Here are Edutopia's most highly rated resources this week. Note that our resources can be rated along three parameters:
PRACTICAL Practical materials are ones that you can use to improve your classroom or school right now. These include lesson ideas, tips and strategies for implemeting a new practice, or anything else that is useful RIGHT NOW (as opposed to something that may take 10 months and several committee meetings to implement.)
INNOVATIVE These are materials that inspire you with their cutting-edge ideas. Not necessarily something you can implement right away, but if they're Practical too, then you can certainly choose both.
PERSUASIVE Persuasive resources are those that make the case for a particular practice or idea. Maybe they helped to change your mind. Or maybe they could change someone else's mind. You could use these materials to persuade your school board, for instance, or your principal to adopt a new approach.
It's a means of sending an email to various other people at once. For example, you might send an email addressed to a parent concerning a manner but you'd CC the same email to your year level co-ordinator so they know exactly what you're communicating to said parent.
c Set
up your own collection of RSS feeds
Once RSS is demonstrated to staff through sites such as Pageflakes staff may see how the benefit of the web working for the user rather than trawling through google.
Yes, what about great online presentation tools? How much (if at all?) do we still have to play by the "Everyone needs to know MS suite so schools need to do this as 'Job Prep?'" Do you feel this as a need in your schools?
ito
Juxtapose
other stimulus prompts ito challenge thinking
Edit a word processed document by: using find and replace, checking word
counts, inserting page breaks, accessing the spellcheck and thesaurus
functions
Is this more of a "basic" skill that we assume that all educators already know? If this section is regarding posting documents, we are talking about a different set of skills.
I assume this is a somewhat mandatory skill that users of Word Processing applications should have. How unprofessional to read a doc that has spelling errors etc!!
Yes, any means - Moodle, Wordpress, Sharepoint, etc. - the idea is that we have a professional responsibility to make core documents available. Do you agree?
Consider
taking an active role in an online community.
That's why setting up an in-house system where you can create a large number of individual student accounts at the start of the year (such as VBulletin) comes in very handy.
Any ideas about the best way to do this? Should it be a WEB 2.0 application, such as Dropbox? Or is bandwith use a concern, so a LAN setup should be used?
Just to save on costs, you'd probably have to do it over a LAN. It would also create a more reliable system, since an intranet/local network is less likely to fail than the connection to outside resources.
Create
opportunities for students to synthesise their learning through projects that
call for a creative, problem-solving or innovative response.
Join
a professional learning community and follow
posts for several weeks
c Join
a
professional learning community and follow
posts
for several weeks
c Join
an online chat, webinar or presentation as an observer
c
Choose one aspect of the learning framework to research
Twitter is excellent for following like minded people and sharing thoughts, opinions and ideas about education and web 2.0 technologies.
Choose
at least one work that you are willing to publish to the Web and do so. This may be in any format: visual,
written, video, audio, presentation, etc. The forum may be a wiki,
professional journal, educators’ social network, iTunes, etc.
How do you ensure appropriate content, privacy of other students, etc, in an environment where students can publish content for the world to see? Can you effectively?
This is GREAT. Now we just need an online database so we can take a good long hard look at our own skills and those of other staff. I don't think this should be threatening to anyone, but guide them through some essential skills.
Explore a new Web application and use it yourself for a
lesson
Adrian did a full day PD with our Primary staff at the start of 09. The focus was on integrating ICTs into the curriculum. It had a significant impact on the teachers, and they are still talking about how much fun they had.
Links to a HUGE range of teaching resources:
-Reading Games-Math Games-Educational Software-Motivational Posters-Line Symmetry-Readers Theater-Art Lessons-Science Lessons- ....
One strategy that usually works is to begin simply with “Who? What? Where? When?
Why? and How?” This challenges viewers to look beyond the surface and venture a
hypothesis.
This poster begins to map the field of active and critical reading as demonstrated in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) projects in the Visible Knowledge Project. It connects, as well, to exhibition posters that synthesize work and methods that cut across projects. We also link to posters of individual SOTL projects ub the VKP Galler
A fantastic source for the greatest thinkers and achievers of our day. Use the Web or iTunes interface to view, download and watch snippets to support Learning to Look