How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool Think Twitter is just a waste of time? Think again. Its organizational structure makes it an effective tool for connecting with students and others online By Alan November and Brian Mull Read more by Contributor July 13th, 2012 Learning how to filter through tweets will bring clarity and meaning to Twitter and will get you past the mosh pit of random thoughts and lackluster chitchat. (Editor’s note: This is part three in a series of articles about how to build students’ web literacy and research skills. On Feb. 10, 2011, the world was transfixed on the protests raging in Egypt. What Mubarak might not have known is that while he was trying to maintain his iron grip on power, thousands of Egyptians were tweeting about their frustration with the dictator. If you are a middle or high school social studies teacher, and you wanted to provide your students with a close-up view of the events unfolding in Egypt, you could turn to a traditional news service.
Is the Internet Good for Writing? Part 1: Affirmative - Lingua Franca The science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon thought that 90 percent of everything was crap. Taking this side of the question is Clive Thompson, author of the new book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Thompson says he is “regularly astonished by the quality and length of expression I find online, the majority of which is done by amateurs in their spare time.” The length part, at least, is inarguable. Thompson, a journalist who has specialized in covering technology, asserts, “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.” Lord knows, most of those words are horrible, as Thompson readily acknowledges. But some substantial minority of amateur online writing—probably well below 10 percent—is pretty or very good, in a distinctly new way. The Internet is full of unexpected treasures that instruct and delight. Return to Top
20 Must-See Teaching Tools Coming To Your Classroom Very Soon It’s hard to find a field that hasn’t been radically changed by technology, and education is no exception. Few classrooms these days operate without digital tools, gadgets, or applications that have made it easier for teachers to track student progress and tailor lessons to student needs and interests. While the tools of today are great, there are even more great technological teaching tools and practices on the horizon, many of which are just starting to be adopted in the classroom or are just making it out of the developmental stages. These tools offer new and often very promising ways to connect with students and improve the quality of education offered in schools. (Click the title of each tool to visit their respective website) ClassConnect ClassConnect is a startup founded by teen entrepreneur Eric Simons (who spent months living on AOL’s campus while he worked on the project). 19Pencils Augmented Reality Glasses Online Learning Exchange Prentice Hall Writing Coach Three Ring Class Dojo
Classroom 2.0 Scholr.ly Search Engine Takes An Innovative Approach To Research The web is cluttered. There’s a pantload of information out there and it’s hard to sift through. Google does a fabulous job at being your virtual Swiss Army Knife for finding what you’re looking for. But even the likes of Google Scholar and Google Books are not perfect. Quickly finding and skimming abstracts, learning about authors, and surfacing new publications is tricky. That’s where Scholar.ly comes in. Personally, I love the dual column approach. One interesting side-note is that, when faced between results that are either behind a paywall or free, Scholr.ly ranks free papers and books above those behind a paywall. The beta is expected to launch later this summer and we’ll be sure to bring you more as it’s opened.
Restyling the Classics: Don't Judge a New Cover by the Old Book - Jen Doll There's been a lot of talk about the new (book) edition of The Great Gatsby , with its movie tie-in cover that's been dubbed terrible by some and enticing by others. But there's a whole world of re-imagined book covers for classic novels well beyond those Leonardo Di Caprio editions of Gatsby . Take a look, for instance, at book designer Neil Gower 's new cover for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra , which was released April 30. (It's the one in red, above, at right, next to the 1934 classic designed by Alfred Maurer.) There's no shame in redesigning a classic. From conversations with Bickford-Smith, Buckley, and Gower, here's how the designers make covers for the books you know and love new again. Finding Inspiration Through Drop Caps The Drop Caps series comprises 26 collectible hardcover editions of books authored by people from Jane Austen to (they're currently up to L ) Chang-Rae Lee. Nodding to the Original Want to add to this story?
Use Twitter in PowerPoint Your audience is tweeting How do you draw them into your presentation? By asking for their opinion, and displaying their tweets directly in your slides. With Poll Everywhere, you can invite people to tweet a short comment directly to your slide in real-time, while still blocking inappropriate or off-topic tweets. You can also ask multiple choice questions and watch a graph evolve as people vote. Try it now: chart How does it work? If people tweet and include "@poll", we'll pick it up as fast as Twitter allows. If you defined a confirmation message, @poll replies back to them.
44 Twitter Chat Tools For The Modern Teacher Twitter is one of the most powerful teacher professional development tools of the 21st century. The fact that that sentence is–as far as we can tell anyway–entirely true shows how much technology has changed everything. Imagine being told even just six years ago that in 2013 your best consistent source of diverse professional information would blogs and a stream of short messages in a bird-branded app on a screen you could hold in your lap. While we believe that it’s time to offer teachers professional development credit for their time invested here, that will likely time some paradigm shifts from district administrators and policy makers. For now, we can do the best we can with what we have.
Learning and Growing: Keynote, Socrative, Simple Circuit App, BrainPop Back from a nice long weekend, I know that I have to reactivate my students memories from our Lego circuit lab from last week. So, how to do this? My objective is to review the necessary parts of electrical circuits, illustrate the difference between series and parallel circuits, and review how electrical energy can be transformed into other energy forms. Start off class by showing the lab video (from above). Enter, Keynote... Here are a few slides... Sorting circuit parts Comparing various circuits Traditional circuit question The students will also have them available through Dropbox. Enter, Socrative app... Information on the Socrative app can be found at Our lesson will really ramp up with the use of the Simple Circuit app that some student explored in our lab last week. As a cooling down activity, students will log on to the BrainPop app for a quick review of circuits by watching the Electric Circuits video.