The noted philosopher once said, "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the fact of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.
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Wolfram Education Portal - 0 views
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Their portal for Education. "Wolfram Research is dedicated to the advancement of science and mathematics education. For both students and educators, this educational portal contains a collection of resources spanning all precollege grade levels, including dynamic classroom Demonstrations from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. Explore the topics below to find Demonstrations for your classroom or for individual study."
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Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:What Would Socrates Say? - 0 views
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Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate. We need to approach the contemporary knowledge explosion and the technologies propelling this new enlightenment in just that manner. Otherwise, the great knowledge and communication tsunami of the 21st century may drown us in a sea of trivia instead of lifting us up on a rising tide of possibility and promise.
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A child born today could live into the 22nd century. It's difficult to imagine all that could transpire between now and then. One thing does seem apparent: Technical fixes to our outdated educational system are likely to be inadequate. We need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
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Every day we are exposed to huge amounts of information, disinformation, and just plain nonsense. The ability to distinguish fact from factoid, reality from fiction, and truth from lies is not a "nice to have" but a "must have" in a world flooded with so much propaganda and spin.
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For example, for many years, the dominant U.S. culture described the settling of the American West as a natural extension of manifest destiny, in which people of European descent were "destined" to occupy the lands of the indigenous people. This idea was, and for some still is, one of our most enduring and dangerous collective fabrications because it glosses over human rights and skirts the issue of responsibility. Without critical reflection, we will continually fall victim to such notions.
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A second element of the 21st century mind that we must cultivate is the willingness to abandon supernatural explanations for naturally occurring events.
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The third element of the 21st century mind must be the recognition and acceptance of our shared evolutionary collective intelligence.
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To solve the 21st century's challenges, we will need an education system that doesn't focus on memorization, but rather on promoting those metacognitive skills that enable us to monitor our own learning and make changes in our approach if we perceive that our learning is not going well.
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Metacognition is a fancy word for a higher-order learning process that most of us use every day to solve thousands of problems and challenges.
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We are at the threshold of a worldwide revolution in learning. Just as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the wall of conventional schooling is collapsing before our eyes. A new electronic learning environment is replacing the linear, text-bound culture of conventional schools. This will be the proving ground of the 21st century mind.
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We will cease to think of technology as something that has its own identity, but rather as an extension of our minds, in much the same way that books extend our minds without a lot of fanfare. According to Huff and Saxberg, immersive technologies—such as multitouch displays; telepresence (an immersive meeting experience that offers high video and audio clarity); 3-D environments; collaborative filtering (which can produce recommendations by comparing the similarity between your preferences and those of other people); natural language processing; intelligent software; and simulations—will transform teaching and learning by 2025.
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So imagine that a group of teachers and middle school students decides to tackle the question, What is justice? Young adolescents' discovery of injustice in the world is a crucial moment in their development. If adults offer only self-serving answers to this question, students can become cynical or despairing. But if adults treat the problem of injustice truthfully and openly, hope can emerge and grow strong over time. As part of their discussion, let's say that the teachers and students have cocreated a middle school earth science curriculum titled Water for the World. This curriculum would be a blend of classroom, community, and online activities. Several nongovernmental organizations—such as Waterkeeper, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Water for People—might support the curriculum, which would meet national and state standards and include lessons, activities, games, quizzes, student-created portfolios, and learning benchmarks.
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The goal of the curriculum would be to enable students from around the world to work together to address the water crisis in a concrete way. Students might help bore a freshwater well, propose a low-cost way of preventing groundwater pollution, or develop a local water treatment technique. Students and teachers would collaborate by talking with one another through Skype and posting research findings using collaborative filtering. Students would create simulations and games and use multitouch displays to demonstrate step-by-step how their projects would proceed. A student-created Web site would include a blog; a virtual reference room; a teachers' corner; a virtual living room where learners communicate with one another in all languages through natural language processing; and 3-D images of wells being bored in Africa, Mexico, and Texas. In a classroom like this, something educationally revolutionary would happen: Students and adults would connect in a global, purposeful conversation that would make the world a better place. We would pry the Socratic dialogue from the hands of the past and lift it into the future to serve the hopes and dreams of all students everywhere.
