Writing Across the Curriculum

A social learning community.

A video about Connectivism and Web 2.0 tools.

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

Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue.

An introduction to mobile portfolios.

creative critical thinking

The 2011 Horizon Report K-12 Education looks at the technologies most likely to impact education in the coming five years. Released by the New Media Consortium in collaboration with the Consortium for School Networking, the report identifies six new technologies that can expand the tools available to educators without increasing costs - and all of them have the potential to change the way educators, students and institutions work.

new technologies

Infographics -visual representations of data- can play a critical role in developing students' information literacy so they can make sense of their world.

visual construction

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.

Throughout much of the 20th century the getting of wisdom involved a largely one-way transmission of facts, theories and ideas. In school classrooms it was mainly chalk and talk from an authoritative teacher up the front; in universities we had various sages on the (lecture) stage or the less-inspiring drones on the throne. By 2000, 82 per cent of the global population could read and write and the classroom played a critical role in shaping lives worldwide. Knowledge resided in books, publications and educated minds.

My experiences with Twitter made me revisit important lessons as a writer and as a teacher of writing. What I learned through tweeting has applications for each writing teacher and writer.

Groups that you can connect with for classes, etc.

Educators - it's time to stop all the modeling. Get rid of all the canned graphic organizers. Have the courage to be less helpful. Be patient and let students recognize their own patterns. It's messy work, but its where the learning will take place.