Group items tagged

This article discusses the disagreement between administrators and teachers regarding online safety taught at school.

Survey conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Microsoft revealed that students are not savvy in the area of being safe and ethical in cyberspace. Schools, teachers and administrators need to bridge the divide for students to not only be safe, but skillful digital information users.

Seeing as we "talked" a lot about blogging policy and digital ethics this week, I thought this was a perfect information literacy article.

eSchool News presents the dilemma with the growing trends in online learning. Communication is key in the classroom and online/virtual teachers must possess the special skills necessary to enhance the learning process in the virtual environment.

Very interesting article. I think a lot of teachers diving into online teaching are not prepared for, or are surprised at, the intense level of communication required. Frequent concise feedback to students is the key. This article does a solid job at communicating this. Thanks for sharing it.

This article is about the continually evolving face of online education. The students that choose online educations are usually "non-traditional" students... so online schools need to be non-traditional also!

This article about Blended Learning where some of the course is taken face-to-face and other parts strictly in an online environment - this is a new wave in teaching and another option for increasing information literacy for students at all levels of education from Elementary School to College!

Stoodle , an online white board service partly supported by CK12 Foundation, enables students and educators to quickly create and work on a collaborative whiteboard space.

This educational web 2.0 tutorial demonstrates a great online method of taking collected data with your classroom and inputing the information into a chart in just a couple of easy steps. Create cutomized data charts simply.

This teacher makes a really strong argument that you should not feel that you have nothing important to say. This is the way to make some strong networked relationships. I like her quote "This has led to many great conversations with other educators about teaching issues." Blogging has connected her to peers throughout the world. I find that being an online educator is lonely so this may be the way to go to share resources and to discuss with others that share our online world.

I really enjoyed reading this article because I'm feeling the same excitement as the author did when she first began blogging. While I'm just learning how to "officially" blog, I have been using Edmodo with my students as a way to connect with my students outside my classroom. It allows us to communicate and ask questions to one another outside of normal school hours, yet in a more structured classroom like forum, unlike Facebook. But because it works similar to Facebook, the students love it and don't mind logging on and doing their assignments. One day when I was out sick, I was able to log on an have real time discussions with my students. If they had questions about the assignment they were able to ask. They can also turn in their assignments via Edmodo instead of waiting for the next day/week. My feelings are if the students are into it, then it's something we need to be doing as well to keep up with them. Teachers who use Web 2.0 tools such as blogging have an advantage over those that don't because these are the social networks that students know and are familiar with. Also, the author of this article points out the fact that teachers have a new way of connecting to each other and share ideas. From what I remember when I was younger, the traditional teacher's only way of communicating and sharing ideas or concerns with other teachers were via phone or before/after school meetings. I don't know how often that actually happened, but now with blogging you can share your information any time with any body.

This is an academic paper examining the reasons why an online learning group should 'move ... from cohort to community.' (abstract), and how students resources and strategies may be managed to accomplish this. The paper asserts that students in a distance learning situation are isolated from each other and the teacher, therefore it is of vital importance that the cohort needs to create a sense of community rather than simply exist alone in the virtual learning room. The article quotes Vygotsky's social development theory of 1978, Selznik's seven elements of community: history, identity, mutuality, plurality, autonomy, participation, and integration (1996), and how the author's of the article modified the characteristics to conform more with current online learning theory. I found this article particularly relevant to the current situation I find myself in. Even though I am happy in my own space and don't need the close interaction with others, I can see that it is important to push myself forward in the sense of gleaning the most benefit from the course and those many intelligent people out there. This is difficult for me because I find the time necessary to maintain so many contacts, and actually have something worthwhile to say and share goes against my slow, ponderous thinking and non-gregarious nature!

This article by Sam Somani, explained the new fad at universities call MOOCs- massive open online courses. These courses are free and open to the public, and thousands of students can take each course. The author, being skeptical of MOOCS, decided to try one. He found that not only were students benefiting from the course, the quality of instructional videos was such that it could be used as a tool to ,"to see on a fundamental level how other schools may approach teaching differently and how these schools are able to better reach out to students through their teaching."

More educational institutions provide free online education. This trend we are now seeing from places like iTunes U, TED talks and Kahn Academy, for example make this world more open to learning.

This is one of the easier and more versatile concept mapping software online.

"Social media may have started out as a fun way to connect with friends, but it has evolved to become a powerful tool for education and business. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in new and exciting ways. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list."

Great list from Online University with ideas for using social media in the classroom.

University students create videos for younger, k12 students to help inspire future computer science students. This is two fold. The process of creating the video also reinforces topics mastered while benefiting society.

This is amazing on so many levels. Thanks for sharing. For us- great teaching resources, but also a great learning tool for the MIT students.

Can you trust everything you read on the Internet? Can you trust anything you read on the Internet? Teach your kids which Web sites to trust! The words you are reading now have been read -- and reread -- by several experienced editors and educators.

What a great resource. We have recently had a lot of problems at our school with students using Answer.com and trusting the information there to be fact. We have had some interesting facts come to light as a result...

Starting in 2013 VA will require all students to take some sort of online course in order to graduate. Taking online courses requires higher order thinking for students and teaches them valuable 21st century skills like collaboration, independence, communication and digital literacy.

This article by John F. Bauer and Rebecca S. Anderson helps explain valuable criteria and sample rubrics for evaluating online classroom formal and informal discussions, explaining the rationale for different rubrics for each and providing sample of each.

From the makers of Gronckit the collaborative, social, online learning and test preparation company comes their latest venture Learnist. Learnist is a continual learning and professional development platform kind of like Pinterest, but with more features. Learnist is a community geared for creating, sharing, communicating and improving collective resources.  I signed up for an account and started to follow @LearnistTweets on Twitter.

A comprehensive adaptive online curriculum resources that individualize each student's learning experience, It is a new social learning tool. The tool promote increased online collaboration among students and with instructors. The goal is an approach to community-based learning is to deliver a more engaging educational experience where each student can benefit from a high level of support and interaction.

This site overviews the importance of using media in instruction and provides some Web 2.0 tools to achieve animation for teaching.

This is a very cool article. I loved the comparison of a teachers introduction of education background is compared to a computer " It's like going to Dell's website to shop for a computer and getting nothing but photos of the factories and descriptions of how the computers were built." Use a video to introduce ourselves and explain all we can do in the classroom. We should be making them look forward to what they can do during the year with me. Very Cool.

This is a very cool article. I loved the comparison of a teachers introduction of education background is compared to a computer " It's like going to Dell's website to shop for a computer and getting nothing but photos of the factories and descriptions of how the computers were built." Use a video to introduce ourselves and explain all we can do in the classroom. We should be making them look forward to what they can do during the year with me. Very Cool.

This page contains links to online games with some educational value.