January 2012
2 posts
Teaching in the Age of Big Data →
We all know that big data is going to change the teaching profession. But what exactly will this transformation entail?
This article explains how analytics will 1) reduce administrative burden 2) address the diverse needs of students 3) improve engagement levels 4) increase flexibility:
“One of the biggest challenges facing schools and administrators today is the growing diversity of the...
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5 Ways to Make Students Smarter →
Ever wondered why some students get trapped in a negative cycle in school while others only seem to become smarter and more motivated? This article explains why success breeds more success in the school environment:
“Self-perception, social expectations, and previous experiences shape our academic ability more than we realize. Just think: how many times does your belief that you are...
November 2011
1 post
9 tags
STEM Education: Does America Have the Right Stuff?...
(click to get a closer look at the STEM education infographic)
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Great find - Chronicle of Higher Ed's "Tech... →
An invaluable resource:
“Technology continues to change college life, and each month The Chronicle’s Tech Therapy podcast offers analysis and advice on what the latest gadgets and buzzwords mean for professors, administrators, and students.
Join hosts Jeff Young, a Chronicle reporter (left), and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, for a lively ...
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Gamechanger: Digital Media plus Student-centered,... →
“In the middle of one of the hottest and driest summers on record, twenty Austin, TX, area high school students showed up for school everyday for four weeks. While the four-week project took place inside a school, how the students worked, the roles they assumed, and what they produced was a total redesign of school and what it means to be a learner. Their mission: create a casual...
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Mathematics, Creativity, and the Essence of Good... →
How important is “play” to brain development?
“Mathematics is a language, a way of thinking, a set of disciplines that help us in the endless, infinitely challenging job of creating a life. We haven’t really learned Pi, until we can think about Tau, and have fun with it.”
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6 Different Types of "Failure": How many are... →
The piece examines 6 different types of failure with examples of each…. seems like there are some implications for education…
“Most of the time, I’m in complete agreement with this sensibility, but what concerns me is that in this counterintuitive embrace of failure we may be conflating different kinds of failure, and doing so at some risk. Perhaps all this is a necessary...
June 2011
11 posts
2 tags
Online education infographic →
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Infographic: how the internet is revolutionizing... →
Major facts and figures:
Milestones in e-Learning: In 1971, the Open University in England began broadcasting lectures on television and 25,000 students enrolled. In 1993, six years before the term e-Learning was coined at an educational seminar, William Graziadei III outlined a set of criteria to identify e-Learning systems. They must be easy to use, portable, replicable, scalable and...
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How can educating women alleviate global poverty? →
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Engagement techniques to make your online student... →
“The college student experience, even for graduate students, is much more than course assignments, so why is it that the online learner’s experience is often limited to logging in, reading assignments and posting on the discussion board?
As the online student population continues its double-digit growth rate, and some organizations are projecting that by 2020 students will take up to...
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Awesome infographic about blended learning! →
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62 Edtech Resources You May Have Missed →
Be sure to check out:
“20 Must Know Features and Tricks on YouTube that You Simply Have to Know”
“How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn”
“10 Free Web-Based Alternatives to Photo-Shop”
4 tags
Knewton to power more university courses! →
Exciting news!!!!
“New York, NY (June 15th, 2011) – Today, educational technology company Knewton announced that its award-winning Adaptive Learning Platform™ has been selected by Penn State University (PSU), University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the State University of New York (SUNY), and Mount St. Mary’s University to power college readiness courses that will help condition...
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The Staggering Size of Social Networks Today →
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20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have →
Here are just the first ten:
1. Google Tools Knowledge 2. Google Earth Knowledge 3. Wiki Knowledge 4. Blogging Knowledge 5. Spreadsheets Skills 6. Database Skills 7. Social Bookmarking Knowledge 8. Social Networking Knowledge 9. Web Resources in content area 10. Web Searching skills
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Look Where Augmented Reality Is Now... →
“We’ve seen augmented reality done what seems like a million different ways, but we’ve never seen it quite like this. The New York Times reported Wednesday on a forthcoming iPhone app called Aurasma that has the power to turn ink-and-paper publications into interactive mine fields. Aurasma, conceived by enterprise software firm Autonomy, uses a scaled down version of the...
