Group items tagged

I love this article which talks about the most common problems when people call customer service. I believe that as I teach my students I should help them become technically fluent to minimize these problems and maximize their potential in this increasingly technical world. The most common problems are: * Users don't know the terminology to describe the problem they have or to know what to look for. * Users haven't studied the problem long enough. * Users don't recognize details or signs which might aid in understanding the problem. * Users might not have easy access to the documentation, may not be qualified to understand it (because of language barriers or technical level), or they may simply not have the time or energy to use it. * Users might be unaware of the status of their computer/account/browser and/or they might be limited in their ability to obtain this information. * Users might have received incorrect or misleading information from someone else, or they might have made incorrect assumptions about the product. * Users may be familiar with one kind of product and lack the appropriate mental model for knowing how the product is supposed to work. * Users might have previous problems in the past and found it easier just to call technical support than to risk aggravating the problem when trying to fix it.

Information on how to help users become more proficient at being helped.

classroom, students, learning, tools, resources, learning aid, special eduation

KNowmania is a very cool website which now has an app. You'll want to look at the online site, but if you're looking at flipping and have detailed screencasts, etc, this is a nice site. It is also an interesting app to have children use to create their own screencasts. "Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so your students and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) an"

Debating global issues is an important part of global competency. Here are some important and sometimes controversial issues like Child soldiers, nuclear weapons, child labor, Aids, poverty. Some very nice frameworks to use as we are ending the school year. After you finish your year end tests, you should consider some global competency lessons in your classroom to help students be aware of the world and also develop critical thinking skills. This is a great place to start.

Useful aide to support teachers and/or pupils embarking on blogging

Laura Fleming is using Makerspace in her classroom. She's at New Milford HIgh School -- a place led by one of the best principals in the business, Eric Sheninger (his new book is awesome - out in January). Laura is using Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard and her Makerspace which includes robotics, stop motion animation and "Molecular gastronomy" and more. Wow. I'm fascinated. Take a look. "Setting up a Makerspace has been a priority of mine from the moment I started here at New Milford High School, and it's already well on its way to being achieved. Having a school principal who provides the perfect mix of encouragement and autonomy has, of course, been a great help, but it has also been very much a team effort: the school's tech team and custodians have been very supportive and cooperative, along with a diverse variety of students interested in 'making' experiences. At the heart of the vision for my Makerspace is to develop the space and to provide resources and opportunities that will aid in promoting web literacy.  These components encompass Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard.  The standard is make up of three key elements:  exploring, building and connecting and focuses on reading, writing and participating on the web.   "

The current plan from the White House on education. Read it and share your annotations.

Read the education plan from the new White House for the US. Some good things here and some things that may be hard to implement. What do you think? Join diigo and mark up the page - there are already quite a few annotations.

Obama's Education Plan annotated

A San Francisco wiki services provider has just finished a multiyear project under which it gave teachers all over the world 100,000 free wikis. And now, it is doubling up and getting set to give away another quarter million. The company, Wikispaces, decided in 2006 that it would make helping teachers use the collaborative software to further cooperation between students, both in their own schools and with schools in other cities and countries, a cornerstone of its business. But while Wikispaces hasn't made any money directly from the project--and in fact has incurred significant costs due to supporting the teachers' use of the wikis--co-founder Adam Frey said the company has found that the educators are just the kind of evangelists that can aid a start-up in building a business.

Students, administrators and teachers at Gilbert Classical Academy have a new tool to express themselves that is rarely tapped by schools as a teaching aid: blogs. Blogs have been available on the Internet for years, offering Web users an opportunity to opine on various subjects and post images in a personal journal that anyone on the Internet can read. But schools have generally not utilized them as a classroom tool because officials have such worries as: What if inappropriate messages are posted? What if a hacker steals personal information on a child or staff member?

our world is now open to the eyes of our students. Technology makes it possible to with a couple of clicks able to read about poverty, TB, or AIDS which is faster access to print resources than we have ever had. It also allows us to make it more powerful through images or video. It even allows us to find great organizations that our kids can help support like XDRTB.org. More importantly we need our kids to learn how to use the tools around them to act as change agents to make their world a better place.

Student created wiki. Thomas Cooper is the teacher behind this project. He teachers at the Walker School in Marietta, GA. Many people believe that child labor and abuse is something of the past, but there could not be more of a false statement. Around the world children are being marginalized, and abused, and forced into labor. Children in Africa are being forced to join the military and kill children and adults alike. Other children are living on the streets because their parents' lives were taken by the AIDS virus. And due to India's class system, young children will live in poverty with no possible way of hope in the future. Children are even forced into prostitution and labor. Childhood deformities and disabilities cause affected children to live in isolation and cause pain and suffering for both them and their families. Be sure to check out the teacher resources in the table of contents.

What is aidRSS AidRSS monitors a blog feed by creating PostRank™ for the posts based on the amount of conversation generated (combination of number of comments, del.icio.us links, tweets, Diggs and Google trackbacks).

Great Visual Aid when talking about the Electoral College. GET OUT AND VOTE!!!

Great tool for making flashcards.

Make flashcards using this easy program

This is a comprehensive flash card study aid site. Make your flashcards to study anything. Add pictures, text and it supports a range of non-alphabetical languages like Chinese and Japanese. You can choose to learn, spell things, test yourself or play games with the information. Browse thousands of sets made by other users without signing in. A free account is required to make your own flashcards. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

all sorts of study help

Make study aids

Mnemonic Dictionary (MD) helps in learning and remembering word and it's meaning easily by providing memory aids (called mnemonics) for each word. Mnemonics connect to-be-remembered meaning of words with a systematic and organized set of images or words that are already firmly established in long-term memory and can therefore serve as reminder cues.

aid for writing labs

he Smithsonian Library's 'Digital Library' contains digital publications, collections and objects including online exhibitions, webcasts, digital editions, bibliographies and fact sheets, and finding aids/inventories for collections such as our trade literature collection and artist files.

education, teachers, students, classroom, resources, tools, e-learning, achievements

Le speech de Obama aux étudiants. Explique la responsabilité que chacun a de trouver sa voix, que l'éducation aide à la trouver.