Social media Social Media Made Simple By Emma Chadband Found In: advice & support Thanks to physics teacher Michelle Gould Burgess’ seamless integration of social media into her lesson plans, her students are busy launching marbles out of a catapult instead of listening to a lecture. For last night’s homework, they read Gould Burgess’ blog, watched her lectures via podcast— including a “bonus trigonometry podcast”—and they’ve stored their assignments in Google Docs. Gould Burgess teaches in a “flipped classroom,” so her students complete their “lower-level thinking” for homework, and engage in “higher-level thinking,” like the marble and catapult lab, in the classroom. Gould Burgess said her system is especially helpful because students have no excuse not to do their homework. The blog/podcast system is useful for classwork as well, she says, because if she’s helping one student and another needs her, she can refer them back to the specific part of her podcast that will help them. Busy Work Gets Easier Getting Started
Get stuff done in the cloud. Go Google. You probably hear terms like “the cloud” or “cloud computing” being used a lot these days. While the idea of the cloud may seem abstract, many things you already do on your computer and smartphone today, such as email, photo sharing and video streaming, are made possible by the cloud. At the heart of it, Google is about cloud computing—helping people live online and get things done in the cloud. We’ve built cloud-based tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to help you connect and collaborate online with others more quickly and easily, without having to deal with the hassles and frustrations of installing and managing traditional software. Today, hundreds of millions of people, including 16 million students and teachers at 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, employees at more than 4 million businesses worldwide including Burberry, Costco and National Geographic (and maybe even your 13-year-old daughter and her entire soccer team) have all already gone Google. So go on.
ShowMe Pew data on technology & student writing A survey of middle and high school teachers finds that digital technology impacts student writing in many ways. 78% of the 2,462 teachers surveyed by the Pew Research Center say digital tools “encourage student creativity and personal expression.” Teachers surveyed for The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing Overview (July 2013) believe that exposure to a broader audience and more feedback from peers encourages student investment in the writing process. Despite some challenges, 50% of teachers across all subjects say the internet and digital tools make it easier for them to teach writing (chart at right). In terms of student writing skills, most teachers rated them “good” or “fair” (not “excellent” or “very good”). Students are able to organize and structure their writing, and they don’t seem to have a problem dealing with multiple viewpoints. They don’t do as well at handling copyright issues and working with long or complicated texts. Like this: Like Loading... Related In "News"
Online classroom communities Obama, tech firms to announce software donations to U.S. schools Organizing & sharing content Y Combinator's New Nonprofit Helps Tech Companies Teach Kids To Code Y Combinator nonprofit CodeNOW aims to teach high school students, especially minorities and girls, programming skills with its in-person coding workshops. While the organization has taught more than 300 students the fundamentals of programming, it hopes to have a bigger impact, and on Thursday launched a product that it says could potentially reach hundreds of thousands of students. Called CodeNOW in a Box, the program will enable tech companies to host their own programming training sessions. The organization said more than 45% of students are female, and 95% of students receive free or subsidized lunches. The vast majority of students who attend CodeNOW's workshops have never written a line of code before. "CodeNOW's success comes from people responding to our idea and taking action," founder and CEO Ryan Seashore told Fast Company. The program is set up so students attend three days of training over four weeks, and students are assigned about five hours of homework in between.
Presentations Boy Builds Braille Printer Out Of Lego What do you get when you put a Lego robotics kit, basic tools and a creative mind together? A Braille printer. Shubham Banerjee, 12, talks to NPR's Scott Simon about his project to help the blind. Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. Shubham Banerjee has done something utterly remarkable: the seventh grader has used a $350 robotics kit made by Lego, plus some basic items from the hardware store, to build a braille printer. SHUBHAM BANERJEE: Sure, no problem. SIMON: Well, what inspired you to try and use a Lego kit to make a braille printer? BANERJEE: First of all, I've been loving Legos since I was 2 years old. SIMON: Yeah. BANERJEE: So, one of the flyers came to my parents and it said help the blind with donations. SIMON: Can you tell us how it works without giving away the genius of your invention? BANERJEE: OK. BANERJEE: So, you would go to the brick, which is the heart of the robot, and there's up, down, left, right buttons that you can use.
Creating content Five science apps to check out in 2013 From tiny molecules to gigantic planets, science apps can help you to explore the world in new ways. Five science apps that you should check out in 2013 if you haven’t already are Star Walk, SciSpy, NOVA Elements, What’s Invasive and NASA App. Star Walk. Star Walk is an award-winning stargazing guide that was developed by Vito Technology. The app helps you to locate and identify over 20,000 objects in the night sky including stars, constellations, planets and satellites. This app has been on the market for a few years now so you may already have it. A screenshot from Star Walk’s astronomy app. SciSpy. NOVA Elements. What’s Invasive! NASA App. Bottom line: Science apps are revolutionizing the way in which we can explore our world. Now you can identify trees with your smartphone iPhone morphs into medical imaging device Tanzeem Choudhury develops cellphone apps to track our health Citizen scientists hit one million mark for observations of nature Citizen scientists uncover a galaxy of bubbles
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