Mike Fisher's livebinder on iPads In Schools has lots of links to user guides, tips, for students, for teachers for special ed, for administrators and more.
"The Buck Institute for Education commissioned the cutting-edge advertising agency, Common Craft, to create a short animated video that explains in clear language the essential elements of Project Based Learning (PBL).
This simple video makes the essential elements of PBL come alive and brings to light the 21st Century skills and competencies (collaboration, communication, critical thinking) that will enable K-12 students to be college and work-ready as well as effective members of their communities."
"Scratch is often cited as one of the best introductory languages for teaching kids - or anyone, really - to code. So it's no surprise that a Rutgers University honors class called "Programming for the Masses" would utilize Scratch as part of its goal of making programming a more accessible, everyday skill. What is unique - and if I may say so, pretty fun - is the direction that a research project, an outgrowth of the class, has taken since.
The project is called Scratchable Devices, and with it, computer science Professor Michael Littman and some of his students are working to make it easy for anyone to program their household devices by using Scratch."
In today's schools, most research is completed online, and Google is a great resource for combing the web. But at the same time, it's not always easy to find exactly what you want, given that there are usually millions of results - with varying degrees of accuracy. These tricks can help you find the best results, while saving time and making your life easier.
"Welcome to PBL-Online, a one stop solution for Project Based Learning! You'll find all the resources you need to design and manage high quality projects for middle and high school students."
This cartoon strip from nerdson blog has been translated and reproduced on the UNESCO elearning blog. It is an interesting way to explain to students about how Creative Commons works.
"This site contains tools and guidelines to use as a starting point to getting your students, faculty, and alumni. Review these 8 steps outlining a typical Google Apps for Education technical deployment."
While the Lewisville school district still restricts regular cellphone use in the classroom, the policy is being loosened to allow the program to be used by the school's teachers when they feel that technology would enhance learning.
From ACMA Cybersmart this very catchy video has stats on what students are doing online as well as lots of targetted advice on what to do to prevent problems and what to do when problems arise. It also contains visual links to the support docs that Cybersmart can provided.
"It doesn't seem to matter what age group or demographic that I talk to, kids (and adults) everywhere are fans of Angry Birds. As I was playing around with Angry Birds (yep I'm a fan too), I started thinking about all of the learning that could be happening. I have watched a two year old tell an older sister that "you have to pull down to go up higher". I have watched as kids master this game through trial and error. Being the teacher that I am, I started dreaming up a transdisciplinary lesson with Angry Birds as the base.
I happened to be writing an inquiry lesson that has students look at inventions throughout time and thought: the catapult-that is an invention that has technology and concepts that are used even today. This is one of those inspirational moments that comes when you are drifting off to sleep and has you frantically searching for paper and pen to record as fast as the ideas come. So what did I do? I got myself out of bed and went to work sketching out a super awesome plan.
Here is the embedded learning that I came up with"
"ICTEV's 2011 conference aims to put you in touch with educational colleagues who will enthuse and inspire you to integrate technologies in your learning and teaching. The technologies you will hear about and explore on the day will allow you and your students to be in touch with other educational communities (schools and professionals) across the world."
"Collaborative schooling is a model where the school collaborates with, and provides direction and support for its homes and community. It recognizes the profound impact the home has upon education and that in most of the students' homes and communities there is a vast, largely untapped 'teaching' capacity.
It therefore seeks to integrate the efforts of the home and the school.
The school has already recognized the opportunities the network and digital technologies provide for the school to network and work collaboratively with their homes and desired parts of their school community. This is seen in the following:"
"Scratch takes all of the essential programming constructs like sequencing, conditional branching, control structures, data manipulations, etc, and wraps them in a very friendly, very easy to use environment that even the youngest students can use with just a little knowledge. It's quite intuitive to learn and you can do simple things fairly easily, yet there is really no limit as to how far you take it."
"So you and your students use the Internet everyday, but are you fluent in its language? Perhaps you've found yourself listening to a "techy" conversation where the terms IP, DNS, or PHP were being used and you wanted to know what those terms mean. What is an IP address? What is a DNS record? And just who is in charge of the Internet? Get answers to those questions and many more in Make Use Of's free ebook How the Internet Works."
"So I'd like to get more specific about what I think is wrong about the Khan Academy approach by writing about things I see as wrong with the way we teach math in the US.
No matter if we agree or not about Khan Academy, I'm fairly certain we can agree math learning is not going as well as we'd like (to say the least.) Too many people are convinced by the system that they "hate math", and even students who do well (meaning, can get decent test scores) are often just regurgitating stuff for the test, knowing they can safely forget it shortly afterward."
"Project-based learning is centered on the learner and affords learners the opportunity for in-depth investigations of worthy topics. The learners are more autonomous as they construct personally-meaningful artifacts that are representations of their learning. This article examines the theoretical foundations of project-based learning, particularly constructivism and constructionism, and notes the similarities and differences among implementations, including project-based science (Blulmenfeld et al., 1991), disciplined inquiry (Levstik & Barton, 2001) and WebQuests (Dodge, 1995). In addition, an anatomy of a model case will be considered using a WebQuest example developed by the author, describing seven characteristics common among the various implementations of project-based learning. Finally, practical advice and recommendations for project-based learning are discussed, including beginning slowly with the implementation, teaching students to negotiate cooperative/collaborative groups and establishing multiple forms of performance assessments."
"If you can access it in your school, YouTube has a ton of useful educational content. Here are ten tools that can make using YouTube in your classroom a better experience for everyone."