Interesting article. I'm not so sure that Ian Jukes, quoted liberally throughout the article, would be a big fan of RTI but I could be wrong. "Drill and kill" has been around a long time. Whether this transfers to higher level thinking is debatable. Simply providing apps that replicate drill activities we do on paper won't, in my opinion, capture students used to video game quality action - at least not for very long. The reality is classroom time is limited. If we drill students this time has to be taken from somewhere - inevitably it comes from the "real" learning time. My greatest fear of mobile technology is that it will become modern day "flash cards'. If we are going to use mobile technology, let's use it to build in support (within an exciting cross-curricular, inquiry-based classroom) such as screen readers/word prediction, and use it to provide access to apps that help students analyze, synthesize, evaluate, collaborate and create - real 21zt century fluencies. http://www.committedsardine.com/fluencies.cfm
59 different video presentations, created by teachers, that explore and demonstrate what teachers can do with Smartboards in the classroom - and its all free!
Discovery Education provides engaging digital resources to schools and homes with the goal of making educators more effective, increasing student achievement, and connecting classrooms and families to a world of learning.
The Fifty Tools
Below you will find 50+ web tools you can use to create your own web-based story. Again, the mission is not to review or try every single one (that would be madness, I know), but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something.
"YouTube" for Children's eBooks
This site does not have any intention of making any money, ever. Bandwidth and storage are cheap. We just want everybody to have an easy way to find, share, and self-publish their own free children's ebooks,
whether the audience is just their own kids or the whole world.
A free guide from the Ministry of Education of British Columbia, Canada, that offers wide resources and information about how to support students with special needs through individualized educational planning
Amazing resource for educators. Each category (blogging, wikis, social bookmarking etc…) has 5 recommended tools highlighted to try out first. Great place for educators to start learning a new tool.
Choose from a list of hundreds of topics on human biology to view a medical animation or video.
This content is "bandwidth intensive." The latest versions of the following browser plug-ins must be installed: Shockwave and Quicktime.
Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version has a short video about each one.
We've done all 118 - but our job's not finished. Now we're updating all the videos with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments. (U of Nottingham)
Highlight, bookmark, and annotate the web.
"Diigo is two services in one -- it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other. "
This site offers a growing bank of imaginative, highly visual teaching-aids for science developed for use with interactive whiteboards in year 11-18 Schools.
"MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other's changes as they happen."