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There has never been a time in human history when the opportunity to create universally accessible knowledge has been more of a reality. And there has never been a time when education has meant more in terms of human survival and happiness.
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To start, we must overhaul and redesign the current school system. We face this great transition with both hands tied behind our collective backs if we continue to pour money, time, and effort into an outdated system of education. Mass education belongs in the era of massive armies, massive industrial complexes, and massive attempts at social control. We have lost much talent since the 19th century by enforcing stifling education routines in the name of efficiency. Current high school dropout rates clearly indicate that our standardized testing regime and outdated curriculums are wasting the potential of our youth.
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If we stop thinking of schools as buildings and start thinking of learning as occurring in many different places, we will free ourselves from the conventional education model that still dominates our thinking.
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Blogging helps encourage teen writing | Top News | eSchoolNews.com - 9 views
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Blogging is helping many teens become more prolific writers.
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it and revise their writing on a computer, the report says. Nearly six in 10 students (57 percent) say they edit and revise more frequently when they write using a computer. Teens who use a computer in their non-school writing believe computers have a greater impact on the amount of writing they produce than on the overall quality of their writing. Yet, there is a great deal of ambiguity with respect to the impact of computers in each of these areas. Among teens who use computers in their non-school writing, four in 10 say computers help them do more writing, and a similar number believe they would write the same amount whether they used computers or not. In comparison, only three in 10 teens who write on computers for non-school purposes at least occasionally believe computers help them do better writing–and twice as many (63 percent) say computers make no difference in the quality of their writing. Parents are more likely than teens to believe that internet-based writing (such as eMail and instant messaging) affects writing skills overall, though both groups are split on whether electronic communications help or hurt. Nonetheless, 73 percent of teens and 40 percent of parents believe internet writing makes no difference either way. Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further–and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class. The telephone-based survey of 700 U.S. residents ages 12 to 17 and their parents was conducted last year from Sept. 19 to Nov. 16 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. Link: "Writing, Technology, and Teens" survey var a2a_config = a2a_config || {}; a2a_config.linkname="Blogging helps encourage teen writing"; a2a_config.linkurl="http://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/04/30/blogging-helps-encourage-teen-writing/"; Comments are closed &amp;lt;script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vj?z=eschool&amp;amp;dim=173789&amp;amp;pos=6&amp;amp;abr=$scriptiniframe"&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&amp;lt;noscript&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/cc?z=eschool&amp;amp;pos=6"&amp;gt;&amp;lt;img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vc?z=eschool&amp;amp;dim=173789&amp;amp;pos=6&amp;amp;abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/noscript&amp;gt; Recent Stories with Comments Kentucky offers cloud-based software to 700,000 school usersNo access for bad guysU.S. court weighs school discipline for lewd web postsParent video protesting state budget cuts goes viralEditorial: Threats to innovation <SCRIPT language='JavaScript1.1' SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N5621.125531.9553987353421/B3794502.5;abr=!ie;sz=300x250;click=;ord=996778?"> </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT> <A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N5621.125531.9553987353421/B3794502.5;abr=!ie4;abr=!ie5;sz=300x250;ord=996778?"> <IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N5621.125531.9553987353421/B3794502.5;abr=!ie4;abr=!ie5;sz=300x250;ord=996778?" BORDER=0 WIDTH=300 HEIGHT=250 ALT="Click Here"></A> </NOSCRIPT> Educator Resource Centers Computing in the Cloud How technology can help with language instruction Communication and Collaboration for More Effective School Management Expert Blog: Security Insights Boost Student Achievement with Connected Teaching Private: Testing ERC Page Solving key IT challenges with virtualization Online Learning: One Pathway to Success Re-imagining Education One-to-one computing: The last piece of the puzzle Recent Entries Customers question tech industry’s takeover spree New rules bring online piracy fight to U.S. campuses Judge orders school newspaper to delete stories Ed-tech grant program aims to boost college readiness Lawmakers tra
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We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 2 views
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What do you think? Is ignorance of the tools of the web excusable? Should we let them off the hook?
