This Ning has been setup as an educational network to join collaborating ITGS classrooms together in a flattened learning environment starting in August 2010.
K12 Online Conference 2010
Julie Lindsay and Madeleine Brookes
Inside ITGS is about classrooms globally coming together to form an online learning community for the IB subject Information Technology in a Global Society. Madeleine Brookes from Western Academy Beijing and Julie Lindsay from Beijing (BISS) International School, both in China, explore the impact of virtual communication and collaboration and feature the students from pioneer classrooms in a rare face-to-face meeting. It is through their eyes, as cyber-students, that we will learn more about how to use emerging technologies and build stronger more effective learning communities.
Information Technology in a Global Society is the first textbook written specifically for the new IB ITGS syllabus, covering IT systems, social impacts and ethical issues, and each area of application. The text provides engaging content that blends clear examples of technical concepts with consideration of social issues. Discussion points for extended independent learning and complete, modern examples are included to enhance teaching and understanding. Over 200 student exercises and 300 diagrams and photographs are included to clearly explain content and ensure students get the best possible experience from the ITGS course. Support material and additional activities are available on the book's web site.
Award winning global collaborators Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis (co founders of the Flat Classroom Project) are excited to announce the 2012 NetGenEd Project, another global collaboration to envision the future of education and social action by inspiring today's students to study leading technology trends and create their vision for the future.
In this project, students will study and "mash up" the results of the 2012 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and Educause and Tapscott's book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. Students will study the current research and create wiki-reports with their student partners around the world analyzing current trends and projecting future happenings based upon this collaborative analysis. This project is managed by the students who assume roles such as project manager, assistant project manager, and editors of the various wikis.
After compiling their wiki reports based upon current research, and encouraged by "expert advisors" (subject matter experts in the industry), students will then create a video based upon their research in current global technological trends.
Applications open now: http://www.netgened.org/apply.html February 1 deadline extended for interested ITGS classes. Contact julie@flatclassroom.org
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens.
(Note: sometimes ITGS students need to be able to access sites that are sometimes blocked)
The 2 min teaser for our K12 Online Conference 'Indie ITGS: Cyber-students share their connected learning'. Full presentation to be released in a week!
"Small video made in After Effects about the globalisation of McDonalds. Light hearted video."
Although this does not directly relate to an IT system, it is a good introduction for students new to ITGS to help explain the term globalization.
"http://www.warcosts.com
Since 2004, up to 884 innocent civilians, including at least 176 children, have died from US drone strikes in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. A new report from the Stanford and New York University law schools finds drone use has caused widespread post-tramatic stress disorder and an overall breakdown of functional society in North Waziristan. In addition, the report finds the use of a "double tap" procedure, in which a drone strikes once and strikes again not long after, has led to deaths of rescuers and medical professionals. Many interviewees told the researchers they didn't know what America was before drones. Now what they know of America is drones, death and terror. Follow the conversation @WarCosts #UnderDrones"
"The Obama Administration has approved five times the number of covert drone strikes that his predecessor did. Thomson Reuters Digital Editor Chrystia Freeland sits down with Reuters' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist David Rohde to discuss his special report detailing the quiet expansion of presidential power under Obama."