Group items tagged

"United Classrooms is a service connecting classrooms across the world. The service allows teachers to create classroom profile pages. On their classroom profile pages teachers can post assignments, projects, messages for students, and announcements for parents and students. Teachers can monitor and manage all of the communications between students on the classroom profile page."

"Starting today, teachers and professors can apply for a preview of Classroom. Based on the requests we receive, we'll be inviting a limited number of educators to try Classroom in about a month. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education. Since we want to make sure Classroom plays well with others, if you're a developer or partner, sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom."

"I have long been a fan of Edmodo after it was introduced to me as tool in the Global Read Aloud.  This free social network specifically aimed at students and teachers is a fabulous way to integrate social media into your classroom, as well as setting up ways to collaborate with other classrooms."

So now that I am seeing this, I am torn between which one to try in my classroom. Between Edmodo and Collaborize Classroom, which one would you suggest? Has anyone tried both of these? Looking for suggestions before I finalize with my classroom.

Stacy: This would be a great tool exploration project. Compare and contrast both of them.

Some University of Delaware faculty members have begun "flipping the classroom," recording brief lectures or demonstrations for their students to view outside the classroom so that more class time can be spent on other activities. Faculty have found the Self Service Studio in 309 Gore Hall an easy-to-use resource for recording material to supplement their students' classroom experience: homework solutions, prerequisite material, lectures, demonstrations and other resources.

With the scrambled classroom model, we are challenged to learn new possibilities, but also to design instruction based on principles we have known about for some time. In the scrambled classroom model, the innovation is not so much "online learning," but "human learning" supported by all that the 21st century brings to the table.

the inverted classroom places a lot of intentional structure on the out-of-class experience. We don't just hand students a book or a PDF or a bunch of videos and say, Read/Watch these and then we'll discuss them in class. The out-of-class experience for students in a flipped classroom is structured.

"Social media offers some great opportunities for learning in the classroom, bringing together the ability to collaborate, access worldwide resources, and find new and interesting ways to communicate in one easily accessible place. Teachers around the world have found innovative ways to use Twitter as a teaching tool (including TeachThought's favorite), and we've shared many of these great ideas here with you. Read on, and we'll explore 60 inspiring ways that teachers and students can put Twitter to work in the classroom."

"Almost 25 years have passed since Chickering and Gamson offered seven principles for good instructional practices in undergraduate education. While the state of undergraduate education has evolved to some degree over that time, I think the seven principles still have a place in today's collegiate classroom. Originally written to communicate best practices for face-to-face instruction, the principles translate well to the online classroom and can help to provide guidance for those of us designing courses to be taught online."

...Just in time!! :)

A collaborative project on collecting classroom 2.0 practices.

"As director of technology for Groton-Dunstable Regional School District in Groton, MA, as well as a teacher of high school courses in digital and information literacy, Andrew Marcinek knows what it takes to effectively implement tech in the classroom. One of Marcinek's recent discoveries is Google Hangouts, a free video chat service that enables one-on-one chats and group chats with up to 10 people at a time. For Marcinek, Hangouts provides a new way to connect students beyond the four walls of the classroom. Where students used to need permission slips and school buses to get that "out of classroom" experience, tools such as Hangouts (which educators can join simply by setting up a Google+ page and signing up for the Hangout feature) allow instructors to do all of the following tasks:"

"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

Using Edmodo, I delivered online instruction to my students into an actual active and engaging learning environment. As my students engaged in learning the fundamentals of Edmodo, both in the classroom and at home, I was simultaneously able to test each student in Reading Workshop, so that I may assess their independent reading levels.

What we saw today is what our classrooms will look like once iPads are far cheaper, once digital textbooks can be handed down as easily as physical ones, once teachers of every subject have several educational material options to choose among. For now though, it's important to remember that "new" and "different" always come at a premium. One that the vast majority of us can't afford.

"Below, we've rounded up a few other ways that social media and technology are bring innovation to the classroom."

"This summer Sylvia wrote a number of excellent blog posts containing sound information for anyone that has questions about using social media in elementary school classrooms."

The Flipped Classroom IS: A means to INCREASE interaction and personalized contact time between students and teachers. An environment where students take responsibility for their own learning.  A classroom where the teacher is not the "sage on the stage", but the "guide on the side". A blending of direct instruction with constructivist learning.

"When you combine IdeaPaint's ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote's ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become a more creative and engaging place to learn."

"The advantage of the flipped classroom is that the content, often the theoretical/lecture-based component of the lesson, becomes more easily accessed and controlled by the learner. "

"What Zorbas and Sparks call their "Classroom Without Walls" program has allowed their Kenai Peninsula students to connect with students in Afghanistan, Israel, Yemen and several U.S. states. But the videoconferencing exploration grew gradually, from the two teachers team-teaching in the same school, to team-teaching from different schools in the same district, to student-to-student collaborative group work."

"Since most students can type very quickly, laptops encourage them to copy down nearly everything said in the classroom. But when students stare at the screen of their laptops, something is lost. The students shift from being intellectuals, listening to one another, to being customer-service representatives, taking down orders. Class is supposed to be a conversation, not an exercise in dictation. "