I am wondering how many teachers will actually watch these videos or dismiss them without a thought. Many teachers have their students provide feedback about their course at school via a survey. I have never found these to be particularly useful. Instead, what students really think about your school can really assist in changing the atomosphere.

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Videos – I hate my teacher

Do you know what your students are saying at home about your school? Is this something that educators should care about or just ignore?

WARNING: Language often is not safe for work or young children.

See more at dangerouslyirrelevant.org

 

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11 Funny Graphs About Twitter

It's amazing how true most of thee graphs are when describing the behavior of Twitter and how it's used/viewed. Enjoy!

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11 Funny Graphs About Twitter

Who's Big On Twitter?

The Most Played Out Jokes About Twitter

The Best Thing About Celebrities Being On Twitter Is...

Twitter Follower-Following Scatter Plot

The Conan O'Brien Paradox

Things You Do On Twitter That Annoy Your Friends

If I Click On a Trending Topic, What Will I See?

Use of the Word "Your" on Twitter

Reaction to a Celebrity Death, Twitter vs. Mainstream

What Happens When You Introduce Someone 55+ To Twitter

Who's Making Money Off Twitter

See more at www.11points.com

 

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7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

I'm familiar with 6 out of the 7 choices given here by Mashable. To my surprise they have listed EDU 2.0 first! Why am I surprised? EDU 2.0 has been around for a while but has not received near the attention of other sites. It has great features, great security and it's free! If you have not tried EDU 2.0, you should give it a try!

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7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

Even when people say they want to incorporate social media, they don’t always know the best ways to do so. It’s especially daunting when those efforts can affect the education of your students.

1. EDU 2.0

EDU 2.0 is a lot like online course management systems Blackboard and Moodle, but with a couple of distinct advantages. First, teachers can share their lesson plans, quizzes, videos, experiments and other resources in a shared library that currently hosts more than 15,000 pieces of content. Second, a community section allows teachers and students to network and collaborate with other members who share the same educational interests. And third, everything is hosted in the cloud for free.

2. SymbalooEDU

The popular visual organizing and sharing tool Symbaloo launched its “EDU” version last month. According to the company, 50,000 teachers are already using Symbaloo to organize classroom resources. The new EDU version comes with academic subject-specific resource pages or “webmixes” and top tools like TeacherTube, Slideshare, Google () Docs, Flickr () and more are fully embeddable. Teachers with a “Free Plus” account can add their school logo and customize the links. The site also allows students to easily share their Symbaloo pages and projects with classmates.

3. Collaborize Classroom

This app gives teachers four discussion format choices. Students can either agree or disagree with a statement, answer a multiple choice question, post responses, or have the choice between adding a new response or voting for someone else’s response. Teachers can add photos or videos to their prompts and all of the discussions take place on one class page.

4. Edublogs

Common uses for blogs in classrooms include group projects, reflection journals, school newspapers, class web pages and parent newsletters. But, as evidenced by the winners of the 2009 Edublog awards, there are plenty of other creative options for integrating the blogs into curriculum.

5. Kidsblog

Kidsblog is a bit more specific than Edublogs. There are fewer options to adjust the appearance of the main page, and it’s hard to use the platform for anything other than as a system for managing individual class blogs. The homepage serves as a catalog of student blogs on the right with a recent post feed on the left.

6. Edmodo

Edmodo looks and functions much like Facebook (). But unlike Facebook, it’s a controlled environment that teachers can effectively leverage to encourage class engagement. The platform allows teachers and students to share ideas, files and assignments on a communal wall. Teachers can organize different groups of students and monitor them from the same dashboard. Once they’ve organized classes, they can post assignments to the wall and grade them online. They can then archive the class groups and begin new ones.

7. TeacherTube and SchoolTube and YouTube

As the name implies, TeacherTube is YouTube () for teachers. It’s a great resource for lesson ideas but videos can also be used during class to supplement a lecture. For instance, you can let Mrs. Burk rap about perimeters if you like her idea but lack the rhyming skills to pull it off yourself. This site also has a crowdsourced stock of documents, audio and photos that can be added to your lesson plans. Unfortunately, every video is preceded by an ad. Read more at mashable.com

 

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60 Sites in 60 Minutes

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60 Sites in 60 Minutes

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Teaching and Learning with Twitter

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Teaching and Learning with Twitter

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Flip video miguel_mendoza

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Flip video miguel_mendoza

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10 Movies to Make a Man Cry

Without a doubt, my Number 1 is Brian's Song. As long as were being honest here--don't even want to think about watching Born Free.

