"When I heard a teacher tell me that they were creating recorded lectures for courses as homework assignments and spending classroom time on discussions and more active learning, I knew right then the value of the lecture capture tools."
"'The creation of video and the publishing of video is getting to the point where it's almost as easy as creating a written assignment,' says Kyle D. Bowen, Purdue University's director of informatics."s recent experience.
"Often, the word competency and skill are used interchangeably. While they are related, they are not the same. A competency is a demonstrated ability to perform a particular job or task. A competency includes skills, but also behaviors and the ability to apply those skills in order to perform a job or task. For example, a teacher may know how to use a computer and productivity software (skill), but may not know how to use those skills to increase collaboration and critical thinking in their students (competency)."
"Being connected changes learning. When those connections are global, the experience of knowledge development is dramatically altered as well. Over the past four years, a growing number of educators have started experimenting with the teaching and learning process in order to answer critical questions: "How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? What is the future of learning? What role with educators play in this future? What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous? ... (The result is) a MOOC with each week being facilitated by an innovative thinker, researcher, and scholar. Over 30 of them. From 11 different countries."
Crystal's relaxed style and unassuming manner are at the forefront as he discusses the impact of texts and tweets on written language use.
Crystal is actually quite positive about their impact and discusses findings relating the number of texts a student sends and their attainment in formal testing - contrary to conventional wisdom texting is actually positively related to school achievement.
"This the 5th annual survey of learning tools that I have built based on the contributions of learning professionals worldwide. The 2011 list will be finalised on 13 November 2011."<--reason enough to postpone the cool tools workshop until mid November?
ITinteroperability is a newsletter aimed at informing you about technical, standards and interoperability projects pertinent to education in Australia. It includes news items on local interoperability projects as well as summarising activity in international standards bodies relevant to education in Australia.