Group items tagged

This publisher is a subsidiary of the Workman Publishing Group and features a new online book club. The online book club features a new book each month (their first book was Julia Alavarez's "In The Time of the Butterflies") and one of the biggest features of this site is the live webcast interview of the individual authors.

Talking about Web 2.0 tools and learning is meaningless as well - until you explain what the tools are, what they are used for, and what the students do with them.

museums. All of that information in one place? It's amazing! Museum Box provides you with the tools to showcase descriptions of an event, person, historical period of time, or anything you can imagine into a virtual box!

Looks like this is a good tool for students to showcase information in any subject.

An article as the title implies that is in favor of using projects int he classroom to enhance learning

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.

This post reviews a digital resources that could be used to assess students prior to or during a lesson.  

This article attracted my attention due to my affiliation with Graduation Portfolios for our district. I loved the idea of students taking ownership of their Portfolio in terms of linking it to an electronic format they could *present* at the end of the school year. One of the apps listed ("Three Ring") sounded really interesting, and I hope to model it with next year's Seniors.

This article was great. Our high school students should be creating career portfolios and some of the programs like Evernote and Three Ring seem to be great ways of collecting and organizing career information. Employers are now looking at what students have accomplished over a paper resume. Some employers want to see you digital resume' with examples of a student's work. These two programs seem to be a great way to help students be prepared for the new way employers might require for job interviews. One other website is a great resource for Student Portfolios and that is MassCis. Not only does it have the ability to upload exemplars, but it has lessons teachers can use that are aligned with the standards to help students explore their career interests. Imagine, career information, career inventories, goal setting activities, resume writing, college and financial information, teachers' lesson plans and student portfolios all on the same website. Each student can create a portfolio and have it from the middle school through high school. Check it out: www.masscis.intocareers.com

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

Blogger Raleigh Werberger, a high school history and humanities teacher, describes a PBL unit that flipped a class from 'just good enough' to creating a working business model and seeking funds to launch a startup. The creative approach to teaching students on multiple levels, including how to market a start-up, and how to make sure students have genuine vested interest in success shows a great way for students to be engaged in their own learning. As the article points out, "[Students'] social media use took on more significance and had a more authentic stake for them, as students began communicating with web journals and community organizations to expand their online presence and gain 'endorsements' for their products." This is a great way to bring students together for a project that demonstrates real life lessons.

Collaboration is key to establishing an effective learning environment. The teacher and the students share the responsibility of creating an environment where optimal learning can take place. Students are often unaware how their behaviors do or don't contribute to learning. Teachers may not be aware how they need to modify their own behavior to meet their students' needs. Teachers and students need to work together in identifying the characteristics of an effective learning environment and then in making their shared vision of the classroom a reality.

I really thought I had bookmarked this the other day - but I guess I didn't. Maybe I blogged about it instead. Really insightful and interesting view of all stakeholders in the classroom being responsible for making it a safe and dynamic workplace.

..."unlock or create layers of digital information on top of the physical world that can be viewed through an Android or iOS device." Through augmented reality, you can hold your device up to an image and watch it come alive. With tools like Aurasma, students can create their own virtual reality.

This site has a plethora of rubrics for assessing the new technology-based projects we will encounter in our classroom. It provides links to rubrics for podcasts, wikis, blogs, websites, voice threads, and more. It's a great resource when planning a rubric for your own classroom projects.