March 2011
51 posts
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Tips for Grading and Giving Students Feedback... →
How does a new or veteran teacher handle the hours of grading that can amount to a second full-time job? And as our class sizes increase, something’s gotta give. The key is to provide feedback in different formats. It keeps students alert to your message, and it keeps you from going out of your mind.
“Academics are trapped in this paradox of using Wikipedia but not contributing....”
– Dario Taraborelli, research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation, quoted by Zoe Corbyn in a Guardian article, Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics.
Seems most academics either A) feel Wikipedia is beneath them or B) just have too much on their plate trying to publish in academic...
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Visual Turn: If you really want a book ... →
visualturn:
I am currently teaching an evening class at a new, modern campus at local community college. I wandered into the campus library before class tonight. It was a lot like the computer lab I teach in, with row after row of computers. Just one lonely bookshelf of reference books sat behind the main…
Skype in the Classroom: a new network for teachers →
theteachersdesk:
On Tuesday, Skype launched Skype in the Classroom, a dedicated teacher network.
Using the platform, teachers can create profiles that describe their classes and teaching interests. They can then search a directory of teachers from all over the world by student age range, language and subject, finding classrooms that match theirs. This will allow teachers to connect with other...
An ancient profession adjusts to the 21st-century... →
Last week, for the first time ever, world leaders in education from 17 countries gathered in New York and traded ideas about how to put the best on education’s front lines. As leaders of the world’s top school systems shared ideas on everything from credentialing to salaries, a number of tools for elevating the teaching profession emerged, and they may be Canada’s brightest hope to avoid...
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The Game of India: update #4
The class met today (yes, we have classes on Saturday) and here’s how things have come along since the last post.
Once they decided on the coordinates for their initial destination, they DM’ed them to AgentShiva on twitter. This action unlocked an achievement on the website. They then officially became “agents” of the GODS (governmental order of divinity and society),...
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Museum Box: Create Virtual Museums →
revolutionizeed:
“If you could put a number of items into a box that described your life, what would you include? What do you think would be included if you were a Victorian Servant or Queen Elizabeth I. If you lived during the English Civil War, what items would you include to make a case for, or against, the parliamentarians? And what if you were an abolitionist and wanted to show that slavery...
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The game is coming together
Alright, so the past week or so has been two things. 1. It’s been the most productive time for me in weeks. 2. It’s left me completely exhausted. There’s just not enough time in a day to do all the things I feel I need to do. Despite this, I tread onward.
In faculty meeting this week I gave a presentation on gaming and the elements of gaming that provide insight to human...
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Growing Up Digitally: The iPad As a Learning... →
world-shaker:
His name is Bridger Wilson, and he’s two years old. He’s just like any other toddler, full of imagination. But Bridger’s father Mike has bought him an iPad. It’s not immediately clear how much experience that Bridger has had with the device previous to the taking of this video (which we should mention is about 8 months old now), but the results are seemingly rather stunning.
He...
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Let Kids Rule the School - NYTimes.com →
IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure...
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Twitter in the Classroom and Twitter Posters →
world-shaker:
This is a great write-up from an educator who is working with a school to integrate Twitter into the learning process. They go into the setup, and share their resources. Anyone interested in using Twitter to teach should find something valuable here.
PS: Don’t forget…you can like…email these to people :o)
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Facebook and Education - Do Opposites finally... →
Since Facebook’s launch there have been a couple of attempts to build education related applications or communities on the platform but none of them actually succeeded in attracting a critical mass of users. The idea though seems to be pretty obvious. Facebook itself started as a closed network for Harvard University.
Only then it has become the world’s largest social network with users...
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Designing the Game: Part 2
I got some great feedback from Twitter and Gameful peeps about the game. One of my colleagues posed some pertinent questions, which got me thinking:
Good questions.
First, I haven’t thought about expanding the audience. Someone else asked me about this and while my goal is to make it clear and transparent, I haven’t found the right venue for that yet (online). But I get what...
Publishers and Libraries Struggle over Terms of... →
“Anything we institute ahead we’d really want to talk through with the community and together understand what makes sense for us both,” Mr. Applebaum said. “We’re open to changes in the future which are in reasonable step with the expectations and realities of the overall library communities.”
Publishers are nervous that e-book borrowing in libraries will cannibalize e-book retail sales. They...
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Facebook Announces Anti-Bullying Tools
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Facebook announced their new anti-bullying tools last week at a White House conference on Bullying Prevention.
The new tools are targeted toward younger Facebook users, and will make it easier for them to report any type of bullying they come across online. The user can also choose to send the report to a trusted adult as a contact in the Facebook incident report. They also have the option to...
