Blogs October 14, 2017 - Politics & Policy+ Politics & Policy (10) Education and the Media Mark Walsh examines news media coverage of education, as well how schools, teachers, and students are treated in popular culture. The Intersection: Culture and Race in Schools English teacher Christina Torres dissects how race, sex, and culture meet and conflict in the public education system, and how educators can better understand and approach such issues. 2¢ Worth Listen A few weeks ago I worked and attended North Carolina's ISTE affiliate conference. I opened the NCTIES conference with a breakfast keynote address and Marc Prensky closed it with a luncheon keynote the next day. Sadly, I missed the second day of the conference. I would first offer some constructive criticism to NCTIES , and to all such ed-tech conferences across the nation and around the world. You do a fabulous job of offering dynamic learning experiences for teachers who are new to teaching or new to utilizing contemporary information and communication technologies in their classrooms.
5 Awesome Prezis And 5 Ways To Use Them In Your Digital Classroom I am just going to put it out there and say that Prezi is one of my all time favorite tools for work and for play. Simple, fun, free and with an endless number of uses in the digital classroom, the tool is now a favorite of many teachers around the globe. Being the most popular course on Fractus Learning Online Training and boasting over 5 million users, Prezi is indeed a favorite in and out of education. 20+ Must-Attend Education Conferences for NJ Teachers Summer 2018 Edition With lesson planning and grading on the backburner, summer remains the ideal time for teachers to invest in themselves and learn something new. It’s one of the few opportunities that teachers get to fully indulge their own passion for learning without the competing priorities that come with classroom teaching responsibilities. To help you seize this summer’s learning opportunities and simultaneously grow your professional learning network (PLN), we’ve compiled a list of local and national conferences where you can advance your professional practice.
15 OER tools for educators Below you’ll find great sources for K-12 OER. Need some higher-ed OER tools? We’ve got a ton of them on eCampus News. This is just a sampling of the OER tools available. Do you have a favorite OER tool or guide that isn’t listed here? Let us know in the comments section below. Blog Silvia Zanatta wrote how she incorporated the Classroom Habitudes into her 7th grade classroom in a wonderful post last year. Here, she updates us on her progress of using Heartbreak Mapping and the transformation she’s seen in her students—and her school. One year ago, Angela Maiers asked me to share my students’ work and experiences around Following Their Heartbreak, and what resulted was a blog post that she graciously published on her website. At that time, I had been in the midst of exploring and learning about the Classroom Habitudes and the #youmatter movement with my students.
How to use Prezi- a prezi for you to use Having talked a lot recently about the strengths and weaknesses of Prezi, I thought it was about time I ‘showed and told’. So here’s a Prezi presentation of mine, to give you an overview of how you can use the tool to best advantage. You can click through it like a book, or set it to autoplay. Now here are a few caveats - This is a Prezi designed to be read – if you used it as a presentation aid it would be supervised reading, which would be worse than death by PowerPoint.Use it like an online training aid and take your time to read through it. It shows Prezis strengths and weaknesses in equal measure.To turn this into a visual aid, I’d simply remove the clutter (unnecessary detail, the sentences, the extra words and use the visual for emphasis of my text only).I’d end up with a very simple set of emphatic words and images that I could use like a flipchart to illustrate my key points.
Five websites every art teacher needs ⋆ felt-tip-pen With the Art exam season now in full swing, I thought I’d dedicate this post to five fantastic websites providing excellent exam support resources. These are some of my favourite online exam resources for art students and teachers: Tate Exam Help – this resource covers only some of the current exam themes, but the ones that are on there are covered really well. It’s great to find a site with commentary linking the artists’ ideas to the theme and to one another, and I love that it introduces me to artists and works I didn’t already know.art2day – a fantastic resource for finding fine artists and photographers to inspire students or link the their individual projects. There are sections focused on different media which you can browse through, or there is a search function (though you have to donate to the site to gain access to this).
Classroom Management: Using Gaming Elements Gamification is a term you may have heard in passing, but probably like most of us, are unsure what exactly it means. Simply put, gamification involves using the principles of classroom games to motivate and engage students. We all know that children love video games, and we can see that these game designers really know how to hook our children. So, why wouldn’t we be interested in incorporating some of the bells and whistles that designers use as part of our own classroom games and classroom management tactics? If you think about it, we as adults use one of the elements in gamification probably every day that we go to a store and use our rewards card.
Your School and Google’s Nine Principles of Innovation The other day Kathy Chin Leong published a review of what Google’s chief social evangelist, Gopi Kallayil, calls Google’s Nine Principles of Innovation. I tweeted out the post (as did others) and I know many of my followers linked to it. A major section of my upcoming book will discuss how key elements of innovation strategy are particularly effective in a school setting. Much of what I found in my many school visits resonates with this list of what makes Google one of the most innovative cultures on the planet. Here are some very brief examples of how I see Gopi’s keys to Google innovation, as applied to a K-12 setting: My preferred definition of innovation is “ideas that enhance the value of the organization”.
Google URL Shortener Posted by Michael Hermanto, Software Engineer, Firebase We launched the Google URL Shortener back in 2009 as a way to help people more easily share links and measure traffic online. Since then, many popular URL shortening services have emerged and the ways people find content on the Internet have also changed dramatically, from primarily desktop webpages to apps, mobile devices, home assistants, and more.