Group items tagged

"The site links medical researchers from around the world-and is driving homegrown, locally relevant innovation in developing nations."

do wikis equalize classroom participation?

It seems the privacy issue is never ending and becoming even more of a topic as changes that are supposed to better control privacy make settings even more complicated.  

Ideas for using texting at school.

great article. relevant to today's discussion about web 2.0 / social media. for those who didn't read it. Here's there article's list of interesting sms based tools for education use: Remind101: Remind101 allows teachers to send text messages (and email) home -- to students and/or to parents -- to offer reminders and updates for class. Remind101 allows teachers to communicate with their classes without either teacher or students having to share their phone numbers. Poll Everywhere: As the name suggests, Poll Everywhere allows teachers to use cellphones for polling in class. Students text their responses, using their cellphones to give feedback, answer questions, take quizzes. Celly: Celly provides SMS-based group messaging. Classrooms can use the service to take quick polls and quizzes, filter messages, get news updates, take notes, and organize and hold study groups. The groups can be public or private, moderated or open. StudyBoost: StudyBoost allows students to study via SMS-based quizzes. The questions can be self- or teacher-created, and can be multiple choice or open-ended.

I like Celly for its group messaging and polling applications. Note: The link to "Poll Anywhere" is broken.

banned websites issues

Looking for web-based teaching tools to prepare its students for the future, Kello School in Finland deployed Microsoft Live@edu to give students a rich online learning experience, foster peer collaboration and enable students to work away from school all within a secure online environment.

Tablets' potential for learning, as seen by apple. Thoughts?

I personally see a lot of potential for the use of tablets in education, but I find it interesting that Apple is heavily promoting the ipad for educational uses on its web site, but doesn't offer the educational discount for the iPad.

Tying into discussions this week about bringing access to mobile devices to all via non-prohibitive costs, while still reaching a set of bare-minmum technical specs for actual use: India's "$35 tablet" has been a pipedream in the tech blog-o-sphere for awhile now, but it's finally available (though for a price of roughly $60). Still though, as an actual Android color touch tablet, with WiFi and cellular data capability - I'm curious to see how it's received and if it's adopted in any sort of large scale

I had heard months ago that India was creating this, but was not going to offer it commercially - rather, just for its own country. Just like the Little Professor (Prof Dede) calculator, when tablets get this affordable, educational systems can afford classroom sets of them and then use them regularly. But to Prof Dede's point - can they do everything that more expensive tablets can do? Or better yet - do they HAVE to?

I think this is what they're aiming to do - all classrooms/students across the country having this particular tablet. They won't be able to do everything today's expensive tablets can do, but I think they'll still be able too to do plenty. This $35 tablet's specs are comparable to the mobile devices we had here in the US in 2008/2009. Even back then, we were able to web browse, check email, use social networking (sharing pics and video too), watching streaming online video, and play basic 2D games. But even beyond those basic features, I think this tablet will be able to do more than we expect from something at this price point and basic hardware, for 2 reasons: 1. Wide-spread adoption of a single hardware. If this thing truly does become THE tablet for India's students, it will have such a massive userbase that software developers and designers who create educational software will have to cater to it. They will have to study this tablet and learn the ins-and-outs of its hardware in order to deliver content for it. "Underpowered" hardware is able to deliver experiences well beyond what would normally be expected from it when developers are able to optimize heavily for that particular set of components. This is why software for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and games for video game consoles (xbox, PS3, wii) are so polished. For the consoles especially, all the users have the same exact hardware, with the same features and components. Developers are able to create software that is very specialized for that hardware- opposed to spending their resources and time making sure the software works on a wide variety of hardware (like in the PC world). With this development style in mind, and with a fixed hardware model remaining widely used in the market for many years- the resultant software is very polished and goes beyond what users expect from it. This is why today's game consoles, which have been around since 2005/6, produce visuals that are still really impressive and sta

#edchat A twitter sharing session for teacher's hosted every tuesday 12pm EST. Attempts to foster teacher professional development / updates to research in education. I can't comment till I've tried it. Check out the web site and tell me your thoughts.

This is an old article, but I thought quite appropriate given the discussion in class yesterday. This topic continues to fascinate me and I'd love to hear what you guys think about it.

This recent episode of "The Simpsons" addresses, incidentally (and in a way characteristic of the show), some of the issues we discussed in class. Nothing terribly profound, but I thought it had an amusing satire of modern teacher education programs.

Speaking of crowdsourcing - how about outsourcing grading to the students themselves?  

A fascinating description about how corporate pressures can undermine the "crowdsourcing" model

Article written for mashable by our own classmate Dave Chen. Good work!

"The national health care debate right now is all about giving more people affordable access to doctors and hospitals. Yet the vast majority of health care decisions - 80 percent or more, experts say - are really made by individuals, instead of medical professionals..."

A great visual way for generating word clouds; the phsyical size of the word in the word cloud indicates the number of times a word appears in the document provided to Wordle.

A very interesting way to engage individuals on a personal level via video. It startled me the first time around (see :56). I wonder how quickly the novelty of providing subtle dynamic elements to video would wear off, but if done properly, might have a place in a nonformal educational setting for children ... a new type of personalized learning experience. Ah, and I may have altered the web link a bit to make it a bit more appropriate for our class :)

Schools in Denmark are piloting a program which allows students to use computers with internet access on national writing exams.

This is a website that allows users to find videos from which children (3-18) can learn. All videos are hosted by other sites like YouTube, but content is approved and moderated separately. Comments and discussions are separate from the comments on the original post (i.e. WatchKnow comments do not get added to YouTube and YouTube comments do not appear on WatchKnow). There is heavy emphasis on transparent, widespread monitoring of content. This is accomplished in ways very reminiscent of Wikipedia's moderation methods. Right now, the site has a good number of videos, but lacks a rich community of active users. This means that it is harder to locate quality videos since few users have rated and discussed content.

This website is very similar to an idea I've been brewing for a while (though I believe this site is missing some of the more promising features). I was pleasantly surprised to see professor Dede's name on the Advisory Committee.