24 Ed-Tech Terms You Should Know If you’re a teacher or administrator who has been to an educational conference or sat in on a product demo featuring the latest classroom innovation, you know that the intersection of schools and technology is littered with buzzwords. From mLearning to mobile apps to asynchronous instruction, the ed-tech landscape is equal parts high-gloss marketing and roll-up-your-sleeves instruction. In the face of increased pressure to improve student performance, how can K–12 educators cut through the promotional hyperbole and put the focus where it should be — on classroom improvements? It helps if you speak the language. This Ed Tech Cheat Sheet, which we first encountered on the Mr. Are there any other terms you’d like to see on this list? 9 Tools to Create E-magazines and Newspapers for Your Class 1- Uniflip UniFlip converts your magazine, brochure or catalog from its original PDF format into an exciting, professional multi-media digital format with pages that flip. 2-Joomag Joomag is a web tool that lets you create your own magazines using a simple online editor. You can draw shapes, write texts, add rich media elements like video and audio players. 3- Scribd Scribd is known for being a reading library where you can search for and find ebooks and slides but it is also a magazine creator which allows users to upload their own content and turn it into a magazine 4- Issuu This is like Scribd above. 5- Zinepal This tools lets you create an ebook or magazine from posts and articles of a blog. 6- Build A Newspaper This one is a professional platform that provides teacher based templates to create mazagines. 7- Fodey This is most simple of all the tools mentioned here. 8- Open Zine 9- Calameo Publish your magazine, presentations or documents and share them with the world.
The greatest creative writing activity ever UPDATE: This post was awarded the British Council’s Teaching English blog award for February, 2013. Thanks to all those who voted for my work, you’re awesome. This post is a response to a question posed on the British Council’s Teaching English page on Facebook: ‘Have you got a favourite lesson plan or class activity that you come back to and use again and again? What does it consist of? Ok, let me dive straight into it. First, I’ll describe the activity, and then I’ll tell you why it’s great. 1. How long have you been on the planet? 2. You are going to write a paragraph that tells a story.Your paragraph will be a response to these questions.Any sentence you write is OK, but you must follow the sequence of questions.You can ask me for help while you are writing. 3. What kind of language might we use to answer the first question? 4. Twenty minutes is long enough for most to finish. 5. Why does this work so well? 1. ‘When did you arrive on the planet?’ You can equally make it more complex: 2.
Alternative Video Use in the Flipped Classroom Guest post by FLN executive director, Kari Arfstrom. Recently, you may have heard about flipped learning. If you read any professional journals or education publications over the summer break, most of them have written at least one story on this new ideology. Every education blogger seems to have an opinion on the topic as well. National news organizations like CNN and NPR have covered it, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, which has done multiple stories. Your local newspaper or TV station may have run a story on a school in your area. Survey says: Flipped learning boosts grades, attitudes, satisfaction You may have decided to flip your classroom (or are thinking about it) to increase student interest and learning, to stave off doing the “same thing day after day,” and to utilize past technology purchases that can finally be realized as increasing satisfaction for both teachers and students. Where and how to use video: 6 styles with examples Can’t see the video?
A world where grades don't exist and learning is free As USA TODAY celebrates it 30th anniversary, we interviewed some of the USA's greatest visionaries to talk about the world of tomorrow: How we'll live, learn and travel, what we'll do and who we'll be. PALO ALTO, Calif. -- About a mile from the main quad at Stanford University, one of the nation's bastions of exclusive and expensive higher education, a street-level office building across the street from an Olive Garden houses the makings of an up-and-coming contender. In this version of education, learning will be free and available to anyone who wants it while operating like a whimsical playground: No one is late for class, failure is not an option, and a lesson looks something like Angry Birds, the physics-based puzzle game that has been downloaded more than 1 billion times. "You want learning to be as much fun as it is to play a video game," says Sebastian Thrun, a Google vice president and Stanford research professor best known for his role in building Google's driverless car.
A place of greater safety | macappella Motivation is key to learning, the carrot being better than the stick, and if the carrot is brought in by the learner themself, why, even better. Of course, motivation is a lot of things: it’s output from input (as a ratio), it’s challenge, engagement, effort, empowerment, being energised, it’s having needs met and then some. As teachers, we often think of needs in linguistic or language learning terms: he needs to be able to write business emails to engineering companies, she needs to be able to understand articles about plant genetics, he needs to pass his first year secondary school exam, she needs to improve her pronunciation as she’s difficult to understand.. and so on. But there’s more to life than language, and the classroom – if we open ourselves to it as teachers – is more than just a language box or drip, it’s a microcosm – and a good place to be. Do you remember Maslow and his five neat layers working their way up the hierarchy of needs? Why am I banging on about this?
Goal 10: Spread Your Knowledge (15+ Tools to Bookmark, Aggregate, Curate) Posted by Shelly Terrell on Thursday, June 14th 2012 Goal 10 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators ! Click the link to find out more about the new changes to this year’s 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! ““If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. ” ~ Margaret Fuller Short-term - share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Teach your students to use online bookmarking, curation, and aggregation tools to gather and organize their knowledge. Long-term - develop a community for sharing resources in your teaching environment. My Personal Thoughts About This Goal As educators, we are in the business of learning. Resources Related to This Goal I love learning. The tools that I use meet a few criteria: They have a free app! Tools Diigo - saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet, allows you to highlight sections on websites and make notes, takes clippings, tag, search, and more! More resources:
No document camera? No problem! Use your smartphone, Dropbox, and PicMonkey to do even more! | Nathan Hall Image courtesy of Cushing Library Holy Names University One of the tools I use quite a bit in my English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom is a document camera. While I tend to use a lot of computer based tools, it is still easier (and in some ways better) to have students work in pairs and groups on writing projects with pens and paper. This allows the entire group to be active during the writing time instead of staring at their screens or letting one person do all of the typing. When talking with teachers who are limited in their technology resources, such as not having a document camera, I try to find alternatives that do basically the same thing without the expenditure of another tool to buy. Students work on their projects with coloured pens and white paper. Once they are done, I take a photo with my smartphone of the project. Once I am done with each photo, I can then download it to my computer or I can save the edited version back on Dropbox. Like this: Like Loading...
IATEFL 2014: Q and A with Sugata Mitra – Saturday 17.00 BST: a summary At 17.00 BST (18.00 Palermo time!), the Q and A session with Sugata Mitra took place. Questions had been sent in advance of this session, and these appeared in turn on the slides, for Mitra to answer. I attempted to make notes during the session and here is what I managed to catch: Slide one a)If you look at the paper, which was written in 2005, it describes quite carefully what the measurements are. b)With regards to the second question, Mitra doesn’t have all the answers. Slide 2 He would love to see State involvement and indeed states across the world, U.S., U.K, India, has shown positive response. Slide 3 Mitra is not sure what they mean by wider approach, but likes the first part – 60% out of school factors, 20% teaching, 20% personal – but would like to capture that 60% and bring it into school. Slide 4 a) Of course they would have learnt better from a good teacher but they didn’t have teachers so two options either learn nothing at all or learn by themselves. Slide 5 Slide 6 Slide 7 a.