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Donna Hebert

Usborne Quicklinks: USA: Home - 0 views

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    Nifty resource for all of the content areas.
Annie Evans

Hands-On Math Movie & Activity - Skateboard Flex - 0 views

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    One important quality of a skateboard is its flex, how far the deck will bend when weight is put on it, and how well it snaps back to its original shape.
Ananya Walia

The Art of Collaboration - 0 views

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    Collaboration: arguably, the single most important and under-appreciated thing in business since the Ark of the Covenant was used as a filing cabinet. No matter how challenging the project or important the deadline, people only think of their part - they assume the "communication" thing will happen automatically because people talk all the time.
Ananya Walia

President Obamas Credit Card Statement - 1 views

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    Being a banker and having friends in the white house... priceless...
J Black

Welcome | Wordnik - 0 views

shared by J Black on 08 Jun 09 - Cached
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    Fantastic web app to use for ESL classes because it is so much more than a traditional dictionary... "What is Wordnik? Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them. Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they've found what they consider to be "enough" information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don't want to wait-if you're interested in a word, we're interested too! Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known. By "information," we don't just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be: * An example sentence-even if we've only found one sentence for a word, we'll show it to you. (And we'll show you where the sentence came from, too! * Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. (For instance, cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.) * Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a "pout" looks like? We'll show you. * Statistics: how rare is "tintinnabulation"? Well, we think you'll see it only about once a year. "Smile"? You might see that word many times, every day. * An audio pronunciation-and you can record your own! * Something YOU tell us! Use the "Contribute" links to tell us something-anything-about a word.
J Black

How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom - 0 views

  • Asking students to discuss their classes in a very public forum has got to raise concerns for some people as well. Rankin says participation isn't required, but it's because of these kinds of concerns that private, education focused services like EdModo have a market. That closed communication comes at the expense of public knowledge sharing, but classroom innovators may not be able to have it both ways in the long term.
J Black

Where's the Innovation? | always learning - 0 views

  • Tom refers to this as the “Red Queen Effect” after a scene in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, where Alice is shocked to be standing in the same place after running quite fast for an extended period of time and the Red Queen explains, “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
  • nother Hong Kong presenter, Stephen Heppell, was also careful to emphasize that the biggest challenge today is the pace of change: exponential. With this rapid pace of change there is no time for the “staircase mentality” (pilot, review etc).
  • what are we mistakenly not valuing now?
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  • Tom explained that innovation falls squarely in quadrant 2 of Steven Covey’s matrix: it’s “Important”, but “Not Urgent”. For example, we absolutely have to have a new math/science/reading/social studies program. The teachers can’t teach without one, so picking a new one is going to fall in quadrant 1, and ultimately, innovation gets put off until tomorrow. However, innovation has an urgency all its own and those that don’t place innovation as a priority will find themselves displaced.
  • his is a good example of the difficulty people face in conceptually realizing the advantages of bold innovation: we naturally assume that slow steady progress will be best (as we are taught from an early age, when the tortoise wins the race).
  • The time for innovation is now, as Stephen described (and Marco Torres’ slide below emphasizes), “learning is at a crossroads:” we’re looking at a choice between productivity and new approaches, those new approaches being: student portfolios; making huge leaps in our model of education, not tiny steps forward; working to produce ingenious, engaged, inspired, surprising, collegiate students; and developing learning experiences that are open-ended, project-focused, multidisciplinary.
  • I can’t remember who said this first but, “technology is just an amplifier” - technology doesn’t change the quality of teaching or learning, it will only amplify it, either in a positive or negative way. What we need to be looking at is changing our approaches to learning, not modifying our curriculum to a “newer” version of what we’ve already had for the past 20 years.
  • bsolutely fabulous. This is great stuff. I just wrote a post on Thursday arguing that the “learning management system” paradigm prevents innovation and change. If we don’t break out of it, we’re destined to get out-innovated, as you suggest.
  • I came across a great quote from Frank Tibolt this morning: “We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.”
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Alan Kay
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    Tom explained that innovation falls squarely in quadrant 2 of Steven Covey's matrix: it's "Important", but "Not Urgent".
J Black

