Useful links

  by  vdowney 

• URL Droplet This tool allows you to upload links straight to your Dropbox folders. All you need to do is take a link (this especially works well if the link leads to a PDF or similar document) and paste it into the URL Droplet form.

• Teacher’s Guide to Adding Images in Google Forms ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Post describing how you can embed images into the content of your Google form. A useful addition for teachers creating image-based quizzes and surveys.

• 5 Powerful Social Media Tools For Your Classroom | Edudemic Social media tools can help break the barriers set by the walls of schools. Learning and communicating outside the school hours with technology aid is a modern adaptation of education that has shown great results. This post looks at some web tools that provide school-specific tools that are just as powerful in facilitating the communication inside the student-teacher-parent triangle as the more famous popular social networking sites.

• What Teachers Need to Know about Fixed Vs Growth Mindset ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning An infographic which features the major differences between fixed and growth mindsets using teachers as the underlying subject

• Should university students use Wikipedia? | Education | guardian.co.uk Article from TheGuardian ” Students use Wikipedia extensively, probably more than any other social group. Although the website’s founder Jimmy Wales once warned readers not to use the website for academic purposes, American research shows that the majority of students browse its pages when researching essays. Most universities and academics distrust the service, warning us: “Never cite Wikipedia.” Why is the academic world so hostile to this vast information resource? And why do students find it so hard to stay away?”

• TagCrowd: make your own tag cloud from any text The service offers three ways to create word clouds: copying and pasting text into TagCrowd, upload a plain text file or you can copy and paste a web address into TagCrowd. Simple and effective visuals

• Stripe Generator – ajax diagonal stripes background designer A free tool that simple makes stripes. Another way to create a visual for a digital site. Simple and easy to use.

• Photomontage Generator – WriteOnIt Create a photomontage to add interest to a photo. Easy to use tool that offers a fast way to create some fun photos/images.

• 10 Digital Citizenship Tips From Your Mother | Edudemic This infographic takes a look at good digital citizenship tips as well as some common do’s and dont’s for good manners when using the internet.

• A Simple Guide on The Use of Hashtag for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ”Here what Twitter said about it : ” The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Hashtags are a great way to build community around content.” Post with ideas about how teachers can make the most out of hashtags.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Coggle – A Simple Mind-Mapping Tool ”Coggle is a new, collaborative mind-mapping service that is very easy to use. To create a Coggle mind map just sign-in with your Google account and click the “+” icon to start your mind map. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the “+” icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. “

• 25 Top Concept-Mapping Tools For Visual Learning

• 30+ Mind Mapping Tools 30+ mind mapping tools. Some are free and others have a fee.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Terrific Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Tools A post that looks at some of the tools that could be used for mind mapping. Brainstorming, collaborative brainstorming, free ipad apps, Free Technology For Teachers, mind mapping.

• Memofon Memofon is a new mind mapping tool that makes it possible to create mind maps from typed outlines. It is similar to Text 2 Mind Map. To create a mind map with Memofon you just have to type an outline. It takes some time to figure out the outline formatting tricks. Once you have the formatting down it can also be used to create to-do lists within your mind map.

Sir Ken Robinson: education’s “death valley” & what we need to change

I like to follow a lot of the TEDtalks. They are often thought-provoking and frequently challenging.

Yesterday, when I checked, I found that one of my favourite speakers, Sir Ken Robinson , has done another talk for them. He is again champions a radical rethink of our school systems. Although not talking specifically about the Australian system, it is easy to apply his logic here. Watch the video and then answer his challenge: How do we get out of the educational “death valley” we now face? How do we nurture our students, teaching them to value and cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligences.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Useful Links – Weekly

• It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing | Public Knowledge An article that looks at the intellectual property implications of 3D printing (written with quite some detail).

• My Top 10 Web Curation Tools as A Teacher ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning A good list of some curation web tools that are easy to use and that versions that can be used with most computers

• 16 e-textbook providers: Who’s publishing and who’s selling? | Education Dive ”16 names in e-textbooks that you should know about, as well as what each of them are doing to set themselves apart in a competitive new area of education:”

• Ebook Friendly – ebooks made simple and cool  ”The Ebook Friendly is a site for e-book geeks. You can find here simple tips and fun stuff about ebooks, digital publishing and the future of books!”

• Guest post: Steve Saville of Alfriston College, Auckland, on comics in the classroom | Books and Adventures  “Post by Steve Saville, deputy principal at Alfriston College in South Auckland. For four years, Steve has championed the use of comics in the classroom through a series of innovative workshops which have allowed students to develop and publish their own high quality comic books. In the first of a two-part guest post, Steve tells the story of Alfriston’s unique comic book education project.”

• Learning Ratings | Common Sense Media Ratings are given for a variety of digital media products based on core academic content. There is an assessment of the learning potential. Alternative games and sites that achieve the same goals as the product being reviewed as also given.

