Group items tagged

Make a Christmas card online and download to send. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

A great, simple list maker and task manager site. Just add your tasks with a click and mark them as completed with another. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This is an easy to use online presentation maker. Upload or search for your images, videos or sounds and publish on the web. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A nice collection of tools and resources for your classroom, including a quiz maker, 'Who wants to be a millionaire' game, a random pupil name generator and more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular

There are a lot of great citation makers out there, but one of my favorites is David Warlick's Son of citation machine. He's added the ability to generate a pdf now. This is a great free option and works so well.

A beautifully made virtual word wall and sentence maker. Use the default words or add your own. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

Here's a sample presentation from eMaze. If you look at it, you'll see elements of Prezi and Haiku deck. These simple presentation makers add variety. I prefer to have multiple types of presentation programs to keep our work fresh and interesting.

Dead drops.com has a list of dead drops around the world. Some of my students brought this in as a maker project that they want to do in Friday's #geniushour . Honestly, I'd never heard of this and I'm not sure what I think about this. It could easily be used for great things - sharing photos or making a time capsule of sorts, but it could also be use to pirate files. It is interesting what happens when students bring in ideas.

This app creates a form where the data goes to your dropbox. I know that there are a lot of form makers out there, but this one is a great one if Dropbox is your go to app or if you use it to assess.

A popular website for uploading your best photos and selling them is 500px. You can upload 20 pictures for free a week and have your personal store selling your photos. This is a money maker for those students who are photography buffs.

Tinkering works. Read Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager's book "Invent to Learn" which talks about tinkering and how to use Maker Spaces to promote it to learn more. Great points from Lifehacker: "Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality... it involves a loose process of trying things out, seeing what happens, reflecting and evaluating, and trying again."

NYT article on coding movement, focusing on Mill Valley, CA. Coding should be taught in all schools.

Haiku Deck is one of my all time favorite quick presentation makers when I just have to share something meaningful with my class and only have a few moments to pull it together. (For example, if I realize that students don't know something valuable, etc.) One of the best things about Haiku Deck is its incredible search feature for Creative Commons and automatic citation. If you're 1:1 ipad, this free app is a must have. They are beta testing and online version that should be available soon. Great tool.

Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The paper was co-authored by a group of distinguished education scholars and policy makers, including four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association, a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein, and others. The authors find that the accuracy of these analyses of student test scores is highly problematic. They argue that the practice of holding teachers accountable for their student's test score results should be reconsidered.

I'm sorry, but if this is news to anyone, you've been asleep at your desk. I'm sick of people being all professional about this issue, it is well past time to rebel against it. It's bad for the teachers, it's bad for the students, it's bad for society, and it's bad for the economics of education too! Get active, join a group against NCLB & high-stakes testing, and END IT. I would post the group(s) I work with, but I don't want to be dismissed as promoting them - find one(s) that are right for you and get behind them.

Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day-but many don't fully understand the rules surrounding the appropriate use of these materials, or why this should even matter. To help teach students about intellectual property rights and encourage them to become good "digital citizens," software giant Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a free curriculum that offers cross-curricular classroom activities aligned with national standards. The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program was designed for students in grades 8-10 but can be adapted for use in grades 6-12, Microsoft says. In one unit, students are given a scenario in which a high school sponsors a school-wide Battle of the Bands. A student not involved in the production decides to videotape and sell copies of the show to students and family members. Later, one of the performers ("Johnny") learns his image has been co-opted by the maker of a video game without his permission. Students research intellectual property laws to see who owns the "rights" to the Battle of the Bands as a whole, as well as the rights of individual performers, to determine three or four steps that Johnny can take. http://digitalcitizenshiped.com

John Pederson pointed me to Danah Boyd's post about the new book "Born Digital" by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Danah describes the book as: "Intended for broad audiences, "Born Digital" creates a conversation between adult concerns, policy approaches, technological capabilities, and youth practice. This is not an ethnography, but JP and Urs build on and connect to ongoing ethnographic research concerning digital youth culture. This is not a parent's guide, but JP and Urs's framework will benefit any parent who wishes to actually understand what's taking place and what the implications are. This is not a policy white paper, but policy makers would be foolish to ignore the book because JP and Urs provide a valuable map for understanding how the policy debates connect to practice and technology. The contribution "Born Digital" makes is in the connections that it makes between youth practices, adult fears, technology, and policy. If you care at all about these issues, this book is a MUST-READ." Danah also goes on to give a great disclaimer to the "academics in the room", those who are very wary and weary of the term "Digital Native". I just ordered this from Amazon - can't wait to share my thoughts on it!

"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

NECC is the place for hands-on, interactive learning about how technology and the latest Web 2.0 innovations can transform teaching and learning. Join more than 18,000 teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists, teacher educators, administrators, policy makers, industry representatives, and students from all over the world.

Creative commons remix website for video makers and podcasters. Cool.

Creative commons remix website.

Place to remix and work with podcasts.

Where blogosphere meets twittersphere from the makers of Technorati -- just when you thought Technorati was irrelevant that old authority rating comes back -- time to make sure you're pinging technorati again!