Group items tagged

"WiredSafety's volunteers have been doing this since right after the Web was launched. For more than 16 years we have been helping people who need our help online. Our sites have had different formats, approaches and lots and lots of coders, editors, writers and webmasters. We are all volunteers, and our online presence looked different every time someone added something or took something away. The site and our other sites grew, but not always in the right way. Our haphazard sites and navigation would be modified to adapt to a need we discovered, and new topics shoe-horned in when they emerged. No one overall vision for the site. And it stopped reflecting our One Vision, One Mission, One WiredSafety rule. We never had enough time to plot our site, update everything and adopt the newest technologies to help us address the needs of the public or even all our volunteers. Please accept our apologies. That was before. This is now. With the generous support of Google, Spectorsoft and a couple others we have ripped everything down and started from scratch. Only about 10% done, we launched with the new site to clean things up. Expect daily changes and improvements. "

Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning Initiated by Barry Joseph, Global Kids, Inc. Written by Barry with scores of others* Background For over four years, Global Kids has developed badging systems within, after and outside of schools. We are currently designing a badging system for dozens of civic and cultural institutions within the Hive Learning Networks in New York City and Chicago, as well as throughout our organization. We have had a frontline view of the growing interest which has emerged over the past year in the development of badging systems across a wide range of formal and informal learning environments. We have also followed the rise of opposition, and sometimes confusion, about what digital badging looks like or is designed to accomplish. In this context we felt it might be useful to delineate the various interests we see aligning themselves with badges, or make distinctions amongst the different goals people have for them.

"To out-educate, we must out-innovate Posted by michael_horn | Under Online learning, Schools Thursday Feb 10, 2011 In his State of the Union address, President Obama urged the country to out-innovate the rest of the world. If we want to bolster America's competitiveness now and for the future, there's no better place to start than education, where Obama also said we need to out-educate the rest of the world."

"At EdTechTeacher, our mission is to help teachers and schools leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments. We offer keynote presentations, hands-on workshops, online courses, and live webinars for teachers, schools, and school districts. Whether you are a teacher looking to enhance your instructional practices, or a school leader seeking to foster change, we have services to fit a variety of needs. We understand teachers and students because all of us have been in the classroom."

"The modern world is an age of rapid growth in scientific knowledge, much of which is quickly utilized in the creation of new technology. Science and technology have also made the world very small, so that we no longer live in the confined world of our town, region, or country, isolated from what is happening in the rest of the globe. This has changed the way we consume information and we expect more out of our learning experiences."

Cell phones have the capability to become the "Swiss army knife" for student research and organization. First, we explore using cell phones as data collection tools: audio recorders, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. Additionally, we consider how classroom projects can be developed for cell phones: creating ring tones, text messaging, mobile WebPages, and mobile surveys. Finally, we contemplate the future features of cell phones and how those features play a role in learning.

What we have learnt Recently Chris Flesuras from Kyoto Gakuen school created the movies below (Part 1 and Part 2). Not much more than a year ago MLC school began our journey and were very unsure of how virtual worlds would work.  Since that time we have had many meetings, many trial activities, many failures and successes.  What Chris' videos say to me is that we have learnt plenty.  I invite you to watch both parts and enjoy.  Whilst it is only explaining one event within Skoolaborate I believe it clearly shows how our understanding on 'how to work with Education in Virtual worlds' has grown.

Who We Are We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) membership association based in the Washington, DC area with over 3,400 members. We are unique; our members represent a diverse cross-section of K-12 education from school districts, charter schools, state education agencies, non-profit organizations, research institutions, corporate entities and other content & technology providers.

"Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device. We carry high quality ebooks: Our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers and digitized by us with the help of thousands of volunteers. All our ebooks can be freely downloaded: Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats. No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing more books, recording audio books, or reporting errors. Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates and Resources. "

" Pixel Pushers is an educational game and modification project based out of Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center under the supervision of our client, MinecraftEdu. We are creating a toolset that allows teachers to create lessons in the popular indie game Minecraft, easily share those lessons with other educators, and allows them to effectively monitor and review their students' progress. Further, we aim to explore what academic subjects best lend themselves to the game's format through a series of proof-of-concept lessons. Finally, we want the student experience to be as safe and constructive as possible, whether sessions are being held in real classrooms or virtual youth centers."

"expert answers to your questions Stack Exchange is a fast-growing network of 94 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on the most important topics in each area of expertise. From our core of Q&A, to community blogs and real-time chat, we provide experts with the tools they need to make The Internet a better place. Learn more about us..."

"Leading a claymation workshop? Download the Claymation Workshop Kit! While we can't make a claymation workshop any more fun that it already is, we wanted to make preparing for it even easier! The Claymation Workshop Kit is designed to give you new ideas and resources that will make preparations and follow-up a snap."

Considering the heavy female demographic happening on Pinterest, we were surprised to find the U.S. Army had a well-stocked profile, until we checked out the rest of their online goings-on. The Army is all up on the Internet. And, in a very active way -- it doesn't just have social media profiles to have its hand in the future. It has robust profiles on various sites, ranging from the big social media players like Twitter to newbs like Pinterest, each appropriately using the platform as a PR tool. It's really quite impressive for such an established, bureaucratic organization that one would assume would stink at the Web.

"We live in the cloud Available anywhere, any time, across your devices WeVideo makes video creation accessible to everyone, using cloud-based technologies to make it easier, faster and more convenient. Because it's cloud-based, we make social video editing possible, where people come together online to collaborate on a video project."

"This collaborative space was created to celebrate the many Apps and Extensions made by developers which serve the accessibility needs of individuals with disabilities. Although Google already highlights accessibility features built into the Chrome browser or through add-ons, we have collected numerous other free tools that we feel further contribute to that mission."

"We are not spyware Our team believes in positive family communication based on trust and responsibility. Before using our product, we urge you to sit down with your child to have a discussion about what exactly will be monitored. Read more » See us in the news Watch as Dr. Phil, law enforcement officers, and parents from around the country all recommend My Mobile Watchdog. View more » Keeping School Kids Safe My Mobile Watchdog is proud to partner with TDS, California's largest and oldest public school 403b Plan Administrator, to prevent cyber bullying."

"n2y is your home for effective symbol-supported tools and materials for your students with special needs. We develop the special education curriculum, lesson plans, and materials so you can spend your time teaching. We Create. You instruct."

We often read that there are 4 C's in a true 21st century education: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation. The iPad is a success at engaging individual students in critical thinking and creativity, but how about collaboration? After all, tablets are consumer products, designed to be used by one person at a time, not by teams of students. It's up to teachers and instructional technologists to figure out how best to deploy them in the classroom in a way that supports project-based learning and fosters teamwork. We asked several teachers involved in iPad initiatives which apps they've had the most success with on the collaboration front. Here is what they told us.

"Whether you're new to Twitter or have 5,000 LinkedIn connections, one thing's for sure: social media keeps getting more popular and more powerful. If you haven't used it for your own professional development, what are you waiting for? Too overwhelming? We get that. To help you start, we gathered advice from some expert users."

Maps are one of our oldest forms of visualizing data about the world. One might say we'd be "lost" without them. flickr creative commons photo by [martin] From the early web-based Mapquest versions and later when Google Maps came onto the scene followed closely by Google Earth, online mapping and the use of maps by the general public has exploded.  Maps are now a mainstay for mobile computing and other endeavors online line that have a spatial component. The capability enabled by GPS  (Global Positioning System) allows our devices to know where we are in the world, what/who is nearby, and what information is available about places. We see many ways people use maps for personal use and are interested in knowing more about that and your ideas on how mapping tools might also be used for learning.