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The new iOS 6 has a very simple and powerful tool called Guided Access that lets you keep students focused on a single app of your choosing. It lets you disable the home button, restrict parts of the screen so they can't be touched, and even stop responding to being turned over and upside down. It's easy to implement and a great tool in the teacher's toolkit. Here's how to do it:
How To Use Guided Access
Go to SETTINGS then tap GENERAL
Toward the bottom, tap ACCESSIBILITY and then go to the LEARNING section
Now tap on GUIDED ACCESS and switch it to the ON position
Want to set up a passcode? You can do that now
Now go to the app you want to use. Tap the home button 3 times to launch the Guided Access options
Set the options as desired and then tap the home button 3 times again.
"Here's an article by BIE that appeared in the September 2010 issue of Educational Leadership magazine from ASCD. Good for general audiences as well as educators, it explains the essential elements that make rigorous PBL different from "doing projects.""
"Calling all digital divas, web chix & coder girls!
The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing honors young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. The Award offers both national and local "affiliate" competitions to generate support and visibility for women's participation in communities nationwide. THE AWARD IS OPEN NOW THROUGH OCTOBER 31: APPLY NOW!"
"You may have wondered whether you hold the copyright to work you've put many hours into creating on the job. Who holds the copyright to works created by teachers or librarians? Short answer: In general, when employees create works as a condition of employment, the copyright holder is the employer."
"But some new tablets do get you jazzed. And one deserving recognition is the alluring Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime that I've been testing. Available the week of Dec. 19, it vaults to the top of the list of available Android tablets.
Why the lust? Asus has produced a tablet that is fast, beautiful and generous with power. It costs $499 for a version with 32GB of internal storage or $599 for 64GB. Asus is throwing in a year of unlimited Web storage for free. Machines are Wi-Fi only."
"The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to World War I, including photographs, documents, newspapers, films, sheet music, and sound recordings. This guide compiles links to World War I resources throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, this guide provides links to external Web sites focusing on World War I and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers."
"They text (and text and text). They have hundreds of "friends" they've never actually met. They game for hours. How to keep your kids safe and healthy in a hyper-connected world. "
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Developed for students as well as the general public, these interactive learning activities are designed to give you a fresh perspective on how the United States Congress works, your role in the process, and peoples' perceptions about Congress. To open the modules, click the graphic."
"A Planning Guide for Empowering Learnersis a program evaluation, planning, implementation and advocacy tool that will ensure school library program planners go beyond the basics to provide goals, priorities, criteria, and general principles for establishing effective library programs. The guide includes a revised School Library Program Assessment Rubric, a tool that allows school librarians to assess their program on 16 different sets of criteria.
You can immediately start using this valuable resource to plan for your 2010-2011 school year!"
"YoYo Games has grown to be the world's largest user generated game site with over 25,000 games. Employing a web 2.0 community model YoYo Games allows users to "Play, Make and Share games" for free. "
from the site: "The Web and cell phones help us communicate, connect and learn in ways we never could before, but they've also forever changed how we interact with others. Things we used to share in person - and in private - can now be broadcast to thousands, instantly. Sometimes we type things we would never say to someone's face. As a result, new issues like forced sexting, textual harassment and cyberbullyiing have emerged, which now affect a majority of young people in the U.S.
MTV's A Thin Line campaign was developed to empower you to identify, respond to, and stop the spread of digital abuse in your life and amongst your peers. The campaign is built on the understanding that there's a "thin line" between what may begin as a harmless joke and something that could end up having a serious impact on you or someone else. We know no generation has ever had to deal with this, so we want to partner with you to help figure it out. On-air, online and on your cell, we hope to spark a conversation and deliver information that helps you draw your own digital line."
Includes fact sheets about topics such as sexting, digital spying, and excessive text messaging and instant messaging.
The Copyright Alliance Education Foundation is the 501(c)3 non-profit charitable arm of the Copyright Alliance dedicated to developing educational programs aimed at helping America's next generation of creators succeed. The Foundation develops and implements educational projects designed to meet two goals:
1. Help maintain a copyright-aware environment in the nation's classrooms to ensure creators' long-term ability to thrive; and
2. Provide educational resources to future creators.
"The Internet is a fantastic source of facts, but also a source of dubious claims and misinformation. Here we offer our observations on which sites are generally reliable and unbiased, and which are not."
Links to Federal government, NGOs and advocacy groups
We've sorted the sites into three baskets:
* The Official Word - Sites where you can find government statistics and official reports and documents.
* Policy Wonks - Sites of non-governmental organizations that study issues, though not always from a neutral point of view.
* For the Cause - Sites that offer information while also advocating a particular stance on a policy matter.
We've indicated some of our favorites with a , and put a by some that we think you should be wary of."
"Wolfram|Alpha is a free online computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Our long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. This can be valuable to educators in many ways. "