Big Marker is a new free service for conducting online conferences. I actually learned about Big Marker last weekend from a post by Larry Ferlazzo, but didn't get a chance to try it until this evening. What I discovered is that Big Marker looks like a great option for conducting online tutoring sessions, brainstorming sessions, and other online presentations.
Big Marker allows you to create your choice of a private or a public online meeting room. If you make your room public anyone can join. If you make your room private you have to give participants a password to enter the room. Once in your Big Marker conference room you can share screens, chat via text, chat via audio, or turn on your webcam so that people can see and hear you. Your Big Marker conference room comes with a white board that you and your participants can write and draw on. As the creator of a Big Marker conference you can control who can and cannot be heard or seen in the live audio and video chats.
Applications for Education Big Marker could be a great tool for conducting online tutoring sessions and lessons. Students working on collaborative projects could use Big Marker to brainstorm and plan for completion of their projects. As a professional development resource Big Marker could be useful for facilitating workshops online.
The report Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning, by Cooney Center Industry Fellow Carly Shuler, makes the case that our nation's leaders should not overlook the role mobile technologies can play, if well deployed, in building human capital and in helping to stimulate valuable innovation. As Sesame Street has proven over four decades of remarkable work, exposure to research-tested educational media starting early in life can accelerate children's skills, while producing enduring economic benefi ts to society.
Pockets of Potential argues that despite legitimate public concern about the "disruptive track record" of mobile devices in schools, there is reason to be excited about their potential. As an analysis of key industry trends, opportunities, and challenges, including small-scale studies of academic and industry projects, the paper recommends a series of urgent action steps for key sectors to consider. Of particular note are the promising innovations developed by an international group of mobile technology thought leaders - from Silicon Valley to Seoul to sub-Saharan Africa - whose pioneering work is featured in this report and its appendices.
The report joins a series of studies the Cooney Center has undertaken since launching one year ago. We hope to stimulate a new debate that will lead industry, funders, scholars, and caregivers to consider how the devices children now rely upon as their social currency may one day help them learn essential skills needed for success. As Mrs. Cooney recently noted, "Now is the time to turn the new media that children have a natural attraction to into learning tools that will build their knowledge and broaden their perspectives." Unless we do, the gulf between what children do informally and in school will widen, diminishing the educational opportunities all of our children need and deserve.
This presentation explores a range of ideas that teachers could use to make a real-world task richer and more meaningful for their students. Using a large public art event as the focus, it looks at a number of ideas for enriching student learning with technology… ideas that could be modified and applied to nearly any learning context.
The greatest economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that’s who’s going to be the winner.
my equation is CQ + PQ > IQ. Curiosity Quotient plus Passion Quotient is more important than Intelligence Quotient.
When information is really abundant, when we can literally pluck it out of the air, you need people to sift it, sort it and connect it.
This report summarises the findings of a preliminary research study on the use of mobile technology for learner support in open schooling in developing countries and comprises of the following sections: