accessible to all! This presentation demonstrates what can be done and I can't wait to work with the back end!
"In this course, author and educator Chris Mattia demonstrates how to use the Apple iBooks Author application to create and publish your own iBook, without extensive design or publishing experience."
Very Comprehensive. You can follow the course step by step or you can use the table of contents to skip to the specific skill you want. There are video screen casts for everything.
Terry Freedman from the UK makes some great points about expertise in Computing. This is particularly relevant in the UK where every student age 5 and up is expected to be taught programming in school. (Wake up world.)
Terry says:
"Some Principals and Headteachers think that a good way around the problem of teaching computing is to not worry about whether teachers have subject knowledge at all. "All we need are facilitators", they say, "while the kids can teach themselves and each other." This is, as any teacher knows (or should know), easy to say, less easy to do, and not altogether the most desirable thing to do even if you can do it. However, just in case your school happens to be "led" by one of the aforementioned Headteachers, here are some arguments you may want to use. I think that any one of them should suffice, and all of them together make for a cast-iron case."
Read more... this is a topic that will be increasingly discussed in other countries.
How about cutting and pasting the most meaningful mini-exchanges? Or simply get a screen-shot of them (whatever is faster for you) and create a page here for those who can/want to discuss together. Or perhaps people want to use it as inspiration to write reflections in their own blogs when time permits. Please point us to those links!
Not all students are alike. Based on this knowledge, differentiated instruction applies an approach to teaching and learning so that students have multiple options for taking in information and making sense of ideas. The model of differentiated instruction requires teachers to be flexible in their approach to teaching and adjusting the curriculum and presentation of information to learners rather than expecting students to modify themselves for the curriculum. Classroom teaching is a blend of whole-class, group and individual instruction. Differentiated Instruction is a teaching theory based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual and diverse students in classrooms.
"July 31, 2011
By David Glenn
Cambridge, Mass.
This past April in Switzerland, Lawrence Lessig gave an impassioned lecture denouncing publishers' paywalls, which charge fees to read scholarly research, thus blocking most people from access.
It was a familiar theme for Mr. Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who is one of the world's most outspoken critics of intellectual-property laws. But in this speech he gave special attention to JSTOR, a not-for-profit journal archive. He cited a tweet from a scholar who called JSTOR "morally offensive" for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly.
The JSTOR archive is not usually cast as a leading villain by open-access advocates. But Mr. Lessig surely knew in April something that his Swiss audience did not: Aaron Swartz-a friend and former Harvard colleague of Mr. Lessig's-was under investigation for misappropriating more than 4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR.
On July 19, exactly three months after Mr. Lessig's speech, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging that Mr. Swartz had abused computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and disrupted JSTOR's servers. If convicted on all counts, Mr. Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison."