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Louise Phinney

iOS6 Upgrades and Impact on Use in Schools | Classroom Aid - 0 views

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    "Technology is always upgrading, especially something popular like iPads with huge user base. Apple has the strong resource to make it better and better. After the upgrades of iOS6,  Lisa Nash - the author of Learning and Teaching with iPads, made a list of its impact in the use of schools. Readers will find these changes are thoughtful considerations for daily use practice."
Keri-Lee Beasley

iPad Scotland Final Evaluation Report (October 2012) | Classroom Aid - 0 views

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    The final report of the iPad Scotland Evaluation undertaken for schools and local authorities in Scotland was released by the Technology Enhanced Learning Group based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hull in October. 8 primary and secondary schools were assigned to participate the research by local authorities, the approximate number of iPads in pilot is 365
Louise Phinney

First Aid Kit - 1 views

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    Use the contents of this Kit when you need help understanding an information fluency method. 
Katie Day

washingtonpost.com: The Cyber-Saga of the 'Sunscreen' Song - 0 views

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    "It began as a newspaper column, became an Internet hoax, was turned into a song by a hipster movie director and is now a hit on radio stations around the country. Along the way, it became an example of how words - known to the e-generation as "content" - morphed from one form into another, aided by misinformation and high-speed modems."
Katie Day

Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano in Education & La... - 0 views

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    Free e-book download:  "Silvia Tolisano, author of the excellent Langwitches blog, has an awesome free ebook about digital storytelling. Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators is a 120 page guide to using digital storytelling tools in your classroom. The guide offers clear directions for using tools like Audacity, Google Maps, Photo Story, VoiceThread, and other digital media creation tools. Silvia's directions are aided by clearly annotated screenshots of each digital storytelling tool."
Katie Day

MIT OpenCourseWare | Economics | 14.73 The Challenge of World Poverty, Fall 2009 | Home - 0 views

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    A free online university course, but some of the readings might be useful to teachers in primary/secondary  - DESCRIPTION: "This is a course for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Why do some countries grow fast and others fall further behind? Does growth help the poor? Are famines unavoidable? How can we end child labor-or should we? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? How do we deal with the disease burden? Is micro finance invaluable or overrated? Without property rights, is life destined to be "nasty, brutish and short"? Has globalization been good to the poor? Should we leave economic development to the market? Should we leave economic development to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene?"
Sean McHugh

The Scientific Case For Teaching Cursive Handwriting to Your Kids Is Weaker Than You Think - 2 views

  • here is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character.
  • if they have the time and inclination.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      But should we be dedicating swathes of curriculum time towards this? Surely not.
  • what teachers “know” about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they’re immersed than a result of research and data.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Never were truer words written.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting
  • our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate
  • Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Shouldn't we include touch typing here as well?
  • So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade
  • They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly
  • While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.
  • The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice
  • freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Likewise if they can touch-type instead of wrestling with ascenders and descenders...
  • for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages
  • the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.
  • There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.
  • even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      In other ways... the time it takes for kids to learn cursive, spread over years, compared to the relatively short time it takes to master touch-typing being a case in point.
  • that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning
  • inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence
  • How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?
  • Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
  • the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.
  • This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is “right,” unsupported by evidence.
  • it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead
  • There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
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    There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
Keri-Lee Beasley

Making Media Literacy Central to Digital Citizenship | MindShift | KQED News - 2 views

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    "This emergence of video as a high-stakes media form requires a rethinking of what we mean by digital citizenship. We need to move from a conflation of digital citizenship with internet safety and protectionism to a view of digital citizenship that's pro-active and prioritizes media literacy and savvy. A good digital citizen doesn't just dodge safety and privacy pitfalls, but works to remake the world, aided by digital technology like video, so it's more thoughtful, inclusive and just."
Oliver Sampson

NOLS - 0 views

Katie Day

Historical Thinking Matters: Why Historical Thinking Matters - 0 views

  • Winner of the American Historical Association's 2008 James Harvey Robinson Prize for an Outstanding Teaching Aid. A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and School of Education, Stanford University with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and additional support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Katie Day

FT.com / Global Economy - World's hungry 'close to one billion' - 0 views

  • The Rome-based organisation said that a preliminary estimate showed the number of undernourished people rose this year by 40m to about 963m people, after rising 75m in 2007. Before the food crisis, there were about 848m chronically hungry people in 2003-05.
  • Prices of agricultural commodities such as wheat, corn and rice jumped to record levels earlier this year, triggering food riots in countries ranging from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh and prompting appeals for food aid for more than 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Although food commodity prices have fallen about 50 per cent from this summer’s all-time highs, they remain well above pre-crisis levels. The cost of rice, for example, has halved since July, but it still trades at prices that are 95 per cent above 2005 levels.
  • The vast majority of the world’s undernourished people – more than 90m – live in developing countries, according to FAO estimates. Of these, 65 per cent live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in three people – or almost 240m – are chronically hungry, the highest proportion of undernourished people in the total population.
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    The food crisis has pushed the number of hungry people in the world to almost 1bn, in what the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation described on Tuesday as a "serious setback" to global efforts to reduce mass starvation.
Katie Day

Clean Water at No Cost? Just Add Carbon Credits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • If you are a hiker or camper, you may have heard about Vestergaard Frandsen’s LifeStraw. It’s a hollow stick equipped with a series of filtering membranes. You put the end of the stick in a river or puddle ─ or a toilet, for that matter ─ and suck on it. By the time the water hits your lips, it is clean and safe ─ its filters are fine enough to trap virtually all bacteria, viruses and parasites. The product has a bigger cousin called the LifeStraw Family. You hang it on your wall, pour dirty water in the top, open the tap and clean water comes out the bottom. No power or replacement parts are required. Each unit cleans about 18,000 liters of water ─ enough for a family for three years. The market cost of the unit averages out at a penny per ten liters of water purified. Vestergaard Frandsen will distribute the LifeStraw Family for free. It is helping to sponsor a traveling campaign through the western part of Kenya set for April, 2011, that will reach 4 million families. The campaign bundles various products ─ each family that attends will get insecticide-treated bednets to protect against malaria, AIDS tests and counseling and a free LifeStraw Family.
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    discusses the economics of innovations like the LifeStraw which allows people to drink clean water... in places like Africa....
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