• The Difference Between Content Curation and Link Spraying | Social Media Today

• Caitlin Barry: Educators, Please Stop Confusing Media Literacy with Ed Tech

• Great Critical Thinking Map for your Classroom ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ”You ask any teacher today about the skills they want their students to develop and you will get critical thinking skills as an obvious answer; of course together with other skills. With the advance of technology and the educational paradigmatic shift that ensued , critical thinking skills have occupied a central part in the literature of teaching and learning pedagogy, not that these skills were not important before but I would say they came to the foreground now more than in any time before”

• A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age The broad aim is to inspire an open, learner-centered dialogue around the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities for education in the globally-connected world of the present and beyond

• 11 Facebook Updates to Privacy and Timeline You Should Know | Social Media Today  ”It’s common for Facebook to undergo drastic (or silent) changes whether the users like it or not. The real question is, how ready are you when Facebook is determined to ‘make the world more open and connected’? Have you made full use of the privacy and account settings to your advantage? Also, if you’ve been observant enough you should’ve discovered several improvements on the existing features to make them more visible and user friendly. Why not give this list a run-through and see if you missed any.”

• A Must Have Check List Poster for Innovative Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• Maybe ‘What do you want your students to do?’ is the wrong question | Dangerously Irrelevant  ”Laptops. iPads (or other tablet devices). Chromebooks. Maybe even netbooks or ultrabooks… As more schools and districts move toward 1:1 computing, one of the most common questions is ‘What device should we get for our students?’ The typical response is another question: ‘Well, what do you want your students to do?’ I wonder, though, if that’s the wrong question…”

• How Teachers are Using Tumblr in the Classroom | Emerging Education Technology Some of the different ways teachers are using tumblr in their classrooms

• 10 Secrets To Unlocking The Learning Potential Of The iPad The ideas and concepts apply to tablets (or mobile devices) not just the ipad

• ML: Macaulay Library The Mcaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings

• Library Services in the Digital Age | Pew Internet Libraries

• ‘Bill of Rights’ Seeks to Protect Students’ Interests as Online Learning Expands – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education ”12 educators, many of them well known in online-education circles, did manage to draft a document that they hope will serve as a philosophical framework for protecting the interests of students as online education. Called “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age,” the document proposes a set of “inalienable rights” that the authors say students and their advocates should demand from institutions and companies that offer online courses and technology tools.”

• 26 Latest Photoshop Tutorials 2013 | Tutorials | Graphic Design Junction Jan 2013 Photoshop Tutorials. These tutorials are created by Photoshop experts. The article gathers professional Photoshop tutorials that may enhance designing skills and improve the quality of digital works.

• The Ultimate List of Pinterest Tips – Blogging with Amy  A good number of tips. Areas covered: Pinterest Basics; How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic; How to Add the “Pin It” Button to Posts; Pinterest Copyright Issues; Further Reading

• How to Track Traffic From Pinterest in Google Analytics How many referrals does Pinterest generate? How many people use the “pin it” button on a site? Which pictures on a site are the most pinned and repinned? Here are four ways to measure Pinterest using Google Analytics.

• New Pew Internet & American Life Project Report Looks at Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits | LJ INFOdocket A new report (Oct 2012) from Pew Internet focusing on the reading habits and public library habits of younger Americans’ (ages 16-29) is now available online.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Students and technology in the classroom

Technology in Education – students simply don’t think of it as being anything but normal. It is just integrated into their lives. It is not separate or special rather just part of the way they work.

Recently a teacher asked their year 12 students how much value they placed on having their own laptops in the classroom and if it  was a great advantage to their learning in that classroom. They were a bit “ho-hum” about it. They have had their own personal computers all through secondary school and, looking at/listening to their answers, it was evident to me that they took so many things for grantedsimply because they cannot really imagine life without them. They don’t really know what they would have to do if they did not have the technology because so many little things are taken for granted. For instance none thought how easy it was simply write an essay and then edit it easily - rather than rewrite the whole piece. None realised how easy it was to take and organise notes, continually adding to them as new data was gathered and none wondered how hard they might find it if they had to do research without internet access whenever they felt the need. Many are very visual and they like the easy access Clickview and YouTube videos when they need to find out how to do something. These are just some of the little things.

The question was not a “fair question.” It was not really a test of how useful the students found computers because they don’t really know any different.  They don’t know what life is like without technology in their lives. They can list some of the bigger things like social media, blogs and vodcasts and using some of the digital tools to help them learn but too much is just part of their world and even the teacher who asked the question did not consider how much technology flies under the radar.

The question was probably due to frustration when the intranet was “down” or running slowly which only makes more evident that technology is an integral part of education and our students are lucky to have had 1:1 computers for such a long time. I don’t really think the teacher did not see the benefits but it did make for an interesting discussion.

This is a simple infographic tries to show how much impact the internet has had on education.

