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I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse.

What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?

Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers.

Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school. Google Scholar. Use this specialized Google search to get results from scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, and academic publishers. Use Google Earth’s Sky feature. Take a look at the night sky straight from your computer when you use this feature. Open your browser with iGoogle. Set up an iGoogle page and make it your homepage to have ready access to news stories, your Google calendar, blogs you follow in Google Reader, and much more. Stay current with Google News. Like an electronic clearinghouse for news, Google News brings headlines from news sources around the world to help you stay current without much effort. Create a Google Custom Search Engine. On your own or in collaboration with other students, put together an awesome project like one of the examples provided that can be used by many. Collect research notes with Google Notebook. Use this simple note-taking tool to collect your research for a paper or project. Make a study group with Google Groups. Google Groups allows you to communicate and collaborate in groups, so take this option to set up a study group that doesn’t have to meet face-to-face. Google Code University. Visit this Google site to have access to Creative Commons-licensed content to help you learn more about computer science. Study the oceans with Google Earth 5. Google Earth 5 provides information on the ocean floor and surface with data from marine experts, including shipwrecks in 3D. Learn what experts have to say. Explore Knol to find out what experts have to say on a wide range of topics. If you are an expert, write your own Knol, too.

I’ve recently been working with a district that over the last two years has given over 300 workshops on various tools, but when I asked them to talk about what significant, real change had come about because of those workshops, there was basically silence in the room. I’ve started saying that the only workshop we should offer our teachers is one titled something like “How to Learn Online,” one that gives teachers some context and some strategy for directing their own learning but places the expectation for DIYPD squarely on their shoulders. That’s what I find really compelling about PLP, that it supports teachers in developing their own learning goals and strategies, yet at the same time gives them a great sense of potential of these online communities as well. Ultimately, this still is about us, about the decisions we make as “solo practitioners.” But we have to have a different frame, a different context for those decisions now, one that helps us understand our roles as truly connected educators as well.

Students revisit the framework several times throughout their program and use artifacts from their evidence collection to demonstrate learning. Justification for their selection is part of the task and engages students in reasoning about the alignment of evidence with particular indicators. This is coupled with a reflective writing task that asks students to discuss their growth in each of the domains (and over time). This is the central task of many teacher education programs that require e-portfolios.

I am drawn to the notion of having students participate in a professional discourse community that interacts around entries and artifacts, which both contributes to their thinking and learning about what it means to be a professional in their chosen field, as well as allows them to monitor their learning over time.

What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.

You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).

In my recent experience of integrating technology into my classroom, I’ve found that the mode of communication changes but several elements of classroom do not change.

n this course, you will write a substantial research essay (6+ pages in MLA Style) on a topic of your own choice that relates to some aspect of the course material. In order to combat the procrastination (I-work-better-under-pressure) syndrome, this assignment has several steps all of which you must complete to achieve the best possible result.

It seems natural to assume that students in upper level courses will know the difference between a good term paper and a poor one. I've learned the hard way that this is an unwarranted assumption! My first attempts to use term paper assignments in my psychology courses were disappointing. The failure was partly my fault because I was not very specific in stating my expectations and the characteristics of good writing. Term paper assignments should be used as an opportunity to clearly demonstrate the differences between good and poor writing by communicating practices to avoid in the course assignment.

The following is a term paper assignment that I use in my Biopsychology course. The trend that you will notice in this assignment is that the expectations are very clear. For example, acceptable topics and information that should be covered within a topic are stated. In addition, classic space wasters such as huge direct quotes, long bulleted lists, large margins, and oversized fonts are illustrated as practices to avoid. As for the sources, the assignment clearly states that academic or peer reviewed sources are preferred whereas information from encyclopedias is considered unacceptable. These specific expectations help to clearly delineate the differences between good and poor writing practices.

For older students, Silvia Tolisano, a technology and 21st-century learning specialist, offers a comprehensive blog post on helping students take their blog skills to the next level. She focuses on the ability of blogs to help students become better writers, and be part of a network and contribute to a larger community.

This has expanded into the idea of a social presence where one is able to be seen as a real person in a virtual environment