Group items tagged

"This webinar will examine the social networks that have become established by educators. It will examine their scope, audience and the different tools that can be used to connect with these online learning communities. It will look at how teachers can connect to these communities with mobile phones, tablet devices and computers, online behaviour, how information is shared, how to control your content, how to find material and how to leverage this to best advantage. It will also consider some of the ethical issues and dilemmas that must be considered. "

""Technology is central to how we learn and how we communicate," Florence said. "This is an initiative to allow faculty to experiment with how tablet computers can help improve and expand their teaching.""

News report that examines how a tablet computer can help change classroom teaching.

"Being able to solve everyday complex problems through communication and cooporation with others are the skills that students need to learn and practice to prepare for the future. Communicating effectively and efficiently with diverse audiences and solving everyday problems are important in a society that is moving at a rapid pace in a Global Market. The ability to solve everyday complex problems is an important and necessary skill for students today. Problem based learning (PBL) provides a learning environment students require to resolve everyday problems while applying previous and learning new knowledge. Cooperative learning, as a part of PBL, allows students the opportunity to communicate ideas and knowledege. As a teacher it is also important to communicate effectively with students to guide the learning process as well as model how to question and reason through a problem. The web-enhanced 3 part seminar series is designed to review and apply the basics of PBL to allow you to create a PBL unit to use within your own classroom."

"We know how important it is to protect and educate young people on using the Internet and want to provide all of our users with a safe experience. When it comes to family safety, we aim to: * Provide parents and teachers with tools to help them choose what content their children see online * Offer tips and advice to families about how to stay safe online * Work closely with organisations such as charities, others in our industry and government bodies dedicated to protecting young people "

"Scott McLeod, in his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, recently reminded us of a line from Mission Impossible, and we must apply that challenge to all of society. "Your assignment, should you choose to accept it" is to take education truly into the 21st century. It is not enough to say that we are already living there. Technically it is the 21st century, but our schools are not there, and our challenge now is to reinvent schools for the 21st century - for the sake of our children, our students and the welfare of our world. Making such a paradigm shift is not easy. After all, when any of us thinks of education, we usually think of what we knew as school - the way it has always been. That is how parents, policy makers, politicians and many students think of school. But we have to make the paradigm shift to 21st century education. So what is 21st century education? It is bold. It breaks the mold. It is flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. It addresses a rapidly changing world filled with fantastic new problems as well as exciting new possibilities. Fortunately, there is a growing body of research supporting an increasing number of 21st century schools. We have living proof, inspiring examples to follow, in schools across the United States. These schools vary, but are united in the fundamentals of 21st century education - see Critical Attributes of 21st Century Education and Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century. Scott McLeod has issued the challenge of creating a plan to get us from "here" to "there"."

"Learn it in 5 is a powerful library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, for the purpose of helping teachers and students create classroom strategies for today's 21st century's digital classroom. These step-by-step how-to videos walk teachers through Web 2.0 technology, demonstrating how to use Web 2.0 applications like blogs, social networks, podcasts, interactive videos, wikis, slidesharing and much more."

"Here's a closer look at how network snooping works and how to protect yourself from it."

This neat tool from Google, ChartTool is a simple-to-use chart-making service that lets you simply paste in your data and play around with how it looks. It's never been easier to whip up charts that are actually easy to use and update. In fact, embedding these charts on web pages is quite simple thanks to the embed API. You can even make QR codes in just a few seconds and quickly get an embed code to add it to your website. While ChartTool does not create as many of those fancy 3-D charts that Excel does (it still makes quite a few), it likely will be able to in the future. However, if you're in a rush and need to whip up some exact charts without all the fluff, this is the tool for you.

"No matter what topic you are interested in, Google can only go so far in providing you with the search results that you need. You have to remember that Google is searching through the entire Internet in order to offer you relevant results about your unique topic. The more unique or specialized the topic, the more difficult it is for Google to identify useful sites." This How To from Make Use Of details how to create a custom search engine based around a pre-defined set of websites.