Useful links

  by  m_edens 

• The League of Extraordinary Librarians: SLJ’s latest tech survey shows that media specialists are leading the way – The Digital Shift ”According to School Library Journal’s 2012 School Technology Survey, media specialists are leading the charge to bring new media, mobile devices, social apps, and web-based technologies into our nation’s classrooms.”

• Life of an Educator by Justin Tarte: The importance of literacy… ”The simplest acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering effect personally, socially and politically.  Literacy gives people tools with which to improve their livelihoods, participate in community decision-making, gain access to information about health care, and above all, it enables individuals to realize their rights as citizens and human beings. Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about respect, opportunity and development…”

• SearchReSearch: Presentation on “What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?” From Dan Russell. Abstract:  What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that “literacy” is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being literate as well.

• Format Factory Home Page – Free media file format converter ”Format Factory is a multifunctional media converter”

• The Ten Commandments Of Twitter | Business 2 Community

• Ebooks & Digital Content | Transforming Libraries To help meet a growing need, the ALA’s Digital Content & Libraries Working Group was formed in Fall 2011 to implement the recommendations and to continue the work of ALA’s Task Force on Equitable Access to Digital Content. Working Group members were selected by the ALA President based on their high level of expertise and range of experience regarding libraries and digital content, and are broadly representative of the various constituencies within the Association and library community. This website is meant to be a resource to support libraries in their transformation from print to digital content.

• Create and share electronic books for free with BookType and Booki — freewaregenius.com

• Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks | LJ Insider Random House (one Big Six publishers) is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership.

• eBooks: Amazon Introduces Whispercast to Manage Fleets of Kindles | LJ INFOdocket  Libraries and schools that lend Kindles to users might be interested in this new service from Amazon that just launched.

• An ePortfolio idea from Scotland | eLearning Island  Offers an example of how e-portfolios could be used. Has some good lists of questions and resources for students working on ePortfolios

• Free Sound Clips | SoundBible.com SoundBible.com offers free sound clips for download in either wav or mp3 format. They offer free and royalty free sound effects and clips for video editors, movie scores, game designers, and weekend sound warriors.

• Teachers and Parents – The new rules of engagement | Generation Next  ”What is ‘parent engagement’ and how does it affect our children’s learning and well-being? Research (and evidenced-based results of effective parent engagement in schools) indicates that we need to move away from the ‘ivory tower’ perception of schools and the ‘locked gate’ mentality to embracing family engagement as policy, as education reform. Weiss, Lopez and Rosenberg (2010) assert that ‘family engagement must be a systemic, integrated and sustained approach, not an add-on or a random act.’”

• Free Music & Sound Loops for PowerPoint Presentations | PowerPoint Presentation  ”Some resources where you can download free music and sound loops for presentations.”

• Teen Read Week: Creating a Text-Rich School | Edutopia Ideas from literature addict Heather Wolpert-Gawron.”As a teacher, my mission is to spread this addiction to my own students. But I have a greater, more sinister, goal than that this year. I want to spread it to my entire school. And to do that, I have to allow literature to leak out of my classroom and into my school at large.”

• Guidelines for working with RDA and non-RDA records prior to implementation of RDA- Program for Cooperative Cataloging (Library of Congress) From the Library of Congress:The following guidelines were recommended by the Task Group on Hybrid Bibliographic Records (Sept. 1, 2011). The recommendations were approved by the PCC Policy Committee. The documents below include guidelines for working with RDA and non-RDA records for monographs, serials, and integrating resources prior to implementation of RDA.

• A Primer on Ebooks for Libraries Just Starting With Downloadable Media – The Digital Shift The Library Journal has been presenting a series of articles, “Exploring Ebook Options”, that take an in-depth look at some of the e-book platforms that are now in the marketplace. Article provides a good summary and explains some of the pros and cons of e-collections; the issues involved with eBooks and downloadable media, and what’s out there right now.

• The library with no rules Manila’s Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books.

• Authors Who Skype with Classes & Book Clubs (for free!) The site is is maintained by Kate Messner, an author and educator. Listed here are the books for which she offers free Skype chats for schools. She also lists and provides links to other authors who offer free Skype chats. This is a great way for small, rural libraries to connect students with authors.

• How to Use Pinterest to Improve Your Writing « Grow With Stacy

• Who can we trust? The importance of teaching our students to interpret the news. Today news is available at all times and technology brings us an unending stream of updates that don’t have the opportunity to be fact checked or vetted by experienced editors. It is inevitable that errors make occur, misrepresentations and blatant untruths can be easily promulgated and distortions published. This can happen, not just on websites, but also on TV and radio news and current affairs programs. Educators of young people today need to focus heavily on developing critical thinking skills in reading news and other purported fact based writing.

• Piktochart- Infographic & Presentation Tool. Piktochart offers 5 free templates, but many more options for paid accounts. There is a variety of pre-created shapes and images on Piktochart; you are able to upload a limited amount of customized images with a free account. t

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.