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Oh, and read down through the comments, as well. The discussion continues there.
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"...if you're not doing what needs to be done, then you should get out of the way to make room for someone who will." This statement assumes everyone who uses digital technology "know what needs to be done." After viewing many videos during our class I believe there is a direction we should be going in, but nobody really 'knows' what needs to be done. Just like every politician and irrate blogger seems to have the answer. The "get with us or get out of the way" statments concern me the most. If a student doesn't subscribe to what we're teaching do we then shuffle them off to alternate school? No, we try something different whether it's Web 2.0 or something else. It's what we call the 'art' of teaching. Whether we're teaching students or educators, as long as we're willing to try something new, not just jump on the bandwagon, then our students will learn to adjust and be flexible also.
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I don't think we can let educators off the hook. I feel like some just ignore where the world is going and feel save and comfortable in what they know. Well, who isn't. We don't become better teachers, friends, parents, or people by keeping things to same. You have to change and adapt in order to be successful. We aren't just teaching students. We are preparing the future generation. Those students will become all of things we are and we know - if we don't prepare them for what their world WILL look like, what are we doing? Are we even doing our job? We must be held accountable.
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No, we should not allow colleges who train our teachers off the hook either. We need to support and train teachers in these various tools. We also need to make sure they have the hardware was well as our kids. All too often these authors think everyone including kids have access to computers/internet 24/7. Some of our teachers do not have this access in their homes.
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I also like this paragraph. The idea of life-long learnining has to embrace change. I understand that adapting is difficult because it requires teachers to constantly reconstruct their teaching. However, I agree that this needs to take place in order for education to effectively meet the needs of students.
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If you’re a teacher / administrator / librarian / education professor that somehow ‘doesn’t even realize [yet] that there’s a decision to be made,’ should you even be working in a school or university? Don’t our children and our school systems need and deserve someone who’s in a different place than you are?
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It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.
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"If you're a teacher / administrator / librarian / education professor that somehow 'doesn't even realize [yet] that there's a decision to be made,' should you even be working in a school or university? Don't our children and our school systems need and deserve someone who's in a different place than you are? It's one thing to still be a learner; heck, we're all learners with this technology stuff. It's another to opt out or not even recognize the choice. If we look at what our kids need, shouldn't we replace you with someone else? "
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What do you think of this post? Look for the sticky note and let's discuss it.
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Gates Ideas - 0 views
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Welcome to the Gates Ideas website. Look around to find information about my workshops, resources, and other services that I provide. I bring a lifetime of experience in education and a passion for all things technology to the table to help you find and use the right tool for the job. It’s all about getting the kids actively engaged in their learning. I demand a world class education for all children. Say it with me - "I demand a world class education for all children!"
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I agree - all children deserve a world class education. Technology is a great way to engage students ... of all ages, including graduate students.
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World class education for all.....I wonder if I will see this in my lifetime?
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Actively engaged is the way to go. Having students become the educators and the teacher the facilitor is awesome.
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James Gates, Consultant
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One of our goals is to encourage and provide training so that teachers see technology as an enhancement and not a replacement for their current technique.
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New: 10 of the best Apple apps for education in 2012 | eSchool News - 0 views
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Friday Institute for Educational Innovation - 1 views
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"Bringing together students, teachers, researchers, policy-makers, educational professionals, and other community members, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation is a center for fostering collaborations to improve education."
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Watch some of the videos. Where do those assignments reach on the Bloom's scale?
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A Fistful of Challenges for Ed Tech -- THE Journal - 2 views
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In the fourth slot was nothing short of the "fundamental structure of the K-12 education establishment," specifically, as the authors described it, "resistance to any profound change in practice."
