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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.

An interesting read about what may become important to us in the future 3D printers may become very important to us. The true potential is when we can design our own remotes, with our our own sense of flair, using design software, and then print in our own homes.  Cottage industries might emerge, contests, DIY markets - and all fueled by creativity and inventiveness.

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Collaborative Inquiry through Philosophy for Children (P4C) - Cultivating thinking, questioning and discussion..  Presenters: Paul Southwell, Nick Martin and Nicole Jaggers, Radford College Canberra Questions: What does it mean to be educated?  s it more important to know or understand?  Is it more important to be knowledgeable or a thinker?

Interesting post on creativity "If you have a decisions to make, what is the single most important question to ask yourself? I believe it's 'when does this decision have to be made'? When most of us have a problem that's a little bit unresolved, we're a little bit uncomfortable. We want to resolve it. The creative architects had this tolerance for this discomfort we all feel when we leave things unresolved." "Why would those two things be importance? The playfulness is because in that moment of childlike play, you're much more in touch with your unconscious. The second is that when you defer decisions as long as possible, it's giving your unconscious the maximum amount of time to come up with something."

Cooperative learning requires positive independence which boosts atmosphere of trust among students and helps them accomplish the task in result oriented and timely manner. The team will suffer if one of the students does not manage to do his/her part. The next important factor is that this type of learning encourages face to face interaction. Students must challenge and compromise one another. Team members must periodically identify the changes to achieve better results in their work.

With regards to creating a video like the one above do you: Do it because it's not only fun but likely does address some cirriculuar outcomes but you might have to look them up later. Fingers crossed. Do it and to heck with the outcomes, doing joyful things with students is important.  Do it but perhaps as an extra-curricular activity because you're not sure where it fits with a robust curriculum but still think it's important. Not do it at all.  

A place to share e-learning and Web 2.0 tools for education. Computers and laptops in education are important only when used with good pedagogy. Digital content and creation is an important part of the process for educators in the 21st century.

So Prensky was right the first time - there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not - and that's what's important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have doubted the existence of a coherent 'net generation'. "We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis," says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation - which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work. "Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying."

"Video games are just tools, outlets for people to express themselves in as vast a variety of ways as anything else. They are still relatively new creations, and the unknown can frighten anyone, hence the uproar that's followed games for years. The same uproar and indignation that followed rock and roll in the '50s and novels in the 19th century. This is why the Violent Content Research Act of 2013 is ultimately a good thing. It will lead to, ideally, a deeper understanding of how we interact with games. For parents, children, players, academics, and everyone else with a vested interest in a gaming future, the most important thing is to maintain perspective."

"It's very important for us to build this into our understanding of what it means to teach writing. We need to be able to make that part of our understanding of the new normal of writing -- not an additional piece -- but the new normal."

... the lecture is no longer the only way to transfer important information. "Ever since the Middle Ages, the primary vehicle for conveying information was the lecture," he said. "But this is the 21st century, and there are so many ways to convey information, it's not the necessity it once was." Students don't learn by listening, they learn by doing, 

One of the most powerful things I have learned is how amazing young children are in their thinking around mathematical concepts.  In Kindergarten I began developing a culture that not only had examples and artifacts of our learning, but ways for children to begin to use "math talk", which is the language I began modeling in explicit ways for children to see and began to practice in their own understanding of the concepts we are exploring. Through daily, explicit modeling through our daily number corner, math dyads and other mathematical work stations the children began to apply their understanding in meaningful ways throughout the day which has helped to build self-confidence in all of the children. What is important to understand here is that I did have to add something new onto my already full plate, but rather this was an opportunity to learn some new tools and a different way of thinking about what I was already teaching. This is one example of  where I started to see how rigor and relevance applied in my teaching and how vital it is and has become in my daily teaching practice.

"Despite more than a century of being bombarded with advertising and other media, educators all too often underestimate the importance of how we communicate using images"

Not only is technology easy for them to use, giving them a central place where everything important is located, they also enjoy using these devices. That's why when it comes to education, teachers need to listen to students.

Ten Surprising Truths about Video Games and Learning What we'd assumed about the importance of brain functions - following rules and logic and calculating - are no longer relevant. There's been a revolution in the learning sciences and the new theories say that human beings learn from experiences - that our brains can store every experience we've had, and that's what informs our learning process. Following that logic, he says, the best kind of learning comes as a result of well-designed experiences. Gee, who spoke at the Learning and the Brain Conference last week, used this theory to launch into research-validated reasons why video games are good for learning. Here are 10 truths, according to Gee."

Girls and Games: What's the Attraction? Games are increasingly recognized by educators as a way to get kids excited about learning. While the stereotype of a "gamer" may evoke the image of a high school boy holed up in a dark room playing on a console, in reality 62 percent of gamers play with other people either in person or online, and 47 percent of all gamers are girls. Game developers and academics who have been studying the elements that go into making games more attractive to girls found that those very same qualities are also important components of learning. For instance, girls are more drawn to games that require problem solving in context, that are collaborative (played through social media) and that produce what's perceived to be a social good. They also like games that simulate the real word and are particularly drawn to "transmedia" content that draws on characters from books, movies, or toys.

"The Stella Prize is a new major literary award for Australian women's writing. The Stella Prize celebrates Australian women's contribution to literature. Named after one of Australia's most important female authors, Stella Maria 'Miles' Franklin (1879-1954), the prize rewards one writer with a significant monetary prize of $50,000. The Stella Prize will also raise the profile of women's writing through the Stella Prize longlists and shortlists, encourage a future generation of women writers, and bring readers to the work of Australian women. The Stella Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2013, and both fiction and non-fiction books are eligible."

hHelping students learn how to learn: That's what most educators strive for, and that's the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers. Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. Students think about the choices they make throughout the process and the way they feel as they learn. Those observations are as important as the content they learn or the projects they create.