“DIY is a club for kids to earn Skills. DIY Makers share their work with the community and get patches for the Skills they earn. Each Skill consists of a set of Challenges that help them learn techniques to get the hang of it. Once a Maker completes a Challenge, they add photos and video to their Portfolio to show what they did.
Makers are curious about the world and strive to learn all kinds of practical knowledge and share it. They seek adventure in the outdoors, participate in communities, use technology to innovate, and have the confidence to try new things” (Source).
Take a look at DIY.org and consider the positive impact it can make in your family, classroom, club, civic group, etc.
“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy,
and we should treat it with the same status.”
–Sir Ken Robinson
More than 5,000 teachers were recently informally surveyed about the Web 2.0 tools that they and their students most commonly used. This presentation will provide a hands-on introduction to these tools along with teacher-created and student-created examples. Strategies for implementation will be shared.
America’s future teachers are invited to participate in the “Speak Up 2012 Survey for America’s Future Teachers” to share your ideas about teaching.
Speak Up, a national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow®, gives individuals the opportunity to share their viewpoints about key issues in K-12 education.
Any college student, who is participating in a degree or credential program that will prepare them for a career as a K-12 teacher, is eligible to take the survey, regardless of prior student teaching experience.
Speak Up for America’s Future Teachers is facilitated through online surveys and will be aggregated at the national and institution level. All of the data is 100% confidential and no specific institutional findings will be shared with anyone outside of the participating college or university.
Participate in “Speak Up 2012 Survey for America’s Future Teachers” and share your ideas about teaching.
The Floating University is a new educational media venture that creates and distributes online multimedia curricula, rich in text, video, animation and graphics, that feature today’s biggest thinkers, practitioners and leading scholars.
Their video lectures “are paired with related texts to introduce complex multidisciplinary subjects in an entertaining and engaging way. Whether you’re a life long learner or a current university student, [their] goal is to take you on a journey of discovery into myriad disciplines — to let you explore unfamiliar territory in a new light — and to pose questions that will encourage critical thinking and robust debate.
For schools, they “aim to invert the traditional lecture model of learning to focus valuable classroom time on interaction, exchange, and discussion, rather than on the passive consumption of live, in-person lectures” (Source).
The Floating University launched last fall with an online course offered at Harvard, Yale and Bard and delivered the key takeaways of an entire undergraduate education. Learn more in this short video.
Disrupting Education: There Are No Boundaries to Knowledge Anymore
This clip/commercial has really gotten in my head. I keep thinking about the juxtaposition of traditional education, innovation, reform, media and technology that this represents. I see this as a sort of a microcosm of what so many of us are talking about and involved in education. In this clip we see a disruptive innovation, online and/or hybrid learning, and some would argue that the classroom has been flipped. I see connections between this delivery platform and the notion that some have that failing schools would improve if they had access to the best teachers. In higher education reports indicate that more and more students are preferring the perceived flexibility of online courses and institutions are strategically planning how they intend to respond.
I’m also really curious to see how interactive and engaging the courses are and how effective they are at promoting creativity and critical thinking. These terms are used frequently on the site and in this video. I also noticed on the website that everything is optimized for use on the iPad which could open the door for interesting opportunities related to engagement. However, I often see teachers, schools, and institutions make similar claims under the pervasive but misguided notion that the very act of using technology makes instruction more effective and more engaging while automatically promoting higher levels of thinking. That just isn’t accurate. Given the reputations of the universities and lecturers involved as well as the feature-rich and content-rich Floating University and Big Think websites I’m going to speculate that they are doing at least a respectable job, and perhaps even better, in these areas. I would enjoy the opportunity to view and experience the Floating University’s courses for myself. The idea of “robust debate” in an online class sounds like fun to me!
Change is in the air. I wonder how all of this will play out over the next few years and subsequent decades. We’ll we resolve these matters or will they have to be solved by the next generation(s) of educators? Perhaps you’ll share your reactions to the the Floating University and to some of the thoughts I have shared.
“Mobile learning is seen by many as a disruptive technology. This is because it has been identified as a technology which holds great potential to transform the learning and teaching within a classroom. What follows is a mash-up presented at the NSWDEC 5th Biennial Equity Conference in 2011 which explains some of the issues.” (Source)
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web. Evernote is a great tool for teachers and students to capture notes, save research, collaborate on projects, snap photos of whiteboards, record audio and more. Everything you add to your account is automatically synced and made available on all the computers, phones and tablets you use.
Learn more in this interview as Bill Stites, Director of Technology at the Montclair Kimberley Academy, describes the school’s Evernote deployment.
Evernote Premium For Schools offers all the features, services and benefits, bundled together for your school at a discounted rate. Perfect for groups of teachers, classrooms, whole schools or entire districts. Evernote Premium For Schools is available at a 50% discount off of individually purchased premium accounts.
Book Apps: A Reading Revolution, or the End of Reading?
“Even if high-quality apps do manage to change the way we read, though, it’s unclear how many current readers will respond. The mere fact that something is possible does not automatically make it desirable.”
Books vs. Screens: Which Should Your Kids Be Reading?
“Canadian author Margaret Atwood thrilled her 285,000-plus Twitter followers by defending their kind as “dedicated readers” who are boldly exploring new frontiers in literacy. Calling the Internet in general “a great literacy driver,” she defended even the most minimal form of screen-based reading as an unalloyed good – “because reading is in fact extremely interactive from a neurological point of view,” she said. “Your brain lights up a lot.””
For Some Kids, a Book Is Just an iPad That Doesn’t Work
“[Calvin] Wang designs interactive storybooks for the iPad. He was inspired, he says, by watching his daughter interact with a movable cardboard book. Since then, Loud Crow, his Vancouver-based firm, has turned an array of children’s picture books that take the pop-up concept into the digital age. Books such as Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit now respond to touch by moving, twirling, speaking and noise-making.”
Digital Lit: How New Ways to Read Mean New Ways to Write
“The e-book is changing the publishing business, but will digital technology actually change the way we tell stories, the way writers write – for better or for worse?”
These are my slides and resources from another of my sessions here at iSummit in Nashville, TN.
More than 4,000 teachers were recently surveyed about the mobile technologies and apps that they and their students most commonly used. This presentation will provide a hands-on introduction to these tools. Strategies for implementation will be shared.
ShowMe makes it possible to easily record interactive lessons on your iPad and share them online. It’s simple and intuitive and is the type of technology that can revolutionize the way we teach, provide support, and individualize instruction. Here is a quick video demonstration.
Examples
The following video tutorials are examples of how ShowMe might be used in and out of the classroom. (Note to ShowMe’s staff: It would be helpful to teachers if the tutorials were embeddable.)
Potential Impact
I agree with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld that was is especially exciting about Show Me is that we are getting a “glimpse of how the iPad can completely change the way people learn. Any teacher can simply record their lessons and their students would need nothing more than an iPad to learn. Add some real-time chat and maybe some video, and it is not too difficult to see how this kind of technology can turn the iPad into a classroom.” (Source)
The McGraw-Hill School Education Group has made all of their Everyday Mathematics apps available for FREE during the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Conference. The apps are available in iPod Touch/iPhone and iPad versions. Students often find these drill and practice educational games to be engaging for long stretches of time. The NCTM Conference begins April 13th and concludes on April 16th, so be sure to download your free copies of these apps by the end of Saturday.