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10 movies to make a man cry

The Pride of the Yankees

Rudy

Saving Private Ryan

Dead Poet’s Society

Brian’s Song

See the full list at BuzzFeed. Read more at holykaw.alltop.com

 

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Google Tools For Schools

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Google Tools For Schools

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Another look at creativity or in this case "Where Do Good Ideas Come From?" A very well done video on illustrating Johnson's take on creativity.

Amplify’d from www.openculture.com

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Where do good ideas come from? Places that put us together. Places that allow good hunches to collide with other good hunches, sometimes creating big breakthroughs and innovations. During the Enlightenment, this all happened in Parisian salons and coffee houses. Nowadays, it’s happening on the web, in places that defy your ordinary definition of “place.” In four animated minutes, Steven Johnson outlines the argument that he makes more fully in his soon-to-be-published book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. The video is the latest from the RSAnimate series. Read more at www.openculture.com

 

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A very interesting video of John Cleese sharing his ideas about where creativity comes from. Although not aimed directly at educators, his thoughts are well worth the time to consider as creativity is what all great teachers hope to accomplish--for themselves as well as their students.

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John Cleese on the Origin of Creativity

British actor John Cleese is best known for his comedic talent as one of the founding members of Monty Python, which makes his intellectual insights on the origin of creativity particularly fascinating. This talk from the 2009 Creativity World Forum in Germany is part critique of modernity’s hustle-and-bustle, part handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity.

“We get our ideas from what I’m going to call for a moment our unconscious — the part of our mind that goes on working, for example, when we’re asleep. So what I’m saying is that if you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.” ~ John Cleese

Cleese advocates creating an “oasis” amidst the daily stress where the nervous creature that is your creative mind can safely come out and play, with the oasis being guarded by boundaries of space and boundaries of time. Read more at www.openculture.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.elearnmag.org How to Help Teachers Use Technology in the Classroom--My Thoughts

The 5J approach has some valid observations. I agree with numbers 3, 4 and 5--just in time, just in case, just try it. However, I strongly disagree with numbers 1 and 2-job related and just enough. My view has always been to successfully integrate technology into education, one must learn the technology. Technology is the only area where it is okay not to know what you are doing and then attempt to teach it or integrate it! I am not saying that teachers as a whole need to become experts, but from my experience, there is no danger of that happening. Increased comfort as a goal as opposed to proficiency is tantamount to starting a project and stating "I have no plan to become very good at this!"

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How to Help Teachers Use Technology in the Classroom The 5J Approach By Mary Burns

Recent reports (from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Walden University [PDF], for example) point to teachers' continuing difficulties integrating technology into classroom learning. Despite access to technology and despite the fact that novice teachers are entering the classroom with far more advanced technology skills than their counterparts of an earlier age, only 39 percent of teachers report "moderate" or "frequent" use of technology as an instructional tool (Grunwald Associates, 2010).

This limited use may have multiple causes: Teachers may be overwhelmed by demands of testing; they may not see the value of instructional technologies in their particular content area; they may work in environments where principals do not understand or encourage technology use; and the types of software most helpful in instruction are not always the types of applications students know how—or want—to use.

Teachers do use technology—for administration, personal productivity, and displaying content (via projectors and document cameras)—but not so much as a student learning tool. Why?

After 25 years of incorporating technology in the learning space, we still may not have figured out how to do technology-related professional development that helps teachers use computers as part of the instructional process. After 25 years of having computers in schools, we still lack an approach that ensures teachers truly understand the benefits and appropriate uses of computers for instruction and that teachers actually use technology as part of teaching and learning.