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The lack of congruence between what students are learning outside of school and what they're being taught in the classroom is causing a disconnect in educational practices.
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The existence of a wealth of online tools and communications tools is allowing teachers to "to revisit our roles as educators."
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"As IT support becomes more and more decentralized, the technologies we use are increasingly based not on school servers, but in the cloud,
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"The digital divide, once seen as a factor of wealth, is now seen as a factor of education
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Digital literacy will also play an increasing role in career advancement, according to the report.
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The ways we design learning experiences must reflect the growing importance of innovation and creativity as professional skills."
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"It has become clear that one-size-fits-all teaching methods are neither effective nor acceptable for today’s diverse students," according to the report. "Technology can and should support individual choices about access to materials and expertise, amount and type of educational content, and methods of teaching."
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Education Week: Filtering Fixes - 0 views
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Instead of blocking the many exit ramps and side routes on the information superhighway, they have decided that educating students and teachers on how to navigate the Internet’s vast resources responsibly, safely, and productively—and setting clear rules and expectations for doing so—is the best way to head off online collisions.
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“We are known in our district for technology, so I don’t see how you can teach kids 21st-century values if you’re not teaching them digital citizenship and appropriate ways of sharing and using everything that’s available on the Web,” said Shawn Nutting, the technology director for the Trussville district. “How can you, in 2009, not use the Internet for everything? It blows me away that all these schools block things out” that are valuable.
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While schools are required by federal and state laws to block pornography and other content that poses a danger to minors, Internet-filtering software often prevents students from accessing information on legitimate topics that tend to get caught in the censoring process: think breast cancer, sexuality, or even innocuous keywords that sound like blocked terms. One teacher who commented on one of Mr. Fryer’s blog posts, for example, complained that a search for biographical information on a person named Thacker was caught by his school’s Internet filter because the prohibited term “hacker” is included within the spelling of the word.
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The K-2 school provides e-mail addresses to each of its 880 students and maintains accounts on the Facebook and Twitter networking sites. Children can also interact with peers in other schools and across the country through protected wiki spaces and blogs the school has set up.
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“Rather than saying this is a scary tool and something bad could happen, instead we believe it’s an incredible tool that connects you with the entire world out there. ... [L]et’s show you the best way to use it.”
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As Trussville students move through the grades and encounter more-complex educational content and expectations, their Internet access is incrementally expanded.
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In 2001, the Children’s Internet Protection Act instituted new requirements for schools to establish policies and safeguards for Internet use as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding. Many districts have responded by restricting any potentially troublesome sites. But many educators and media specialists complain that the filters are set too broadly and cannot discriminate between good and bad content. Drawing the line between what material is acceptable and what’s not is a local decision that has to take into account each district’s comfort level with using Internet content
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The American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennesee’s Knox County and Nashville school districts on behalf of several students and a school librarian for blocking Internet sites related to gay and lesbian issues. While the districts’ filtering software prohibited students from accessing sites that provided information and resources on the subject, it did not block sites run by organizations that promoted the controversial view that homosexuals can be “rehabilitated” and become heterosexuals. Last month, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit after school officials agreed to unblock the sites.
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Students are using personal technology tools more readily to study subject matter, collaborate with classmates, and complete assignments than they were several years ago, but they are generally asked to “power down” at school and abandon the electronic resources they rely on for learning outside of class, the survey found. Administrators generally cite safety issues and concerns that students will misuse such tools to dawdle, cheat, or view inappropriate content in school as reasons for not offering more open online access to students. ("Students See Schools Inhibiting Their Use of New Technologies,", April 1, 2009.)
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A report commissioned by the NSBA found that social networking can be beneficial to students, and urged school board members to “find ways to harness the educational value” of so-called Web 2.0 tools, such as setting up chat rooms or online journals that allow students to collaborate on their classwork. The 2007 report also told school boards to re-evaluate policies that ban or tightly restrict the use of the Internet or social-networking sites.
