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Similar to the TED Talks.

George Siemens was gracious enough to be our guest in EC&I 831 on January 20th, 2009 where he gave us an overview of the changing views of knowledge in society, talked about Connectivism, and described the recent CCK08 course.

Great video of 'How to create a great PowerPoint presentation without breaking the law' by Alvin Trusty (via Wes Fryer's Blog). Quite long (40-odd minutes), but very good messages throughout. I particularly liked the way he talked about creative commons and the use of www.compfight.com as a means of obtaining high quality images.

"You can't swing a stick in social media without hitting something on Facebook. Same goes for education. You can't talk about how technology is revolutionizing education without mentioning Facebook. It's a simple service to figure out but what about once you become a regular user? If you're a teacher, you would be well served by spending 3 minutes to read through this must-have guide. (We timed it out and it's a bit under 3 minutes. It's almost summertime, you can spare it for us!)"

"Create a new thread to discuss a topic online with friends, co-workers or any other people you know. The simple way to have a hassle-free talk online. No chaos with emails. No need to create a complete bulletin board. Just create a single thread!"

A tool to create animations. You can animate the characters, change the background, movement, sound effects and emotions; you can add speech bubbles, interactive elements and music to your animation as well. You can resize things, delete, and move or change their places. Children can create their animated books that talk or they can write their own screenplays and turn them into animation.

"Most of what we do is for the students. The focus of this and many other blogs and websites is about learning, and rightly so, but there are also apps that will make our jobs easier too. I am talking about that catergory of apps that are designed specifically for the classroom teacher. There are plenty and I am sure as more and more teachers gain the confidence to design their own apps, there will be more suitable one to come. Here is a list of apps that you can use to make your job easier."

"It doesn't seem to matter what age group or demographic that I talk to, kids (and adults) everywhere are fans of Angry Birds. As I was playing around with Angry Birds (yep I'm a fan too), I started thinking about all of the learning that could be happening. I have watched a two year old tell an older sister that "you have to pull down to go up higher". I have watched as kids master this game through trial and error. Being the teacher that I am, I started dreaming up a transdisciplinary lesson with Angry Birds as the base. I happened to be writing an inquiry lesson that has students look at inventions throughout time and thought: the catapult-that is an invention that has technology and concepts that are used even today. This is one of those inspirational moments that comes when you are drifting off to sleep and has you frantically searching for paper and pen to record as fast as the ideas come. So what did I do? I got myself out of bed and went to work sketching out a super awesome plan. Here is the embedded learning that I came up with"

Jeff Mummert from The History Teachers Attic has published this great post which lists the TED videos that he thinks are particularly useful and divides them up by subjects including the traditional curriculum areas. As he point out this list is not the sum total of all the TED videos, just a selection of those most relevant to education.

Need a fast answer from someone who knows what they're talking about? Aardvark discovers the perfect person to help with any question in minutes

Using the Download PDF button on this page you can download a really interesting pdf guide for parents about talking with children about working online. The guide looks at children of different ages and stages and offers sensible and commonsense advice. Though it is written for the American context the underlying advice is relevant to all.

Wow - text to voice translation! Will be excellent for students needing help with pronunciation. Many language options.

We send our students many messages about learning, growth, ability, potential. . . Sometimes we are sending these messages deliberately, such as when we talk about growth mindset and the rewards of effort, persistence and risk taking. At other times the messages we send are accidental, incidental and unplanned; these are often the strongest messages we send. 

Despite this being a 'thinking' conference, despite us all being advocates for structured and scaffolded models of thinking, not one group had applied any thinking routines, utilised a collaborative planning protocol or talked about applying an inquiry model or design thinking cycle. It wasn't that we didn't know about them. It wasn't that we don't know how to use them. It wasn't that we don't value them. We had all the knowledge we could desire on the how to and the why of a broad set of thinking tools and anyone of these would have enhanced the process, but we did not use any of them. Why was this the case and what does this reveal about our teaching of these methods to our students?

I have just had the opportunity to spend the weekend learning alongside a large group of mathematics teachers. After a day and a half of talking and thinking about mathematics teaching, I am excited to get back to school and try out some new ideas. There were also some key takeaways for me that I share below. These are the questions or wonderings that my mind wandered to while listening to the numerous talented speakers over the past two days.