Group items tagged

Andrew McCarthy's site with useful info on using tech for formative assessment.

Step-by-step guide for teachers on how to create Google Forms from scratch

Interesting ideas 'challenging the look and form of scholarships'

I just love the name of this blog: iPaddiction A Healthy Educational Problem. Would this form (or something like it) be useful for us?

Great tips for google apps schools including: Create and assignment In Box with Google forms How to use the revision history Create and use templates

Jay Atwood's example of how to use forms/scripts to enhance a booking system

"In the Lego-like cubes that form the intricate world of MinecraftEdu, teachers find the building blocks of good digital citizenship."

Gates & McArthur foundation looking to sponsor a version of Sim City for Educational use. 

"GlassLab is working with commercial game companies, assessment experts, and those versed in digital classrooms to build SimCityEDU, a downloadable game designed for sixth graders. Scheduled to be be released in the fall of 2013, it builds on SimCity's city management theme, but provides specific challenges to players in the subject of STEM. "The big pain point we've heard from teachers is that they cannot entertain their kids to the level that they are being entertained outside of the classroom," said Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab. "They want to be able to create meaningful learning experiences and they just can't compete with the digital tools their kids are accessing all the time.""

a summary of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows in 3min animation form

Kids are growing up in a digital world. They connect, share, learn, explore, and play in way unimaginable just a  generation ago. This is the only world they know and their parents, teachers, political leaders and even the media  are all doing what they can to catch up. The emergence of social media, in all its extraordinary forms, is pushing the  boundaries of what we think of as private while giving us all, and our children, a platform to express ourselves anytime,  anywhere.  It can be an unnerving prospect to a parent or teacher to see their kids pack so much processing power in their  pockets. The media have played on these fears with screaming headlines and nightly news leads about cases of  online predators, pornography, cyberbullying and sexting. Some lawmakers have proposed online safety legislation  based on a single event, such as a suicide that had an online component to it. At least RQHVtate Dttorney  Jeneral suggested raising the age limit for kids accessing social media to 16 years.  While understandable, these reactions are not always helpful or healthy

Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.

If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.

"Kinetic typography is a form of animation that centers mostly on moving text. Simple enough in concept, but it can lend itself to some truly amazing and complex animations if done properly. "

I have written several posts before on the importance of making presentation meaningful and interesting. Not just creating a PowerPoint because it's the easiest tool for you to create a visual representation of your content. Comic books are what I consider to be attention grabbers. After bringing out several samples, you now have the student's attention. It's what you do with that attention that really matters. For this post I thought I would share some great web 2.0 tools that allow you and your students to make comic books. I urge you to make these assignments interesting, and relevant. Make sure that they are strongly tied to important curriculum standards and benchmarks. Just because the form of presentation and activity creation is "fun" does not mean that the substance in the curriculum is not important.

"When I listen to my colleagues in this connected coaches course, I think one area we have in common is that we see the urgent need for change and we are impatient. I read the article "What can we do about teacher resistance" by Jim Knight. Teachers are unlikely to implement a new practice successfully, if they implement at all, if they have had only workshops without coaching or other forms of follow-up support."

Google Books can help with this. What's needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

Blended learning is a disruptive innovation in education that can take many forms

from Jay Atwood

Assessment via tech infographic - by Stacey & Dana Watts in New Delhi