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Federal Requirements for Schools on Internet Safety The Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, is a federal law intended to block access to offensive Web content on school and library computers. Under CIPA, schools and libraries that receive funding through the federal E-rate program for Internet access must: • Have an Internet-safety policy and technology-protection measures in place. The policy must include measures to block or filter Internet access to obscene photos, child pornography, and other images that can be harmful to minors; • Educate minors about appropriate and inappropriate online behavior, including activities like cyberbullying and social networking; • Adopt and enforce a policy to monitor online activities of minors; and • Adopt and implement policies related to Internet use by minors that address access to inappropriate online materials, student safety and privacy issues, and the hacking of unauthorized sites. Source: Federal Communications Commission
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“We believe that you can’t have goals about kids’ collaborating globally and then block their ability to do that,” said Becky Fisher, the Virginia district’s technology coordinator.
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Education Update:Reading the Blueprint:Dawn of the New Literacies - 0 views
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desultory
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the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology has upped the technology ante with the release of its National Education Technology Plan in Spring 2010.
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The plan states, "The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures."
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21st century concept of authorship
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teachers need to guide students to be critical readers "who can evaluate online information for credibility, timeliness, accuracy, and even hidden agendas,"
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The new generation, sometimes dubbed "screenagers," does much more with technology outside school. Through social networking sites and wireless gizmos, kids are reading; texting; connecting socially; and making their own digital creations, from music mashups to backyard, YouTube-ready videos.
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Copyright Alliance Education Foundation - 2 views
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Educators' Workshop The material in this guide will help librarians and media specialists in their efforts to inform other educators about copyright. It includes a quiz, tips on designing a workshop, and a chart of available classroom materials. Educators' Guide This comprehensive 13-page guide is designed for teachers of all grades and subject areas and includes: an overview of copyright, FAQ section, glossary and standards charts for all the classroom curricula available on this web site.
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"The issues surrounding copyright have never been more visible. But the classroom presents its own copyright-related challenges, for students and teachers alike. How is an educator to know what the rules are? How do those rules apply in the classroom? And how can we make sure that students know the rules as well?"
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PDPresenterToolkit - home - 1 views
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"This workshop was originally developed by Mark Wagner, Ph.D., President & CEO, EdTechTeam, Inc., to introduce educators to the read/write web. This wiki is a template that you can use for any Professional Development or Training sessions that address the use of wikis in education. With Mark's permission, we are making it available to educational technologists who are looking for tools to show their teams what can be accomplished with wikis in general - and Wikispaces in particular - in the K-12 environment."
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Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
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“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,”
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But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
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The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
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“People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.
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I would agree that for colleges and adult learners it might be, but I'm not convinced that the same holds true for K12.
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Learning has to occur in a community, eh? If that's true, THEN can we get twitter, skype, Flickr, youtube, Diigo, etc unblocked so we can take advantage of that community?
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Digital Literacy Tour - 0 views
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At Google, we support the education of families on how to stay safe online. That's why we've teamed up with online safety organization iKeepSafe to develop curriculum that educators can use in the classroom to teach what it means to be a responsible online citizen. The curriculum is designed to be interactive, discussion filled and allow students to learn through hands-on and scenario activities.
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Mobile phones in education revisited - Articles - Educational Technology - IC... - 0 views
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"I recently attended an event called Mobile Technology in Maths and Science, run by the London Knowledge Lab in association with the Open University. It was fascinating. Many, if not most, of the exhibits are proofs of concept, but hopefully will become much more than that. Here is a quick run-down of some of them:"
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I will be sharing this article with the science teachers at my school. Talks about some great science apps.
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Google Apps for Education Integration in the Classroom - 0 views
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If you create wikis for each student as an ePortfolio and showcase of their work, your students can now include and share all of their Google Docs work. They can easily create new Google Documents from within Wikispaces or move existing Google Documents into and out of their wiki. It’s so easy for students to organize and present their artifacts, add reflections, and put context around their work in your class for parent conferences.