The End in Mind » A Post-LMS Manifesto - 0 views

    • J Black
       
      This is a very profound statement that we should closely look at. Do LMS do nothing more than perpetuate the traditional classroom model?
  • Technology has and always will be an integral part of what we do to help our students “become.” But helping someone improve, to become a better, more skilled, more knowledgeable, more confident person is not fundamentally a technology problem. It’s a people problem. Or rather, it’s a people opportunity.
  • The problem with one-to-one instruction is that is simply doesn’t scale. Historically, there simply haven’t been enough tutors to go around if our goal is to educate the masses, to help every learner “become.”
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  • Through experimental investigation, Bloom found that “the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average” of students who studied in a traditional classroom setting with 30 other students
  • We can extend, expand, enhance, magnify, and amplify the reach and effectiveness of human interaction with technology and communication tools, but the underlying reality is that real people must converse with each other in the process of “becoming.”
  • Because the LMS is primarily a traditional classroom support tool, it is ill-suited to bridge the 2-sigma gap between classroom instruction and personal tutoring.
  • undamentally human endeavor that requires personal interaction and communication, person to person.
  • here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.
  • n the post-LMS world, we need to worry less about “managing” learners and focus more on helping them connect with other like-minded learners both inside and outside of our institutions.
  • We need to foster in them greater personal accountability, responsibility and autonomy in their pursuit of learning in the broader community of learners. We need to use the communication tools available to us today and the tools that will be invented tomorrow to enable anytime, anywhere, any-scale learning conversations between our students and other learners
  • However, instead of that tutor appearing in the form of an individual human being or in the form of a virtual AI tutor, the tutor will be the crowd.
  • The paradigm—not the technology—is the problem.
  • Building a better, more feature-rich LMS won’t close the 2-sigma gap. We need to utilize technology to better connect people, content, and learning communities to facilitate authentic, personal, individualized learning. What are we waiting for?
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    A very insightful look into LMS use and student achievment. Highly recommended read for users of BB or Moodle.
J Black

GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid - 0 views

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    With the use of a printed sheet and a web camera, make a hologram - courtesy of GE. Very Cool!!
J Black

Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Orchestrating the Media Collage - 1 views

  • New media demand new literacies. Because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, widely distributed new media tools, being literate now means being able to read and write a number of new media forms, including sound, graphics, and moving images in addition to text.
  • New media coalesce into a collage. Being literate also means being able to integrate emerging new media forms into a single narrative or "media collage," such as a Web page, blog, or digital story.
  • New media are largely participatory, social media. Digital literacy requires that students have command of the media collage within the context of a social Web, often referred to as Web 2.0. The social Web provides venues for individual and collaborative narrative construction and publication through blogs and such services as MySpace, Google Docs, and YouTube. As student participation goes public, the pressure to produce high-quality work increases.
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  • Historically, new media first appear to the vast majority of us in read-only form because they are controlled by a relatively few technicians, developers, and distributors who can understand or afford them. The rest of us only evolve into writers once the new media tools become easy to use, affordable, and widely available, whether these tools are cheap pencils and paper or inexpensive digital tools and shareware.
  • Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play—namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively.
  • n the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan explained that conventional literacy caused us to trade an ear for an eye, and in so doing, trade the social context of the oral tradition for the private point of view of reading and writing. To him, television was the first step in our "retribalization," providing a common social experience that could serve as the basis for dialogue in the global village.2  However, television told someone else's story, not ours. It was not until Web 2.0 that we had the tools to come full circle and produce and consume social narrative in equal measure. Much of the emerging nature of literacy is a result of inexpensive, widely available, flexible Web 2.0 tools that enable anyone, regardless of technical skill, to play some part in reinventing literacy.
  • What is new is that the tools of literacy, as well as their effects, are now a topic of literacy itself.
  • Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.
  • The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.
  • They need to be the guide on the side rather than the technician magician.
J Black

Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:The World at Our Fingertips - 0 views

  • Teaching students to contribute and collaborate online in ways that are both safe and appropriate requires instruction and modeling, not simply crossing our fingers and hoping for the best when they go home and do it on their own.
  • "Now more than ever, students need teachers who can help them sort through choices, apply technology well, and tell their stories clearly and with humanity."
  • Among our authors' guidelines for promoting the skills crucial to using social media well: Value reading and writing more than ever; Blend digital, art, oral, and written literacies; and Teach students to search, evaluate, summarize, interpret, and think and write clearly.
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  • As a result, the way we communicate, read, write, listen, persuade, learn from others, and accomplish community actions is changing. Or, as someone said when we were planning this issue of Educational Leadership, "Literacy—it's not just learning to read a book anymore."
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