Top 6 Sites that Inspire and Educate If you’re a professional who likes to be intellectually stimulated and you enjoy keeping up with the latest news and breaking trends, the internet provides you with an endless choice of carefully curated sites to visit. Today, we bring you six of them that we believe are leaps and bounds above the rest. These sites will not only educate you on topics ranging from business and technology to art and design, they’ll motivate you to find your own, original ideas and see them through. They’re culturally relevant, they’re idea driven and most of all, they’re deeply inspirational. TED is short for three incredibly important subjects in our modern world; technology, entertainment and design. Tip: Download TED’s free iPad app to browse through 800 videos by date, popularity or keyword. 2. Brain Pickings started from very humble beginnings. Tip: With over 63K Twitter followers, Brainpicker has a strong audience…and for good reason. 4. 5.
25 Best Websites for Teachers 1. Best Teacher Resources: Scholastic Teachables From lesson plans and reproducibles to mini-books and differentiated collections, Scholastic Teachables has everything you need to go with your lessons in every subject. It’s the best of Scholastic classroom resources right at your fingertips. 2. Best for Finding and Leveling Books: Book Wizard Use Scholastic’s Book Wizard to level your classroom library, discover resources for the books you teach, and find books at just the right level for students with Guided Reading, Lexile® Measure, and DRA levels for children's books. 3. FInd hundreds of standards-based lesson plans, crafts, and activities for every grade level, plus art techniques for beginners to practiced artists. 4. Establish a morning routine with Scholastic's Daily Starters — fun, fast math and language arts prompts and questions, including Teachable Moments from history and Fun Facts. 5. 6. 7. 8. Zoom over the Sahara desert. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
3 Chrome Extensions For Gmail That Help You Use Email Quickly In my meandering through the Chrome Web Store, I found three Chrome extensions designed for Gmail that looked like a perfect productivity hack to defeat my inertia. Of course, to complement my Gmail user experience, I was also armed with the recommendations given by Matt when he talked about 6 Cool Google Chrome Extensions for Gmail Users. If you are as conscious about your ‘laze times’ as me, I am sure you will like these three Chrome extensions for the Gmail user. Mailto:Gmail This is the simplest extension of the trio. Send From Gmail We have talked about this Chrome extension for Gmail in the 4 Ways to Set Gmail as Your Default Email in Your Browser. OmniMail OmniMail for Gmail is just about the best Chrome extension if you want rapid-fire email productivity from the address bar. Once granted, an input of mail <email address> and hitting Enter will open up the Gmail compose window within Gmail itself in a new tab. OmniMail auto-suggests email contacts in the dropdown just like Gmail.
7 Search Tips You Probably Don’t Know About Not a day passes by without doing an online search. You may know of basic search operators like AND, OR, etc. but an increasing number of web applications support even more keywords that’ll help you fine tune your search to the core. Here are some you may have never heard of. This is a guest post by Shankar Ganesh 1. Chances are you’ve never heard of Google’s AROUND(n) search operator. 2. Starring emails is one indispensable feature in Gmail and you’ve probably enabled Superstars labs addon. What many people don’t know is that you can search and find messages that have been marked by a specific star. Here are other search operators that you can use to find super-starred emails in Gmail: You really should thank the Google Operating System blog for bring these to light. 3. Gmail search simply leaves a lot to be desired. Give your Gmail account credentials (don’t worry, they’re stored locally) and then click Ctrl + / to put the focus on the CloudMagic search bar. 4. 5. 6. 7.
7 Reasons To Leverage Social Networking Tools in the Classroom Instructional uses of social networking software can provide opportunities for learning, connecting, and engagement. This year, I’ve written frequently about popular social media tools, and education-specific social networking apps, and social enterprise solutions. I’ve also noticed increasing coverage of this topic in the media recently. Social networking tools aren’t going away any time soon, they appear to be here for the long term. 7 ways in which “social learning applications” can play an impactful role in education: Engagement: Using social media and networking tools obviously has a social aspect to it, and it requires proactive effort on the part of the user. Social Learning: Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that “people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling”. Encourage dialogue, reach more students: It’s social! About Kelly Walsh Print This Post
Learning through Digital Media Delicious: Renovating the Mnemonic Architectures of Bookmarking Shannon Mattern Krissy Venosdale, "Tag It!" January 13, 2011, via Flickr, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License: In the days before its death knell had been rung Read More » Follow, Heart, Reblog, Crush: Teaching Writing with Tumblr Adriana Valdez Young By taking a quick glance at my member profile, you might guess that Tumblr is an online dating site, but although Tumblr frames site activity in the language of admiration and courtship, it is, in fact, a fantastically simple microblogging platform that is extremely adaptable for a spectrum of personal and professional uses. Socializing Blogs, a Guide for Beginners Tiffany Holmes I have been teaching with digital media since 1994. From my perspective, digital media has two major failings: its obvious transience and archival challenges. Facebook as a Functional Tool & Critical Resource Mark Lipton