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“In school, the grading system has created the moral hazard of game play. It has...”
– Seth Prierbatsch Keynote at SXSW 2011 (via curiositycounts)
No direct source yet, but my guess is it’ll be here (or around here) when it shows up.
(via world-shaker)
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Designing a 10 wk MRPG for class on India
After having read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken, I’m awash with ideas for my classes. The book wasn’t particularly about how to gamify education, but as an educator who recently heard John Gee’s pitch for doing just that, I’m ready.
On a side note, ever since I read the book, after I go to sleep, every one of my dreams has been about games — mostly...
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“School today for the most part is just one long series of necessary obstacles...”
– Jane McGonical, Reality is Broken
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“When we’re reminded of our own agency in such a positive way, it’s...”
– Jane McGonigal, “Reality is Broken”
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Obama and White House Host Antibullying Conference... →
“If there’s one goal of this conference, it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up,” Mr. Obama told about 150 students, parents, teachers and advocates of prevention measures gathered in the East Room.
“With big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune,” he added. “I didn’t emerge unscathed.”
While Mr. Obama elicited...
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IPad ‘Smart Cover’ Opens to Instant Access -... →
beautiful marriage of form and function.
Apple has said little about the smart cover since Mr. Jobs showcased it before a rapt audience in San Francisco last week. He said the cover was not an afterthought, but was designed simultaneously with the iPad 2. To highlight its importance, Mr. Jobs gave the smart cover a starring role in its own movie — a playful 32-second clip that, he said,...
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Folding@home: Become part of a networked... →
You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software. Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed...
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New iPad Appeals More to Emotion Than Reason —... →
I have the first Ipad, but am ordering this one as soon as Apple opens up shop tomorrow. Have black — going for white. I’m going to keep the Ipad 1 as a classroom ipad for kids to use during class.
But as it turns out, the iPad’s appeal is more emotional than rational. Once you get it in your hands, you get caught up in the fascination of manipulating on-screen objects by touching...
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Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers... →
The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most...
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“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we...”
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Goal: Gamify the classroom
I’ve been reading:
It’s a inspiring look at Game design and gets you thinking about the potential to increase motivation and engagement with “necessary obstacles” by building game contexts around them. My goal for next trimester is to construct a gaming context to work in each of my courses. This should be fun!
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30 ways to use Twitter to accelerate learning →
revolutionizeed:
Use Twitter with your classroom to accelerate learning with these 30 great tips! …and another list I don’t have to create…
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Memolane Transforms Social Data Into Visual... →
Over the last few days, I’ve checked-in at several favorite haunts on Foursquare, favorited a few Lady Gaga and cat videos on YouTube, uploaded half a dozen photos of a cookie party to Instagram, and posted several status updates on Twitter and Facebook.
As individual pieces of data, each of these points contains a tiny bit of information about me and my life. But when combined, they start...
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Has anyone used Chorewars in the classroom?
Students learn the ethics of cell phone snapshots... →
Cell phone cameras — and associated scandals — have become so ubiquitous that it’s important for students to realize “the full gravity of what’s at their fingertips and the power they can have,”Immaculata University communications professorSean Flannery said.
Flannery teaches the class with Hunter Martin, a professional photographer who works with students on the mechanics of making the...
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The New Humanism - NYTimes.com →
We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.
When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to...
“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are...”
– John Steinbeck (via kristen-thiess)
Some game developers unhappy with Apple, Nintendo... →
“Four thousand per application: Do you see a problem with that?” he asked the audience. “That doesn’t even pay for a really good foosball table.”
Apple said Wednesday it has doled $2 billion out to app developers, which could put the average payout closer to $5,700. Either way, Hawkins said he believes the math makes it difficult for creators of apps to turn a...
Science Starts Early →
Infants and young children can exhibit striking confusion about how the world works, from failing to grasp that wind causes waves, to being mystified about how babies are created. Indeed, some researchers have characterized a child’s knowledge of the world as a bundle of misconceptions awaiting replacement with correct concepts through education (1).
Evidence is mounting, however, that...
The Next Wave Of Smart Drugs →
How will tomorrow’s pharmaceuticals boost your brainpower?
TED, Known For Big-Idea Conferences, Pushes Into... →
world-shaker:
The leaders of the annual TED conference, known for featuring short, carefully prepared talks on big ideas about technology and society, hope to apply their approach to education.
This week they announced TED-Ed, which will provide a hand-picked set of free online educational talks (expected to be even shorter than the conference talks), many submitted by educators themselves but...
