"There are not an abundance of apps for the iPad that really encourage a worthwhile level of collaboration between students or between students and teachers. There are several that would allow students to share an iPad and work on something together on one iPad, but what if you want students to be working on their own iPads at school, at home, or at a time of their choosing? The following 5 apps are designed for just that, and help take advantage of the iPad as a collaborative tool.
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"Getting the school year started right can mean calling home with a positive message, stepping out of your comfort zone or simply asking for help. The connections you make in August can serve you well through the trials of K-12 education. You never know when you're going to need help -- from an encouraging smile to a better way to assess a standard. While the Internet and social media are great, they are merely tools to connect you with the people behind all of the accounts. With so much to do, it can be easy to push collaboration back, but this can have a long-term erosive effect on your happiness in teaching.
The earlier you start, the easier it becomes. "
"Today I wanted to share our experimentation with different types of note taking as part of creating "Official Scribes" for the classroom while taking into account the students' different learning styles.
Students were starting a unit about the American Revolution by watching an introductory video clip. We discussed different ways to take notes and came up with:
individual note taking by paper and pencil
individual note taking on a word processor
collaborative backchanneling
visual note taking (on SmartBoard and paper)"
"Learning in Hand #26 is about Padlet and Lino. Padlet and Lino are the two best online sticky note services around. They are web-based and work great on iPads, PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets. Walls can be set up so that students can use them without logins or passwords, making them easy to infuse into lessons. And the sticky notes aren't limited to text-they can have images, videos, and hyperlinks. Discover how teachers are using these virtual message boards everyday to collect student products, power communication, and fuel productive collaboration.
View the 14:30 video on YouTube, on Vimeo, in iTunes as a podcast, through RSS, or download to explore the educational possibilities of Padlet and Lino."
"We want a team to think about action research as a collaborative endeavor, where principals and teachers work together to improve something over time. It's not just about gathering data, it's about working hard to improve something. Maybe you see a need to improve writing in the building, and you're going to figure out whether there's a way to take a techno-constructivist approach to strengthening students' writing skills. Maybe you feel the culture of your school is very mired in antiquated approaches to teaching and learning, and you want to build a new culture of innovation and collaboration, so you're going to develop your project around that goal."
SpeakingImage is an application for creating
interactive images and share them with others. You can also create groups, add wikis and set different permissions to manage collaborative work
"The author shares findings from her action research, focusing on the question, "How can I use critique to improve the quality of student feedback, student work and create a culture of collaboration?" "
This open, online global community for 21st-century education leaders exists to foster Global Education Transformation-the "GET" in GETideas.org-via virtual
collaboration and international dialogue, including the sharing of best practices and resources.
Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Cacoo can be used free of charge. Collaborating is as easy as sharing a link with others.
Dipity is a free digital timeline website. Our mission is to organize the web's content by date and time. Users can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps.
"National borders are no match for the reach of online technologies, as demonstrated by a host of collaborative projects that use web-based platforms to link US students with their peers abroad."
"Writing appropriate emails is part of being a good digital citizen! Students (even digital natives) are not born with knowing the rules and responsibilities. Just as they need to learn to answer and talk on the phone, they need to learn about e-mail writing in an academic setting (to their teachers, Skype partners, project collaborators, administration or their classmates regarding school business)."
"About three years ago, I began inviting my student-led, peer-evaluated, collaboratively structured classes to think about the shape of a course: what defined it, what its participants could do to describe and circumscribe its practices, how a group of strangers, all enrolled in the same institutional experience of a "course," could come together as a community of choice, mission, shared purpose, and mutually beneficial learning. "
I have learned so much about collaboration recently. I had never really thought about what true collaboration was and probably fell into allowing students to "split" projects before.
Education for Everyone.
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Learn from world-class professors, watch high quality lectures, achieve mastery via interactive exercises, and collaborate with a global community of students.
This resource is the collaborative effort of a group of experienced educators and entrepreneurs who have united to share their experience and ideas, and create a project geared toward making learning relevant to life in our new digital age. Our purpose is to develop exceptional resources to assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st Century.
"ePals is the leading provider of safe collaborative technology for schools to connect and learn in a protected, project-based learning network. With classrooms in 200 countries and territories, ePals makes it easy to connect learners locally, nationally or internationally."
"A Personal Learning Network (commonly referred to as a PLN) is one of the most popular ways for modern teachers to reach out and get connected to other educators, whether this means keeping in touch with colleagues and friends or making new connections with other talented teachers across the globe. The very best PLNs facilitate wonderful information sharing, learning opportunities and gateways to collaboration between classrooms. Read our recipe for the perfect PLN and start cooking yours up today!"
"School culture should be collegial, said Sagor, where there is a focus on continuous improvement, shared responsibility, valuing contributions, and the acceptance that conflict is inevitable. "Working in teams needs to be exciting and attractive to bring the best and the brightest into our profession," he said. "When people say 'just tell us what to do,' the battle is nearly lost.""