A wonderful YouTube channel featuring over 400 science experiments and activities to try in your class. Each video is succinct and easy to follow.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
There are quite a few activities on this website around Hanukkah including a powerpoint presentation about Holidays around the world. It is a great time to talk about the holidays of many different faiths.
A lovely set of online games and activities for young children to practise their computer, problem solving and thinking skills.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Early+Years
It is our dream that teachers won't have to hunt and search for activities for hours or spend a fortune on materials. We hope to continue to build this site until it is a comprehensive collection of teaching materials across several grades. The site currently focuses on kindergarten-third grade objectives. We have begun with mathematics but will continue to create across subjects.
Many conversations around interactivity in formal learning programs rests on the tools. Does WebEx allow polling? Can you have threaded conversations in Second Life? What if you gave keypads to members of an audience? And those are all good questions. But at the same time, we need to nurture cultures around interactivity that are independent of any technology. We need vocabulary and expectations around interactivity itself.Here's a suggestion, hopefully useful in practice if not in theory:
Level 0: The instructor speaks regardless of audience.
Level 1: The instructor pauses and asks single answer questions of the students.
Level 2: The instructor tests the audience and based on the collective response, skips ahead or backtracks.
Level 3: The instructor asks multiple choice questions of the audience, where a student might have the opportunity to defend different answers, or the instructor asks real time polling questions for data.
Level 5: Students engage labs or other activities and create unique content; however, most solutions will fall into fairly common patterns if done enough times.
Level 4: Students engage labs or other activities that have a single, typically process solution, such as putting together an engine.
Level 6: The students engage in long, open ended activities, such as writing a story or creating and executing a plan, and where the class "ends up" is unpredictable.
Culture, not TechnologyBut again, while technology examples are included, all of this can be done in a traditional classroom.
The implication is not that Level 6 should always be used. Most programs will start ideally at Level 1, and then transition to Level 3, 4, 5, or even 6 as quickly as possible.
The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.
So, is Wikipedia headed out? Some scientists have found that:
"The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively."
I have to wonder if their changes in who can edit has caused this shift. People still look at it (I do) to kick off research.