2 tags
Ideas for Summer Relaxation and Learning →
May 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Students Design Games and Software Tools to Tackle... →
74,000 students use technology to solve United Nations Development Goals (which include reducing poverty and hunger, improving access to education, and ensuring environmental sustainability):
“At the recent U.S. finals of the Imagine Cup competition, student teams from across the country showed off not only their technical brilliance but also an eagerness to improve the world through...
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Ed Tech Battle Royale: Tablets and netbooks and... →
Christopher Dawson reviews tablets, netbooks, and hybrids designed for educational purposes:
“Dell sent me a Latitude 2120 netbook in a lovely shade of “Schoolhouse Red.” Honestly, I think my favorite feature of these netbooks is the dodgeball-style rubberized covering that won’t fingerprint, won’t slip out of kids’ hands, and protects the machine from bumps and drops. It’s a bit...
A great site of cultural curation which educators... →
Here’s an example of what you’ll find on this eclectic, intellectual blog of “interestingness” from Wired and Atlantic contributor, Maria Popova:
“We have an ongoing fascination with where creators create. And while it’s somewhat easier to picture the studios of artists and designers, since there’s an aesthetic expectation aligned with their visual styles, it’s...
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Learning Formally & Informally... Why Not Both?? →
How can we optimize our lives, so that we are seizing every opportunity to learn? (This article is worth a read for both educators and business managers!)
“The real genius of organizations is the informal, impromptu, often inspired ways that real people solve real problems in ways that formal processes can’t anticipate. When you’re competing on knowledge, the name of the game is...
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Some Thoughts on Teaching High School English →
As a former English teacher myself, I’m not sure I agree (and pretty sure I disagree) with some of these assessments, but it’s worth a read and a consideration.
Some thoughts about what we should be teaching in English class:
“Those who didn’t make it onto the honors or A.P. track hardly mention writing or reading at all. They talk about giving oral presentations and ...
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What do we mean by academic rigor? →
“Academic rigor”—a commonly used phrase which no one really understands or stops to think about…
“In this podcast Brian & I discuss the notion of academic rigor. Using the book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa as a starting point, we explore what we mean we when we talk about a rigorous education and...
3 tags
A Call for More Engineers in Education →
A great detailed piece on how the engineer perspective can contribute to the intersection between education and technology:
“Having more engineers in ed-tech could foster a substantive leap forward in innovation — in both education and technology. Too often the software designed for schools lags behind consumer tech. It’s clunky and it’s ugly. By bringing more engineers to work on...
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15 Ways Pixar is Creating the Art Education of... →
“Pixar is a lot more than a money-making box office powerhouse. It’s an innovative artistic studio that’s coming up with very cool solutions to new problems. One of those problems is figuring out how to realistically render certain things using a computer. One of the most difficult things has been the rendering of hair. From fur to human hair, it’s not easy to render millions of...
April 2011
15 posts
3 tags
Watch this CNN video about the controversial... →
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How do pressure and stress affect our performance?... →
What does “implicit” learning mean? How does the brain react to pressure and stress?
“My fascination on this subject began when I wrote an entry on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “The Art of Failure,” in which he talks about the difference between “choking” and “panicking.” Gladwell cites research from Dr. Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia, talking about...
3 tags
A Trial Run For School Standards That Encourage... →
Interesting piece worth checking out. Here’s the essence:
“The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English...
Poetry for Left-Brainers from the National Writing... →
A beautifully written personal essay. Here’s an excerpt:
He discussed a commonly held student notion that “good writing is easy to understand.” Maybe there was hope after all. Alas, Blau proceeded to challenge that concept by proclaiming, “Good writing is hard to understand.” He reflected that the typical classroom student response is “It is above ...
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MIT Creates the "One Game You'll Be Glad to See... →
MIT describes the overarching conception of the game this way:
“The premise is that people living in the future have contacted us in the present, to answer a question: What event occurred between our time and theirs that led to the loss of civilization’s historical records? Students must decode clues in hidden messages, and in response find and provide information about Earth’s...
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Is Blogging the Key to Great Student Writing? →
Well, it can’t hurt can it? Let me know what you think!
