Time discovers 21st Century Learning December 31, 2006
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos.add a comment
The December 18, 2006 edition of Time magazine includes a cover story entitled “How To Build a Student For the 21st Century”. This is an interesting article which imagines how out of place Rip Van Winkle would be in current world, everywhere but in a classroom. Points for rethinking the current emphasis on test score driven skills and focusing instead on collaboration and communication are made. While technology would play a central role in this shift in classroom emphasis, not enough is detailed about the complicated issues of support, training, or cost on top of the huge shift needed in public opinion. Still, it is heartening to see a national magazine paying attention to education, and the changing climate for 21st century skills.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html
$100 laptop status (Now for only $150) December 31, 2006
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, OLPC.add a comment
MIT is famous for many education related innovations in technology, with the latest being a foray into providing low cost laptops to undeveloped nations. Based on open source designs and software, the XO Machine, as it is currently being called, is described in an article from Yahoo Business. One of the more interesting quotes is listed below.
“In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint,” Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. “I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061231/hundred_dollar_laptop.html?.v=3
Also covered by the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6224183.stm
Taxonomy of Tagging Systems December 20, 2006
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This is an article on the significance of tagging, or a way to add information to objects like photos or web pages. Written by Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, Danah Boyd, and Marc Davis, this article includes both detailed descriptions of tagging and the systems used to tag, as well as providing significant examples of web sites that use tagging. The article is a PDF document, so you’ll need an application like Adobe Reader to view it.
http://www.rawsugar.com/www2006/29.pdf
2006 Edublog Awards December 19, 2006
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Interested in seeing award winning educational blogs? Check out this year’s Edublog Award winners! Categories range from audio/visual, individual, group, to library, teacher, and more.
http://www.incsub.org/awards/
Learning from learners December 15, 2006
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Edubloggers.add a comment
There is an interesting post on Weblogg-ed. It is a short piece about the tragic loss of a student and the online response from her friends. The post quickly moves from personal to a poignant message about the state of affairs in our classrooms, and offers an opportunity to create a bridge, which is quoted below.
“We’re totally missing the point if we think we can wave the spectre of danger in front of them (danger of pedophiles, danger of future embarrassment, danger of _________) and expect them just to stop. Whether we like it or not, these are important and meaningful places to a large number of our kids. It’s not our role to control them because the reality is we can’t do that. It’s our role to educate them. And to do that, we have to be willing to learn from them first.”
The entire post can be found here:
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/01/17#a4516
Jonathan Kozol takes on the world. December 14, 2006
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Jonathan Kozol has written a new book called “The Shame of the Nation”. He is interviewed about his book by Gary Stager in January 2006 edition of District Administration. Kozol has some pretty pointed comments about the re-segregation of the public schools. Given the author and interviewer, this is a pretty strong article.
http://www.districtadministration.com/page.cfm?p=1406
Presentations December 9, 2006
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Uncategorized.add a comment
This page is a collection of posted Web 2.0 presentations for teachers. These presentations and collections are teacher created and are suitable for use in staff development to introduce the concepts to other teachers.
PLCMC Learning 2.0 presents a 9 week program for teachers to learn about Web 2.0. The program is designed around the idea of accomplishing 23 tasks, similar to the 43 things concept. Tasks include blogging, flickr, RSS, tagging, wikis, YouTube, and more.
http://plcmcl2-things.blogspot.com/
Educause has a selection of linked PDF documents around Web 2.0 and other educational technology trends in their Educause Learning Initiative, called 7 Things You Should Know About… This series includes RSS, Digital Storytelling, Google Earth and many others.
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=7495&bhcp=1
Open Educational Resources, or OER Commons is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, from K through college, from algebra to zoology, open to all to use.
http://www.oercommons.org/oer/oer-categories
FREE - Federal Resources for Educational Excellence - Teaching and Learning Resources from Federal Agencies: searchable activities and resources grouped by subject areas including Arts & Music, Health & Phys Ed, History & Social Studies, Language Arts, Math, Science, and special collections.
IMSA 21st Information Fluency Project provides top tips, lesson plans, core competencies, events materials for teacher training, a Digital Investigator for language arts support at the middle school and high school levels, links and more.
http://21cif.imsa.edu/resources/
Tom Johnson’s i’d rather be writing blog includes a nice presentation on blogging. The presentation materials cover reasons to blog, uses for blogs, usability tips, and specific information on using WordPress.
http://idratherbewriting.com/doctrain
Apple Learning Interchange includes presentations from recent national education conferences. If you were unable to attend FETC 2007 or TCEA 2007, ALI brings you audio recordings of select presenters. ALI also has many other educational resources in audio and video format.
http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/collection.php?collectionID=373
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy’s (IMSA) 21st Century Information Fluency Project (21CIF) provides free resources and training to all educators and learners so that they may locate, evaluate and use digital information resources more effectively, efficiently and ethically. 21CIF addresses the information needs experienced by today’s teachers and students through IMSA’s “Full Circle Resource Kit“, online courses and webinars, face-to-face workshops and interactive tutorials. All curricular resources are informed by the latest research and supplemented with interactive Wizard Tools.
David Warlick presents across the nation on educational issues and Web 2.0. To facilitate his presentations, David Warlick has set up a site called: At Your Service. Here he posts the handouts for his presentations. The presentations page can be found here:
http://72.32.86.225/wordpress/?page_id=5
You’ll find many useful and interesting presentations from this year’s K12 Online Conference. Speakers such as David Warlick, Chris Lehman, Steve Dembo and more, present many innovative sessions on the implications for Web 2.0 in education.
http://k12onlineconference.org/
TIE presentation by Stevan Kalmon and Matthew Woolums, both from the Denver Public School in Denver, CO, in June of 2006, Read Write Web TIE 2006 is an overview of sample sites that exhibit Web 2.0 characteristics.
Karl Fisch, from Arapahoe HS in Littleton, CO, has collected three of his presentations in one convenient location, The Fischbowl Presentations. You can also access his blog, The Fischbowl, to see other interesting discussions.
Adopt and Adapt December 6, 2006
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Edutopia has published a new article by Marc Prensky. This is the same author how coined the phrase ‘digital immigrants’. In this article he reviews the current state of affairs in the use of technology in education. Prensky places the use of technology into three broad catagories: “Old Things in Old Ways”, “Old Things in New Ways”, and “New Things in New Ways”. Please review the whole article here:
http://www.edutopia.org/magazine/ed1article.php?id=art_1423&issue=dec_05#
Tech Tools for Learning December 1, 2006
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Below is a link to a Cable in the Classroom article titled: “Tech Tools for Learning”. Written by Will Richardson, it surveys some of the more cutting edge tech tools in use in classrooms today. Will discusses Weblogs, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Podcasts, Webcams, and Streaming Video. Will Richardson is the author of Weblogg-ed ( http://www.weblogg-ed.com ), an educational weblog.
Tech Tools for Learning Link:
http://www.ciconline.org/web/archive/home?p_p_id=20&p_p_action=1&p_p_state=exclusive&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=&p_p_col_pos=0&p_p_col_count=0&_20_struts_action=%2Fdocument_library%2Fget_file&_20_folderId=21&_20_name=AL-01-06-TechTools.pdf
