EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

Thanks!

"Chief Education Officer" Steve Silvius reached out to introduce EmergingEdTech readers to Three Ring, a free application that allows teachers to quickly and easily create digital portfolios of student work, using a wide variety of devices for input.

"These dual characteristics of "open" are also core to Open Educational Resources (OER). Hewlett's updated OER definition begins: "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." That is, for an educational resource to be "open" it must be both gratis (available at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the resource). An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed - it must be both freely available and openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER."

"Connecting students, teachers and institutions, through an open, online course network."

Antioch University is the first US institution to receive approval from Coursera to offer college credit for specified Coursera MOOCs (massive open online courses). Through this new partnership, Antioch University and the Antioch University Los Angeles campus can reduce student costs to complete a four-year degree and expand course offerings through free online courses offered by the highly respected universities that have partnered with Coursera.

Very cool! Maybe college debt will start to go down for students of the future. Higher levels of education for less money :) I know I will paying back my school loans until I am dead.

This organization has a mission of providing laptops to children all over the world, especially in poverty stricken areas.

I have the pleasure of being a Kindergarten teacher in Vermont. I have been teaching for 25 + years. During my teaching career I have worked with 1st through 4th grade. I am now embarking on a new journey… Kindergarten!

I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.

"The superintendent of the 4,200-student Lindsay Unified School District in California, Rooney set in motion this school year a plan to move to a system in which students progress not on the basis of their age or a set school calendar, but by demonstrating proficiency on learning objectives."

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the "alphabet song," and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word "Lion."

Below are some great YouTube channels for science. If you are a science teacher and you need some useful resources where you can search for and find educational science videos, then the list below would be of great help. Some of the channels listed below have thousands of subscribers featuring some of the best science videos online.

With almost 326 votes, I suppose it has some validity. What surprised me, but perhaps shouldn't have, was the even distribution of responses. I think that's a reflection of the new affordances and opportunities. People are finding value and learning in all kinds of tools and this truly represents a personalization of learning spaces

"The book draws upon a healthy mix of psychological research isolating specific tactics for induce happiness ("happiness hacks") alongside practical examples of those tactics utilized in both traditional and "serious" game design. The net result? A list of 14 "fixes" that can help readers improve their lives through play."

"Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how."

I have recently created a class Instagram account. Since every student has their own iPad with the Instagram app installed I signed them all into the same account. I have made it a private account and accepted follow requests from only a select number of other early years classrooms that we converse with on Twitter.

I was excited and honoured to be invited by BC Campus to be a graphic facilitator at their Open Educational Resources Forum (#OERforum) last week. When they first asked for me to be a graphic facilitator, of course I immediately said yes but I also felt a bit of trepidation as I have never done graphic facilitation before.

The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader.

"Last year, based on our departmental assessment procedures, I determined that I wanted a more subjective way to give feedback to my students. To me, programming is more than just right or wrong code; I want students to develop good habits and styles of programming that use the tool to communicate the process of problem solving, not just the final answers. And I felt that that would be better achieved by giving students consistent verbal feedback, in addition to simple rubric scoring of their work."

"If we can crack through political sarcasm, everything else will be easier,"