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A collection of really well done ads – for when you just need to relax and enjoy for a few moments. Enjoy! via Branimir Zlamalik on HPCA
Category: education
WebTools For Teachers 10/29/2008
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Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
Absolutely wonderful! This discussion of digital storytelling explores what has been done, and what the possibilities are, how digital storytelling can contribute to both composition courses and can be made into curricular objects. I strongly recommend it! via Stephen Downes
Kluging: An LMS Alternative
I confess I’m ambivalent about Learning Management Systems such as WebCT ad Desire2Learn. (I’m not at all ambivalent about Content Management Systems, such as WordPress – I am an enthusiastic user.) The distinction is that an LMS is a container for class work –
Learning Management System is a broad term used for a wide range of systems that organize and provide access to online learning services for students, teachers, and administrators. … web.mit.edu/oki/learn/gloss.html
and a CMS is
used to edit your website by giving the user an interface where they can log in and make text, graphic or structural amends to then publish the new pages on the live website. … absolute-digital.co.uk/glossary.php
I’m ambivalent about LMSs because I learned to use the web in teaching using an early version of WebCT – it was a scaffold for my learning and, as such, I hold it in some affection. However, as a teacher of communication skills and arts, as someone fascinated by language, I continued to learn about what could be done on the web, even outside of the LMS. Both passion and a sense of (teacher) responsibility drove me.
Currently I avoid, as much as I can, LMSs. Instead I kluge together a loose collection of free web applications, (Eduspaces Community blog, PBwiki, Pageflakes, Audacity, a password-protected mark site, and whatever free file-hosting service my current students recommend.) It’s a bit more work than using a LMS but I believe this approach, the kluging together of a selection of free web services, is a richer and more productive teaching practice.
Instead of keeping my students within a walled (and very expensive for the institution) garden, I am requiring them to learn how to use sites that are easily available to them for their personal and professional purposes. I am helping them become more indenpendant and sophisticated users of the most profoundly new communication tool our species has ever seen. And I’m pulling/pushing them into being part of creating the evolving web culture.
WebTools For Teachers 10/27/2008
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SimplyBox – Think Inside the Box
An interesting approach, more visual than bookmarking, Diigo, or del.icio.us. A bit like EverNote, but handier, I’d guess. via Paula White on Twitter
WebTools For Teachers 10/26/2008
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New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption
What the data says in late 2008 – “Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it.” via Micro Persuasion
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Traditional Media has 5 years left: PWC Analyst
When we talk about literacy, we better look at what the net-gen is reading, and what is a dying media!
WebTools For Teachers 10/25/2008
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Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » The Making Of …
This is all about composing a message by linking sources and commenting on why you’re linking them. Inspirational in the sense of inspiring ideas of how Flowgram could be used.
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A Twitter-style micro-blogging application for education
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A webtool to combine web pages, photos, PowerPoint, etc. and you can add your voice. A handy tool for teachers. via Alex Couros
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Social networking – good for small business? | OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN
Seth Godin gives a very sensible explanation of how and when social networking, such as being on Twitter, Facebook, etc. is useful.
Dan Tapscott and Educating the Digital Students
I attended some very enjoyable PD sessions today in the beautifully old University College building at the University of Toronto. I was drawn to these sessions because Dan Tapscott was the featured speaker, and I had read, learned from, and admired Wikinomics
Today he spoke on the digital generation, based on research that he includes in his new book, Grown Up Digital, that’s Grown Up Digital, not his earlier book, Growing Up Digital. I loved what he had to say about the pedagogical implications of teaching students who have grown up in the digital age, and he articulated what I have been observing when I teach. Our students increasingly need, require, respond to, a different approach than the traditional lecture and regurgitate.
I’m not going to cover what he said – he was very amusing and entertaining – I’m just going to suggest you read his book. If you’re a teacher, you really, really, REALLY need to read it and take what he says seriously. It’s very hopeful about the future, and it’s a chellenge for our current teaching practice.
Teaching Communication Now!
As a longtime communications teacher, I am fascinated by our changing communications media and platform. And when I’m teaching, no matter the direct subject I’m teaching, I never lose awareness of the changes our culture is going through, and the responsibility of teachers to help prepare our students for this new and rapidly evolving communications environment. They will be swimming in it for the rest of their professional and personal lives.
What is often unnoticed is that in just over a century we have gone from having one way of recording, putting marks on paper, to multiple ways of recording, all more viscerally immediate than text. Photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures all speak more directly to our senses and emotions than squiggles on paper – which our minds must translate into meaning before we can have our sense and emotional responses. It is easier to think critically when text is what we are ‘reading’ than it is when we see and hear less mediated (so to speak) representations of the world we live in. We are now living in what Ong called “secondary orality” and that is what our students have been growing up in, and to a certain extent, what we grew up in too.
I have never known a world without photographs, radio and records, movies and television. However, text was still the dominant medium, at least in my educational experiences, for most of my early schooling, and mass media ruled. I looked, listened and watched, but I could only critique; I couldn’t participate.
Now I can sit in my study and produce multimedia, as in this blog post.
Vodpod videos no longer available.The audio is poor, but understandable, and I’m combining text with video. I can embed other sites, like what I thought about this new multimedia platform that we can access using computers –
and I can link to other sites for readers/viewers who want to explore more of the educational possibilities – http://jnthweb.pbwiki.com/
and I can make movies using my screen –
Vodpod videos no longer available.
more about “Generating a Table of Figures in Word…”, posted with vodpod
There are other tools that I can use to create a mixed media text, and, here is the point I want to make:
We need to be teaching our students (technical and non-technical) how to compose using the expanding possibilities of the web as a multimedia, participatory communication platform!
WebTools For Teachers 10/23/2008
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List Of Top Social Media Network Sites | instantShift
Just what the title says: “List of Top Social Media Networks” – via Donna Papacosta
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Top 5 Twitter Researching Tools – Webmonkey
If you want to know more about Twitter, or how to research people’s Tweets for a variety of purposes, check here. Via Stephen Downes
WebTools For Teachers 10/22/2008
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EducauseCONNECT – Undergraduate Students and IT 2008
Download the whole study, or just the findings.
“Following are some of the important findings of The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008.
Ownership of Technology
More than 80% of student respondents own laptops, 53.8% own desktops, and one-third of them own both a laptop and a desktop. The longitudinal data for those institutions that have participated in ECAR studies for the past three years show that laptop ownership has increased from 65.9% in 2006 to 82.2% in 2008. In fact, freshmen respondents are entering college with new laptops in hand—this year 71.1% have a laptop less than one year old. And most respondents (68.9%) own a computer of some type that is two years old or less, well within recommended equipment replacement cycles …
Ownership of Internet-capable cell phones is also on the rise, now owned by 66.1% of respondents. Most respondents, however, do not yet take advantage of the Internet capability, citing high cost,
slow response, and difficulty of use as primary reasons. Despite these barriers to use, almost one-fourth of respondents do access the Internet from a cell phone or PDA at least monthly, and 17.5%
do so weekly or more often. Among respondents who say they are early adopters of technology, 25.9% already access the Internet from handheld devices weekly or more often.”
Learning Living 