The overall approach, sequential and cumulative, is grounded in two basic premises. First, if technology is used as a teaching and learning tool, tied to curricular goals and assessment and embedded within strong instructional techniques, it can promote better instruction and greater student collaboration, enhancing student learning. If not, it can't. Second, professional development can promote quality technology integration and learning by minimizing the importance of computers within professional development and concentrating instead on the core areas of teaching: content, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and classroom management.

According to the 5Js, technology-related teacher professional development should be:

job-related, focused on the core competencies of the classroom, not technology

just enough, emphasizing increased comfort, not proficiency, with computers and management of limited technology resources

just in time, meaning teacher are provided with skills as and when needed

just in case teachers need to plan for contingencies

accompanied by a "just try it" attitude, wherein instructors apply both pressure and support to compel teachers to use what they've learned.

Job-Related

The teacher's primary role is to help students understand particular subject matter. Everything else is secondary. Therefore, the focus of any computer-related professional development should not be on the technology itself, but on how computers can improve performance in these core areas of the teacher's "job."

Just Enough

Teachers don't need to know everything about a particular piece of software. They only need "just enough" to help them complete a curriculum-related or instructional task. Anything beyond this is wasted effort.

"Just enough" focuses, not on proficiency with technology, but comfort using technology within a curriculum activity.

Just in Time

The third 'J' is a truism in the field of professional development. Professional development should support teachers' learning just in time — when they are ready to both learn and apply what they've learned with students.

Just in Case

This fourth 'J' therefore focuses on helping teachers address these control issues by adopting a just-in-case attitude toward computers. This approach focuses on carefully planning the classroom activity. By remembering that computers are just one of many learning tools, teachers can reduce their chances of being caught unaware when computers fail technically or instructionally.

Just Try It

Central to change is action, and this is where professional development often breaks down. "Just try it" is the most important 'J' principle of them all. Without application in the classroom, professional development is a waste of time, money, and effort.

Third, technology professional development should de-emphasize the importance of teachers' expertise with software and hardware (Just enough) and emphasize teachers' comfort and confidence with computers. Over the years, I've found it helpful to encourage teachers to envision themselves as project managers who set up the activity, with students as "technicians" who delve into the intricacies of the software.

Only when these five 'J's come together in a systematic way might the story of technology-based trainings have a different ending. Read more at www.elearnmag.org

 

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Computer lab rules and procedures illustrated 2010

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Computer lab rules and procedures illustrated 2010

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Amazing!

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We're going to need a bigger bowl! Fisherman catches massive 30lb 'goldfish'

The orange koi carp weighs 30lb - the same as an average three-year-old girl - and is thought to be one of the largest of its kind ever captured.

What a whopper! Angler Raphael Biagini got the surprise of his life when he landed this gigantic koi carp on a fishing trip to France. At 30lb it's thought to be the largest of its kind ever caught in the wild Read more at www.dailymail.co.uk

 

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The Best TED Talks To Make Use Of Social Media #edtech

Do you need some inspiration? Do you need to hear the experts talk about how best to take advantage of the Internet and particularly social media? Then this is the place! It might take you a while to listen to them all, but it will be well worth it.

Amplify’d from www.makeuseof.com

The Best TED Talks To Make Use Of Social Media

Lalitesh Katragadda: Making Maps To Fight Disaster, Build Economies

Ethan Zuckerman: Listening To Global Voices

James Surowiecki: When Social Media Became News

Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex

Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

Seth Godin : On The Tribes We Lead

Howard Rheingold On Collaboration

Hector Ruiz On Connecting The World

Yochai Benkler On The New Open-Source Economics

Gordon Brown: Wiring A Web For Global Good

See more at www.makeuseof.com

 

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Free Books, Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple, Math, Games and So Much More

My latest blog post featuring tech resources for educators!

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Treasure Chest–Free Books, Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple, Math, Games and So Much More

“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.“  –Stephen King

The Online Books Page

Ten Items All Should Know When Using Google Basic Search…. Far From Basic..

Create an eBook or PDF from Wikipedia Articles for Offline Reading

Math is not linear on Prezi by  Alison Blank

For the love of learning: Digital Natives they are not

10 Environmental Games That Teach Kids About Earth, Ecology & Conservation

15 Free Tools for Web-based Collaboration

The Google Docs Drawing Tool Makes Collaborative Drawing Easier

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