13 Enlightening Case Studies of Social Media in the Classroom Social media is the thing right now. It provides a way to connect people of similar (or dissimilar) interests from around the world. Social media also provides networking tools for professionals and even for job hunters. But social media isn’t just for professionals, computer geeks and families who prefer not to send email; increasingly, social media is becoming a part of the classroom. 1. It isn’t surprising that social media is used in newsgathering. This is a graduate level class in the Graduate School of Journalism that teaches students that they can use real-time searches to find breaking news — and to find comments on that breaking news. 2. Many universities are interested in sharing projects with the world — not to mention educating others in the school. Also, gathering this information into one place makes it a little bit easier to search for news and research being done at Stanford. 3. Chris Copeland is all about using Twitter to help his students. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
End Technology Training? – Learn. Teach. Engage. Ummm…no. Had to get that out of the way before I could continue. Now let me back up a little… I recently read a post by Mark Brumley over at the HP Learning Exchange. Now, in Mark’s defense, he argues that professional development should focus on “stellar instructional methods” instead. Although he doesn’t quote a source, he says that some studies say that only 3-5 percent of teachers who receive training actually use what they’ve been taught. Now, granted, at Engaging Educators we are in the business of teacher training. Think Long Term–training should be sustained over the course of the school year, not just a one day sort of thing. So before we just eliminate technology training completely, some analysis is required. Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
7 Ingenious Resumes That Will Make You Rethink Your CV You love resumes. You really do. When we published "10 Creative Social Media Resumes To Learn From" in May, our readers enthusiastically responded by sharing it with friends, commenting on it and sending us links to their own snazzy resumes. We sifted through those links, picked our favorites and placed them in the gallery below. The 10 Resumes That Inspired the Post You're Reading Now In May, we brought you these awesome resumes to help you to stand out from the crowd. Social Media Job Listings Inspired yet? More Job Search Resources from Mashable: - 10 Creative Social Media Resumes To Learn From- HOW TO: Set Up an Online Resume- 9 Dynamic Digital Resumes That Stand Out From the Crowd- Top 5 Tips for Creating Impressive Video Resumes- Are Cover Letters Still Relevant For Social Media and Tech Jobs? Image courtesy of iStockphoto, SchulteProductions
The Dos and Don'ts of Tech Integration PD Of all the initiatives a school can begin, integrating technology may require the most professional development. This is partly because of the equipment, hardware, and software involved and partly because of the shift that a teacher must make in his or her teaching style, technique, and planning process in order to effectively use technology in the classroom. Here are some basic "dos" and "don'ts" for anyone doing tech integration professional development. This approach requires those who provide professional development for teachers to listen to their needs, and to know the school and staff they are either visiting or presenting to. This includes situations when staff present to their colleagues. Teachers need support, and they need to see how technology will help them do what they do better and more effectively. For more on building a PD model that supports teacher collaboration and voice, see my posts on the Edcamp model. see more see less
100+ Online Resources That Are Transforming Education Yury Lifshits is working on algorithms and prototypes of new services at Yahoo! Research. Before that he was teaching university courses in the U.S., Germany, Russia and Estonia. He blogs at yurylifshits.com and publishes his teaching materials at yury.name/teaching. Education technology has become a busy space in recent years. With so many startups on the scene, it is easy to get lost. 1. The education system of the 20th century is built around institutions: schools, colleges, academies and universities. We've now seen the first online high schools (Keystone School), colleges (University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, The Open University, University of the People), certification programs (Alison.com), enterprise training programs (GlobalEnglish.com), art schools (AudioVisualAcademy.com) and test preparation programs (Top Test Prep, GrockIt, Knewton, RevolutionPrep, TutorJam, BrightStorm). 2. To build a new educational institution, one needs to assemble a lot of pieces. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Daniel Donahoo: Horizon Report K-12 Released: The Future of Education Is Mobile With the release of the New Media Consortium's 2011 Horizon Report for K-12 there is no doubt that the future of education is mobile. But, despite what tech-evangelists would have us believe it will not be enough to put mobile devices into children's hands and expect the education system to improve or their learning to suddenly take off. The revolution in technology, and subsequently educational technology, is an opportunity, but not a guarantee. The most recent Horizon Report repeats what it has stated for a few years now: "Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession." And, it is for this reason developing children's skills across multiple literacies like visual, digital, media and networking is important and using technology to do it is a no-brainer. Mobiles are a category that defies long-term definitions. It sounds impressive because it is impressive. We don't have to evolve, and if we don't it will be a great loss.
5 Tools for Building a Next-Generation 'Hybrid' Class Website [Nicholas C. Martin is a visiting professor at American University and the United Nations University for Peace. He is also co-founder and president of TechChange, an organization that trains leaders to leverage emerging technologies for sustainable social change. TechChange specializes in creating “next-generation” e-learning content, tools and communities. You can follow him on Twitter at @TechChange.--@jbj] Last month, I co-taught a course at American University’s School of International Service entitled ”Applications of Technology for Peacebuilding.” Prior to the course, we created an online social learning community in Drupal with a number of innovative features. Once we got the Drupal site up and running we began creating and embedding various tools to support the learning process. If you’re interested in seeing some of these tools in action you can view a sample TechChange Unit. What We’re Working on Next: Photo provided by Nick Martin. Return to Top