ICT4Champions

It's time for SimpleK12's Online Education Conference - a 24 hour Training Extravaganza!  An international conference that's 100% FREE!  No travel.   No registration fees.  We're camping out in the SimpleK12 offices (bunny slippers on, coffee in hand) for 24 hours straight to bring you the best-of-the-best conference sessions with presenters from around the world. We may be crazy… but we're crazy for online professional development!   Won't you join us?  Come to one session, or come to them all (we dare you!).  

If you are a South African educator and would like to know more about technology integration by participating in short free online courses from SchoolNet, please think about joining our next two courses on offer for April and May.

Social networking websites are being used to threaten and make false allegations against teachers.

The First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education massive open online course (mooc) will run from 21 May to 22 June 2012. This mooc is developed by the HEA/JISC funded OpenLine Project at Oxford Brookes University. First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, is targeted at new lecturers, people entering higher education teaching from other sectors and postgraduate students who teach. We also welcome experienced lecturers to update and share their knowledge and expertise. The First Steps course is an element of the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development's (OCSLD) HEA accredited Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PCTHE).

The #edchatsa community is full of insightful, committed and innovative thought-leaders in the South African education space. As a member of this community you are invited to submit a blog post on a subject close to your heart as long as it has connection to education. Your post will then be published and will be available on this site for comment by others. You may want to introduce readers to a particular edtech tool, open debate around a particular topic, challenge paradigms or simply add insight to the #edchatsa topic of the week. You will also be able to point readers to your own blog or social media platforms.

This Guide looks at how to use Facebook for Social Learning - that is to build a community, communicate, collaborate with others, as well as share information and resources. In addition it looks at how it can be used for more specific formal, social learning events and programmes.

Sign up for YouTube for Schools to bring the power of video to your classrooms free of charge. Access thousands of free, high-quality educational videos on YouTube in a controlled environment.

YouTube for Schools lets schools access free educational YouTube videos while limiting access to other YouTube content. Students can learn from more than 400,000 educational videos, from well-known organizations like Stanford, PBS and TED, and from up-and-coming YouTube partners with millions of views, like Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science and numberphile. Schools can also customize their YouTube for Schools experience, adding videos that are only viewable within their school network.

All the edchats are archived here. Great 

A great prezzi mainly geared at ipad users of tools categorised according to educational use. Brilliant resource!

What does Google Moderator do? Google Moderator allows you to create a series about anything that you are interested in discussing and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas, or suggestions. These are called submissions.  Anyone can come to the site and submit a question, idea, or vote, and anyone can vote. Google Moderator shows you a question in the box with the blue background. This is called the Featured Question. A topic is a way to break up your series into smaller, more manageable topics of discussion. You can have one topic, or multiple topics. For example, if you create a series of 'Book clubs' for your organization, topics could be 'Fiction,' 'Non-fiction,' or 'Auto-biographies.'

"Everywhere I look I'm seeing 'Flip teaching' or 'Flipped classroom'. There's a lot of hype about this 'flipping' idea and it's getting me flipping irritated. What does flipping actually involve? Does anyone know, or is the term being misused or misrepresented? Even Aaron Sams, a highly visible proponent of the flipped movement admits that the term is ambiguous. This morning, the May issue of Wired Magazine landed on my doormat, and what did I see inside? An article entitled 'University just flipped'. Well, dip me in mayonnaise. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but when you get down to the fundamentals, isn't flipping the classroom a load of old hat? Haven't we been doing it for years?"

TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.

Educators interested in "flipping" their classroom (that is, providing traditional lecture material for review at home and problem-solving exercises in the classroom) now have two more options to provide core content with a minimum of effort.