Group items tagged

Tagging allows you to find content in other blogs that matches yours and possibly can provide you with additional insights and information about a subject area you are passionate about. But tagging can also serve a very valuable service for faculty using blogs as a class assignment. If your students are writing individual blogs for a class assignment/project, you can ask them to identify their blog posts with a specific tag, such as your name course name and section number.

How can wikis be used in writing projects? Remember, a wiki is a collaborative tool, so writing projects using a wiki should include a collaborative aspect. Following are some ideas:

There are many, many ways to use Google docs. And Google docs is not only limited to word processing, but also includes shared spreadsheet and presentation (PowerPoint) features.

How can you increase your chances of improving student acceptance of and contribution to a class/group/project wiki? Here are 10 suggestions:

Although wikis, with their collaborative approach and vast reach online, have been around for at least 15 years, their use as a general teaching tool in higher education is still relatively recent. But an increasing number of universities are now adopting them as a teaching tool. As part of that trend, a handful of Singapore universities are using the wiki platform as a way to engage students.

A social learning community.

Explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery. A study by MIT researchers and colleagues compared the behavior of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, finding that children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.

This Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open resource for educational institutions interested in developing or expanding their blended learning initiatives.

Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She's now on her way to "flipping" the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids' own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It's when they're doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.

"The first Networked Learning Conference Hotseat with Peter Goodyear has attracted a lot of interesting discussion. Most of the discussion has centred on what is meant by networked learning and there seem to be as many definitions as there are people in the forum."

"Bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own technology (BYOT) policies are growing in education and the workplace. Teachers are taking advantage of mobile devices for "m-learning,""

These techniques can provide lots of access points to information.

Connectivism as a pedagogical theory is typically thought of in terms of networks, but the major practical implication of connectivism occurs in the organization of learning eventes and resources. Unlike traditional educatioinal modalities, in which people work collaboratively, in a connectivist model, people work cooperatively.

Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.

Kelli Marshall's blog is a candid and detailed post on using Twitter as a discussion tool in some of the film courses Marshall has taught. She explains that while some students have resisted using the site, they have generally produced great comments about the course's content and have participated in thoughtful conversations, even beyond the classroom.

You don't have to know much about the psychology of learning to realise that a series of once-only, delivered lectures is pedagogic nonsense. We learn next to nothing from once-only experiences like unrecorded lectures. Indeed, everything we know about learning shows that repeated access to content is necessary for learning.

I am getting more an more convinced that in high school it is imperative for teachers who want to 'get into blogging' to understand the under pinning nature of 'writing communities'.