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Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com
“Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?”
Just over 20 minutes – fascinating implications for educating 8 to 12 year olds. -
Google on Google Chrome – comic book
Fascinating lesson on browsers – I understood parts of it, got a hazy idea of other parts, and didn’t ‘get’ some parts at all. Still, it expanded what I (not a tech-person at all!) know. Not available for Macs yet.
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Offered through some educational institutions – the growth of online courses is amazing. But then, teaching is advanced and ‘thick’ communication, and the web is the most advanced communication tool developed by humans! via Stephen Downes
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Interesting-looking tool for business, etc.
Category: education
WebTools For Teachers 09/03/2008
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For sciece teachers and interested parents – learning games – via Stephen Downes
WebTools For Teachers 08/29/2008
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Ignatia Webs: Social Media makes this course stand out
“a great example of combining several relevant Social media to enhance a course” via Stephen Downes
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Ever Notice?: Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design: Design & Business: AIGA
What you see is what you get! (Or hear, or smell, or feel, or sense) Interesting disussion. via Stephen Downes
udutu – Free, Easy, and Perhaps Unnecessary
udutu – The price is right, free if you don’t use their server.
It’s fairly straightforward to use –
You can put it up on Facebook and learners can access it there –
The teacher’s view above and the learners’ below –
I like udutu’s encouraging course creators to use the assessment tool for learners to self-assess, rather than scoring with it. It allows learners to repeat going through the materials as often as they want.
I like the ease of use with no coding, and only some figuring out needed. The small “course” I created took 2 to 3 hours and was based on a pre-existing PowerPoint, an udutu suggestion. That’s pretty quick for a first try.
I like the appearance, what the pages look like.
I have two provisos:
- For a highly factual content course, it might be a good fit, but for a course with a lot of student input, the kind I usually teach, it could be too prescribed.
- As the early WebCT did for me, udutu could provide a kind of scaffolding for teachers new to using the web in their teaching. However, having read Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined – http://www.smallpieces.com/ – at an impressionable stage in my learning about the web, I prefer to use separate applications linked to each other. For my fall course, students will be using a class wiki, which will be linked to a class community blog, which will be, of course, linked back to the wiki. Within the wiki and the blog, there will be other links
- to web applications needed to complete the course
- to tutorials and information about those web applications
- to student-chosen links
- to assignments
To me, this is the most efficient way to set up a class, and it matches the overall web culture, as I understand it. Students will be living, learning and working in that culture in their futures, so why put them in a tight framework in this part of their learning.
So udutu might work for some purposes, but not for my current ones.
WebTools For Teachers 08/28/2008
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udutu | Create simulations online with ease.
“udutu’s WSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) online learning software makes it easy to produce media rich, engaging online courseware at minimal cost and without having to rely on programmers…” via Michael Specht, via Stephen Downes
WebTools For Teachers 08/27/2008
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Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
The true value of blogging analysed! – via Harold Jarche
WebTools For Teachers 08/26/2008
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Features Tour — Classtell — class websites
Dsigned for teachers and students. $20.00 per annum
WebTools For Teachers 08/24/2008
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Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Social Media Starfish «
An attractive visualization of the social media landscape
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Innovate: Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts
Essential reading: “we suggest that today’s instructors are missing an opportunity by not learning to read the texts of the Net Generation. Failing to recognize these texts as valuable tools in the teaching and learning process, professors dismiss an entire constellation of literacy skills.”
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“An autobiographical art game.
Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak. ” via Jeff Young
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Wired Campus: Why Computer-Aided Teaching Works Best in Large Classes – Chronicle.com
“Insofar as computer-assisted instruction is valuable, the scholars suggest, it is because it allows more individually tailored instruction in large, diverse classrooms where teachers find it hard to target each student with the appropriate level of work.” via The Wired Campus/The Chronicle of Higher Education
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hidden pain | David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts
“This is what makes a teacher’s job so tough, we don’t teach ’students’ we teach human beings with real-life issues. We ’see’ a lot, but we miss a lot too!” – IMHO – How all teachers should think!
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Presentation Literacies for the 21st Century | Work Literacy
“I think that we’re all in agreement that the ability to present information to an audience in a way that conveys meaning and thought is a critical literacy skill. Where we may have a difference of opinion, though, is in what constitutes “literate” presentation of that information to an audience.” via Michele Martin
WebTools For Teachers 08/23/2008
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Web Extra – Further Reading on Reading – NYTimes.com
“What does it mean to read in a digital age? Researchers are just beginning to explore the question, and educators are engaged in passionate debate about how reading may be changing on the Internet. It is impossible to write about any one piece of research at great length, so for those interested in more in-depth information, here are links to some studies, speeches, reading tests — old and new — and other resources.”
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Literacy Debate – Online, R U Really Reading? – Series – NYTimes.com
“Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.”
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Literacy Debate – Online, R U Really Reading? – Series – NYTimes.com
“Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.”
WebTools For Teachers 08/22/2008
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Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing – Stepcase Lifehack
50 tools that can help you when you do any kinds of writing. This is a extensive list of writing tools, but by no means do you need to apply all of them when you do any writing.
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Gary Hayes: “I am doing a commercial report and curriculum development on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, creative, business and educational potential. On my travels I got out my virtual camera and decided to capture a bunch of small vignettes which quickly turned into a body of audio visual delights – so decided to create a nice seven minute video for posterity.” Interesting overview of virtual worlds.
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“Out of my research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which my generation thought were the last word in music storage, are disappearing even faster.” Dave Pollard
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Feed My Inbox ~ RSS to Email ~ Feed to Email
If you don’t know anything about feeds or RSS, but you want to subscribe to a blog or two, check this out – via Donna Papacosta
Learning Living 