Group items tagged

"Everyone says that everything moves fast on the Internet, but just how fast are we talking about here? How much data gets shared across the Internet? While you calculate that in your head, take note that we are talking about emails, status posts, tweets and retweets, the downloading of apps and uploading of vacation pictures, streaming of online videos and music, online transactions and the list goes on."

By middle school, children spend more time with digital media than they do with their teachers or even with their parents, according to a recent study. Is the internet a good teacher? Apparently not.

"A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.  These teachers see the internet and digital technologies such as social networking sites, cell phones and texting, generally facilitating teens' personal expression and creativity, broadening the audience for their written material, and encouraging teens to write more often in more formats than may have been the case in prior generations.  At the same time, they describe the unique challenges of teaching writing in the digital age, including the "creep" of informal style into formal writing assignments and the need to better educate students about issues such as plagiarism and fair use"

An emerging group of leaders in Canadian education has attracted thousands of followers. They've made Twitter an extension of their lives, delivering twenty or more tweets a day that can include, for example, links to media articles, research, new ideas from education bloggers, or to their own, or simply a personal thought. At their best, edu-tweeters are adeptly leveraging Twitter to brand themselves, to reinvent teacher PD, and perhaps to accelerate the transformation of our Canadian education systems. Twitter is being used to extend formal PD conferences beyond their venue to followers on Twitter in real time; it's facilitating informal discussions ("unconferences") among educators with common interests; it's allowing best practices to "go viral" on the Internet; and it's allowing innovative classroom teachers to challenge the status quo.

"Presenting the 101 most useful websites of 2012. These sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google."

Amazing stats in Real Time

"The failure of online education programs is not logistical, nor political, nor economic: it's cultural, rooted in our perspectives and biases about how learning happens and how the internet works (these things too often seen in opposition). For learning to change drastically - a trajectory suggested but not yet realized by the rise of MOOCs - teaching must change drastically. "

"Meet Dictation v2.0, a web-based speech recognition app that will transcribe your voice into digital text using the Chrome Speech API. You can also install Dictation as a Chrome App."