Group items tagged

This article suggests how to use Web 2.0 tools to assess students in the digital age. The article has many useful links. I wish that the examples of the actual rubrics were larger. Overall, I found the article to quite helpful.

How do we assess students' learning in these in Web 2.0 environments? We want to go beyond assessing the mere mechanics of using these tools; unfortunately, most current rubrics for Web 2.0 learning devote only a minuscule amount (usually 16% or less) to actual student academic learning.

This article is about standards-based learning and 21st century skills. How to improve student learning through teacher's decisions and technology. He has a excellent list of rubrics Web 2.0 tools. Some examples "rubrics" are......Wiki/Blog, Images/Photo/Flickr, Video/YouTube,Podcast, Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Videoconferencing, General Assessment: Prensky's 21st century skills, General Assessment: enGauge's 21st century skills, General Assessment: Partnership for 21st century skills. I really liked the links and rubrics and found them very helpful. However the rubrics were small and a little hard to read.

This article provides a number of new tools, but also explanations regarding their practical usage in any classroom. Newer ones include Ipiccy, Easel.ly, Infogr.am, InfuseLearning, BigHugeLabs, SignGenerator, Delivr, Aurasma, TheNounProject, and WeVideo. Others that are more commonly known are: Padlet, Thinglink, & PollEverywhere

Helpful tools to use web 2.0 in the classroom

fur.ly is a great place/idea for educators who are struggling with students finding the right websites or who are having their students copy long URLs off of the board. This tool will let you have one URL that will open multiple websites at one time.

As more schools go paperless, moving from the paper portfolio to a digital or e-portfolio requires careful planning. This article lists several questions which can be used for planning, along with brief descriptions of suggested tools or platform, some of which are free, and a list of links to them.

Like blogging, Adapt Courseware is a social learning space that allows the student to create a profile to get to know his/her peers. Allows the students to participate in discussion groups and to seek help or support from study groups. It also allows the student to create a post that they are interested in or to comment on posts from others.

A 'challenge' for every teacher to step up and finally embrace the tools that enhance learning.

A great resource site full of rubrics to evaluate web 2.0 tools including cooperative learning ,mind maps, online discussion boards, multimedia presentations etc.

Great article about iPads and collaboration with professional development and Google docs. Google is a perfect tool to increase the level of communication and professional development in every school.

I agree Google is a perfect set of tools for collaboration and communication.

Zamzar is an awesome tool for educators who are going the extra mile trying to use technology in the classroom. Too many times educators receive files from other schools or colleagues that just don't work on their computer because of different operating systems and software platforms. With Zamzar you can take files of many different file types and have them be converted to another file type. There isn't any software that needs to be downloaded; just internet access.

This article gives reasons why schools should encourage tweeting among their student body. It shows the benefits of connecting students to students, teachers, parents and the entire community. Reading this article could give the reader new ideas for communicating and connecting using a popular Web 2.0 tool.

This article has merit from the perspective of a district principal. The 12 reasons are aligned with the school mission statement and since Tweeter is free, it is accessible to all stakeholders in the school community. It suggests that parents receive training in the tool to build two-way communications. Tweeter will help build a Personal Learning Network (PLN) and allows for anytime, anywhere PD, and that it is easier to send a tweet than it is to correct a webpage. The last reason #12 actually seems to be the most important in that students can make a connection not with only one mentor but with "a million other mentors" to learn from using Tweeter.

Hohli charts is a simple method of creating dynamic data sets that then display as charts and graphs. This web 2.0 tool would be great and simple for students to use in a k-12 educational setting.

I found a link from the Newstand that connected me to an article from mashable.com, which discusses a new educational program from the people at TED talks. The program allows teachers to turn any YouTube video, including TED talks into a lesson. The article aligned this new tool with the phenomenon of flipping classrooms. To flip a classroom means to prepare a lesson that students can complete at home. The pedagogical foundation of flipped classes is connected to project-based learning. The proponents of this approach believe if students can cover lessons at home, then classroom time could be used for collaborative student projects. The new TED-Ed program allows for teachers to create a unique URL, where student can access the video as well as a series of questions. The types of questions vary from multiple choices, to short answer, to more high order thinking questions. These HOT questions expand the ideas from the video into high order thinking akin to Bloom's Taxonomy. The TED-Ed team is also producing their own educational videos, which are a collaboration between educators and animators. At this point there aren't many of the TED-Ed videos produced, but the ones I explored are quite interesting. The mashable.com article has links to TED-Ed. I am not the biggest proponent of flipped teaching, but I am intrigued by TED's involvement.

The author of the article reviews a new training software release "Articulate Storyline". The program combines several elements: video, dialog balloons, and questions with multiple scenario resolutions for starters. Each scene is very short. The video action stops, and text balloons appear showing the dialog of the scene. Then three possible resolutioins to the scene appear. The user chooses one, and the video continues. It works like an improv play where the audience chooses how each scene will end. Although it's designed as a tool for the teacher, I can see where students would love this, too. The reviewer is definitely not unbiased, but there are links to samples that showcase just what the program can do.

This article showcases a virtual cultural exchange program between a school in New York and China. The students use web 2.0 tools to collabaroate and learn from each other in what could be a new wave of cultural exchange programs.

Our school was part of the NetGeneration of Youth program and we had a cultural exchange with two sister schools, one in LA and the other in Uganda. The students communicated over Ning and Skype and they collaborated during two celebrations "parties with a purpose" which allowed for a sharing of menus, music, and stories. The culminating project was a student/teacher exchange for three weeks in each country.

I would use this tool to collaborate with students on a topic.

A tutorial on who to use Adobe to assess digital work, best practices, commenting and markup tools, audio commenting

A fabulous article about assessing student learning throught the use of digital portfolios. Audio commentary, photos and more are all gathered in a portfolio throughout the year to assess their learning. A great tool for special needs students!