Group items tagged

Discovery News' "Discovernator" - generates a series of interesting facts.  Just reload the page to see what crazy fact comes up next.  This would be great for generating discussions in science and social studies.  Mind the comments below the generator - as with all sites that allow commenting, there is little control over what people contribute.

Facts about water (great for presentations

"26 Amazing Facts About Finland's Unorthodox Education System"

"Digital pedagogy calls for screwing around more than it does systematic study, and in fact screwing around is the more difficult scholarly work. Digital pedagogy is less about knowing and more a rampant process of unlearning, play, and rediscovery. We are not born digital pedagogues, nor do we have to be formally schooled in the ways of digital pedagogy. There's lots to read on the subject, but we can't just read our way into it; there is no essential canon. In fact, expert digital pedagogues learn best by forgetting - through continuous encounters with what is novel, tentative, unmastered, and unresolved."

lots of interesting discussion points...could be used for writing prompts

"We are deeply and fundamentally attracted, in fact, to games: those places where efforts and excellence are rewarded, where the challenges and demands are severe, and where success often resembles nothing so much as a distilled version of the worldly virtues of dedicated learning and rigorously co-ordinated effort."

Here's a handy site that helps students publish three types of documents - a poster, a brochure or a newspaper.  Read Write Think's site is easy to use with an intuitive interface but its real power comes in the fact that students can save incomplete work!  The site lets a user save in a proprietary .RWT format on a usb stick or saved to a network space.  When your next class begins, that same file can be opened so it can be completed and shared as a .PDF

"How can we best prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century? This question is at the heart of what every educator attempts to do on a daily basis. Apart from imparting content of knowledge and facts, however, it's becoming clear that the "noncognitive competencies" known as grit, perseverance, and tenacity are just as important, if not more so, in preparing kids to be self-sufficient and successful."

"In fact, the focus of the framework rests on a much larger concept of the ways in which humans have altered and continue to alter the "natural world" with the goal of fulfilling "needs and desires." Technology is much bigger and more complex than a single device or site."

Based on research not just opinion. What is it about games that is transcendent? Perhaps it's the fact that games are optional, they are obstacles that we volunteer to overcome. Games are what we choose to do. They are what we are drawn to when we have a choice about how to spend our time and energy.  Games are freedom.

Article with lots of links to research around the subject of games being good for us.

Summary via the Scout Report (May 2012): "This site was created by two German physicists (Ute Kraus and Corvin Zahn) and it offers a "visual and intuitive approach to the theory of relativity." The site does not offer the basics dealing with the theory of relativity, but rather a novel approach to understanding what an object might look like while moving near the speed of light or what it might be like to "travel to the vicinity of a black hole and take a look-around." As the site notes, "Part of the difficulties in understanding relativity are due to the fact that relativistic effects contradict everyday experience." On the homepage, visitors can learn more in the Content area. Here they can watch remarkable visualizations such as Rolling Wheels, Sights that Einstein Could Not Yet See, and Accelerated Motion. The site also offers brief explanations of each visualization, along with links to additional resources. Finally, the site also includes a gallery of images and an FAQ area. [KMG]"

There is more to Word Clouds then Wordle! welcome to a series of posts devoted to the use of Word Clouds. I know you will find new information… whether you are a seasoned user of word clouds, or brand new. I enjoy working with teachers and helping them use word clouds in their lessons because they are a great way to get any teacher started with integrating technology.  In the last post you discovered  12 Tips in Using Wordle. In fact you may wish to read it if you have not as of yet. This post will share 108 ways for educators to use word clouds in the classroom. 

The research pane taps into Google Search directly from Google documents, so whether you want to add a cool destination to your itinerary for an upcoming trip to India or you're looking for the perfect presidential quote for a political science paper, you don't even have to open a new tab.

Creating videos used to require that you own expensive equipment and software. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. In fact, now there are many tools you can use to create videos online. Here is a collection of great tools for creating videos online.

this is an old post, but I like how it looks at changing questioning style i order to get the most out of our students No more trivial pursuit. No more topical research. No more hunts for simple facts - deadly, tiresome and lacking in value, mind-numbing activities without import. This article offers something like a cider press - but one that easily produces intriguing questions from the mass of curriculum content that usually inspires mere collection or varieties of trivial pursuit.

The fact is that creating a quality infographic is not an easy task and not everyone can do it properly.  It takes design skills, time, a good computer program and patience to get it just right.  Unfortunately not everyone has those qualities and so as a result, a lot of infographics end up in the email trash bin.  But done properly, an infographic can be a really beautiful and informative thing, a feast on the eyes.

If we are feeling distracted, we should pay attention to that distraction.  It may be telling us that there is something better elsewhere, something more deserving of our attention.  Or it may be telling us we are on the wrong path, just when we thought we were zooming in to that perfect conclusion of a paragraph or a project.   Or it may be telling us we need better tools, that the set-up we have is not fully appreciating the particularities and peccadilloes of our own work life and demands.  Or it may be telling us that we need better partners, or a better method, someone or something to help us over the hurdle.  Or it may just be telling us we are working too hard and we need to put down what we are doing and go outside for a walk, or stop for a cup of tea, or go for a run, or maybe just check out Facebook for a while.  Distraction is our friend because it reminds us that we are fully human, not just workers, and that our lives are complex and, trying to shut out the complexity, may in fact turn out to be the least productive way to lead a life.

Rep. Bob Morris said he was disturbed by what he learned when he did a "small amount of web-based research" on the Girl Scouts. I'm not going to debate Morris's conservative positions, but I am going to call into question his digital literacy skills. The new media literacies we often discuss involve applying skepticism to information, learning how to review sources and look for bias, and the importance of fact-checking.

Being an enlightened individual means understanding basic scientific information about how the world works. Sure, we have teachers and parents there to fill our brains with knowledge, but the sad truth is that there are certain facts that take on a life of their own as they pass from ear to ear, eventually etching themselves into our collective brain-mass in twisted forms that are, well, just plain wrong.