“I don’t like to write.” That’s the refrain teachers have heard for a generation when they ask students why they’re struggling to complete a short, three-paragraph essay. Thankfully, more and more educators are using two things kids love, technology and social media, to change that. By encouraging...
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Check out "The Kno," newest tablet to... →
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A Comprehensive History of Social Media →
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100 Things to Watch Out for in 2011 →
Here are my favorite innovations:
-Tablets for Tots
-Virtual Mirrors
-3-D Printing
-Digital downtime
-Books fetisization
This is a fun, absolute must-read!
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Video games that help students with reading,... →
I’m especially interested in the literary possibilities here! Apparently these games can help students experiment with storytelling…
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Skype's New Education Platform Connects Teachers →
“Good news for teachers looking to collaborate with their colleagues in other parts of the world. Skype has a new free service just for educators called Skype in the classroom, “a free global community created in response to, and in consultation with, the growing number of teachers” using the tool to help students learn.”
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Campus Ed-Tech "Must-Haves" by 2014 →
What can we expect to have by 2014?
“Reading the Horizon Report always gets the creative ed tech juices flowing. The “Time-to-Adoption” forecasts in the 2011 Horizon Report are: e-books and mobile learning (1 year or less), augmented reality and game-based learning (2 to 3 years), and gesture-based computing and learning analytics (4 to 5 years).”
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ThinkGeek plans to give away damaged goods to... →
“Whether it’s in a school’s technology lab, or a FIRST Robotics team, or your neighborhood hackerspace, we’re betting somebody out there would enjoy getting a box of broken stuff from us every couple of months—and then use the parts and pieces for good, not evil.”
-ThinkGeek
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A database of one million course syllabi from Prof... →
Thanks for making this open for the rest of us to explore!
“Today I’m releasing a database of over a million syllabi gathered by my Syllabus Finder tool from 2002 to 2009. My hope is that this unique corpus will be helpful for a broad range of researchers. I’m fairly sure this is the largest collection of syllabi ever gathered, probably by several orders of magnitude.”
...
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"Get the Math" helps kids explore math in... →
Multimedia project shows kids how math is used in videogame design, music production, and fashion!
March 2011
20 posts
1 tag
A graphic that can help students learn about the... →
2 tags
Dipity: Another cool thing for teachers!! →
“Dipity is a free digital timeline website. Our mission is to organize the web’s content by date and time. Users can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps.”
This is useful for teachers as well as journalists, administrators, politicians,...
ipad cart and washable, submersible headphones... →
“New software for managing mobile devices as they connect to a school’s network, a digital workspace where students can synthesize the information they find through online search engines, and the industry’s first fully washable (and submersible) headphones for students were among the many products unveiled during various ed-tech trade shows last month.”
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Florida moves to go all digital in classrooms →
Some intense changes underway!
“State education officials rolled out a five-year proposal this week that calls for all students in K-12 to use only “electronic materials” delivered by Kindles, iPads and other similar technology by 2015… Many states, including Florida, are experimenting with schools going partially digital. Clearwater High School went a step further...
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Can Social Networking Help Prevent College... →
Companies out there are helping students become more engaged in their school communities by employing social media solutions:
“The vast majority of college students — 60% to 84% — will never participate in a school-sponsored activity, according to the National Survey on Student Engagement. This lack of engagement is cause for concern, and not simply because the NSSE score helps...
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5 Ways Twitter Has Changed Education (happy... →
In honor of Twitter’s birthday: here’s a great list to remind us how social media is enhancing our potential in the classroom. I particularly like #5:
“5. CAPTURES CONVERSATIONS: The twitters in the back of the classroom used to be seen as distractions and disruptions. By using Twitter, many educators are finding ways to capture these “backchannel” conversations,...
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Quick List Of iPad Resources For The Classroom →
world-shaker:
One question that comes into my inbox or on Twitter a lot lately is one dealing with iPads. Many schools and classrooms all over are investing in these devices and educators want to know how to use them effectively, apps to consider and more. In keeping with the “My Favorite Resources” theme (last week I listed my favorite resources for talking about Twitter) here are my go-to...
"Let Kids Rule the School" →
polaraxis:
“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...