Writing Across the Curriculum

One of the largest learning object repositories.

Searching blogs through a service such as Technorati.com will help identify new repositories of learning objects: videos, etc. to use in your lessons.

"This is the second year of the GFW High School One-to-One iPad Initiative where every GFW High School student has access to an iPad tablet to use in their classes. Students can use their iPad: -as an organizational tool to track assignments, homework and class projects. -to access the internet to research information needed for class projects. -to create on-line presentations -to word process class papers and projects -to run a variety of applications to enhance their learning experience in class -to read electronic books, tests, newspapers and magazines"

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.

Are we seeing a shift from text to video as a primary form of expression? Perhaps in pop culture this has already happened with television, movies, youtube, and the web-but what if it stretches into academia? In fact, we're already seeing this with math.

using word clouds and fusion tables to share and process data information with students

Creating data visualizations and word clouds is quite easy with the following tools.

A data visualization tool from IBM.

I suspect that many of us ask students to do some kind of writing in class: whether reflecting on the day's topic, responding to a brief prompt, or outlining their ideas. I include those kinds of writing-to-learn activities in my classes as well.

A virtual round table for meetings & events, with free, unlimited web conferences.

A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. … The data was clear: In every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative and influential research.

Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

A new kind of technological literacy is emerging. While a certain amount of technical skills are important, the real goal should be in cultivating digital or new media literacies that are arising around this evolving digital nerve center. These skills allow working collaboratively within social networks, pooling knowledge collectively, navigating and negotiating across diverse communities, and critically analyzing and reconciling conflicting bits of information to form a clear and comprehensive view of the world.

Cell phones are in the hands of the vast majority of adults, and whether schools like it or not, they're in the hands of most students. While many schools still see cell phones as a distraction rather than as an educational tool, it's hard to deny that these devices are quickly becoming the primary means by which we communicate, in or out of schools.

One of the organizers of Edcamp Philly, a free education "unconference" that took place in Philadelphia last May. The event attracted the attention of educators from around the world--not only for the excellent content and collaborative spirit, but also for the unconference model itself -- one that costs next to nothing to produce by facilitating ad-hoc community participation.

Reflection on one's own behaviour and practice is an important aspect of lifelong learning. However, such practice and the underlying assumed principles are often hidden from the learner's vision, and are therefore difficult to evaluate. Social interactions with others stimulate the learner to re-asses and reflect on the nature of the learner's own behaviour and practice, such as in professional networking contexts and intercultural encounters. This paper describes the prerequisites of learning from these interactions and the possibilities of technological support. It presents one approach to providing support for developing the required skills, with the example of the CEFcult tool, which supports intercultural communicative competence building.

Google's nGram viewer lets you search over 5 million books for the instances of words. Imagine it as a search engine into the uses of words since 1800.