"Thankfully, there are ways to restore your online reputation. While you might think that reducing your internet presence is the way to go, you'd be wrong. The key to managing your reputation is to spend more time online, not less. The advocates of this approach argue that polishing your online persona could soon join healthy eating and exercise in your arsenal of everyday life-maintenance chores. So how exactly do you go about it?"

"Little is known about Wikipedia contributors' information behaviour and from where and how the information in the encyclopaedia originated...... Understanding the information source use of contributors helps us to understand how new Wikipedia articles emerge, how edits are motivated, where the information actually comes from and more generally, what kind of information may be expected to be found in Wikipedia. "

Sometimes you want to do a little task that really has to be run on Windows or there's no alternative software for Mac, but you don't want to reboot into Bootcamp to do it. And you want to keep Bootcamp, since it lets you run Windows to its potential. Well, VirtualBox can certainly help you ! It's a great piece of freeware that I recently fell in love with.

"Welcome to the Google Apps Education Training Center. This is an online learning environment dedicated for educators and students to learn how to effectively use Google Apps in an educational context. Access to a Google Apps Education account is strongly recommended so that you can experiment and apply what you learn. There are six modules of training content available. Each module has several chapters with many lessons. After reviewing the entire training course, an individual will have a solid understanding of all the products in the Google Apps suite. Learning objectives include: * Customize Google Apps for your school * Organize your email more effectively * Create shared calendars for your school * Collaborate with others, online, on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets * Deliver and collect surveys, quizzes, and feedback * Develop a media-rich website without looking at code * Set-up an internal video portal just for your school Each chapter will take from 10 to 20 minutes to complete. Browse the modules on the right to see a list of chapters for each topic."

Digital Leader programme "Show them something they are interested in and they want to know more. If they come up against a barrier, they want to overcome it. If they can find out something no-one else knows, they want to share it. Successful Digital Leaders are the epitome of the curious student with more to offer schools than perhaps any other student body at this time. The classroom environment is changing and students and teachers need their help."

"Clearly, there's a need for multiple backups.  The questions are, how? and how many? .. For most of us, it's all in one place, so we need a single strategy -- one, two, or more backups. But if you have original data on separate Macs and/or external drives, you may want more backups of one than others. How?  There are several ways to have multiple backups, detailed below:"

"Here we'll slowly but surely present our small team's effort to preserve, study, and document historic computers .. Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work?"

Fascinating computer history project.

"iOS 4.2 comes with a unique feature called AirPrint which allows you to print your documents, photos, emails and web-pages over a Wifi connection with your Apple iOS device. To enable iOS 4.2 AirPrint feature on Windows, follow the step-by-step guide below. This guide is applicable to Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users."

How to print from iPad with Airprint on Windows

Plans for a pilot scheme to connect teachers in the UK who want to learn how to program with experienced practitioners who can coach them are starting to take shape. The ultimate goal is to give every child in the UK a chance to try their hand at computer programming ..

This is a fabulous introduction to using Diigo in schools. "Welcome to Student Learning with Diigo. This site was completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of of ISLT 9440, Learning with the Internet, a graduate class, during the Fall 2010 from the University of Missouri. Educators, worldwide, have enjoyed the use of this social bookmarking site. Diigo is a great web-based tool for teachers to utilize, to motivate, and to engage students of all ages in the learning process. We invite you to explore the various features of Diigo. Become educated and informed on the powerful use of Diigo for student learning. Learn how this research tool can enhance classroom instruction and promote higher levels of student collaboration. As you navigate through our site you will see examples of valuable lessons and resources, all displayed for your use. Set up your account now. This research tool is every educator's dream."

"I've only recently started using Dropbox but I am a big fan. It's really convenient to store and access your files from different computers in different locations. In Moodle 2.0 it is possible to import files you have in Dropox by choosing the Dropbox repository when you go to the new file picker. This video shows you how to set it up as admin. All you need is a Dropbox account and a Moodle 2.0 :)"

Interesting tutorial that explains how to integrate DropBox with Moodle 2.0