Too many advocates rely on weak arguments, such as “students are digital natives, so we should use more technology,” as if schools should have used radio and TV more often when earlier generations grew up with those media.
I have a problem with the analogy that schools in the past should have used more radio and TV comparing to now with technology. That's apples and oranges. Or at least tangarines and oranges. The majority of jobs today require the use of technology. Even cashiers at Walmart! Not so for radios and TV in the past. We're not using technology because our kids are growing up with that media. We're using technology because our kids are growing up REQUIRING that media.
The idea of SIMPLE SCIENCE is to have informative music video
presentations for use in the primary school classroom.
They are designed to be used as part of a lesson to reinforce learning objectives and scientific concepts and also as a useful
revision tool for the SAT exams.
They work particularly well on a large whiteboard but can also be
viewed on the computer screen and TV.
The idea of SIMPLE SCIENCE is to have informative music video
presentations for use in the primary school classroom.
They are designed to be used as part of a lesson to reinforce learning objectives and scientific concepts and also as a useful
revision tool for the SAT exams.
They work particularly well on a large whiteboard but can also be
viewed on the computer screen and TV.
"The team at Night Zookeeper is delighted to be giving primary school children across the UK a unique opportunity to use a new (and free!) website to create characters for a soon-to-launch animated TV series in a world first."
In a huge turn of irony, at least if one considers how Bill Gates began his programming career, a spat over Office 365 coming to the ipad and Apple's desire to get 30% commissions for anyone signing up for the service if it originates on the ipad, may mean that office 365 won't come to the ipad at all. The evolution of the platform to tablet devices is critical to software companies and yet, many balk at the steep cut some like Apple take. It is interesting to watch, but there is a bigger issue here. Microsoft continues to have the best Office suite, but, as with Google Drive, many move because of a lack of ubiquity and collaborative ability driven by the walls erected by Microsoft in their traditional, but understandable proprietary system. I have to think that there are bigger issues at stake for Microsoft here. These are interesting times, to say the least, as I sit here watching Batman on my Apple TV streaming via the wifi and read this article on my ipad as I blog in the den using a bluetooth logitech keyboard.
This is a wonderfully designed site to learn Mandarin Chinese. It uses a huge collection of Chinese TV programmes and movie clips with interactive and dual-language subtitles. Click on a Chinese character is see the translation and hear the pronunciation. You can set your ability level and also what sort of media you are interested in.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture
There's a new "cable tv" in town... YouTube.
That's right. YouTube may be launching paid premium channels this week. It will be quite interesting to see what happens if a video goes viral behind a paywall and if the free-for-all online video network will disenfranchise its netizens or if youth will take their game elsewhere.
Of course, YouTube must continue to monetize and make development of content worth it for their content creators, but it will be interesting to see what happens, particularly with new networks like Vine cropping up around sharing video.
This is a truly amazing iPad app and 'soon to be launched' download for PCs which replaces a whole TV crew and studio. Capture your video and audio use like adjusting the sound levels, an in-build teleprompter and green screen effects to make spectacular footage. Edit your video directly in the app and add images, websites and Twitter feed as cutaways sections of the screen. You can publish online and export to YouTube. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchcast/id603258418http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams
I saw this on Fran Drescher's Twitter account from the Cincinnati Business courier and am quite floored by it. Am I the only one who doesn't know this? How about all of the little kids I see where parents are handing them their ipad and smart phones for play purposes. I jusst need to know more but it is based on a study presented at the Pediatric Academic societies meeting in DC. Of course, they recommend hand washing.
But pregnant women should be careful - a 10x increase in maternal PBDE's is associated with a 4 point IQ deficit. Of course, we also have the age old question here of causation or correlation. I do think we need to know more and also if the equipment we're purchasing to use with young children has PBDEs in them.
If you know more, please leave comments. It does say that some manufacturers are voluntarily phasing these out.
"Small children should not touch electronic items such as TVs, mobile phones, computers and other products, according to University of Cincinnati researchers.
Chemicals found in such items and in many other products, including older carpets and furniture, can cause behavioral and cognition problems, they have found."
Reddit is increasingly a site where technology news breaks as well as having a tight integration with top technology sites like Twit.tv (they use Reddit to curate topics for the show.) This app is the highest recommended app for using reddit on the ipad and for that reason I've installed it.
The sooner kids realize that most magazine images are photoshopped, the better. I remember a model on a tv show being asked what it feels to look like her and responding thatbwith all the photoshop on her photos that she wished she looked like herself too! This is a great thing and some would like advertisers to start disclosing the percentage of their photos that are photoshopped.
If you want to see exactly how a LiveScribe pen works, this is an excellent tutorial video. It isn't super fast but it shows you how it really works from beginning to end. This demo is how to create a pencast. Although some of you may be doing this on your ipad using some of the new apps, the Livescribe pen is a sub $100 pen that is very powerful. If you prefer to take notes you can record everything on the pen. I've had one and really enjoy it.
A well made flash version of the TV show 'Deal or No Deal' with lot of maths possibilities, such as comparing large numbers, place value or probability.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
Since I've been exploring the @TESConnect site as part of the work I'm doing highlighting the best resources of TES that apply to US teachers, I've been drawn to some of the World War 2 footage from the site. This video is Children in World War 2 and I think it is especially helpful to pull video footage from other countries when talking about wars, etc. to gain multiple perspectives. What about drilling down to look at other wars as well?