Monday, March 30, 2015

Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/31/2015

  • tags: game Gamify game creation Software programming

  • Audio editor

    tags: recorder audio editor tech tools editor

  • tags: dyslexia google gafe differentiation

  • Some useful ideas in here on how to use the search bar.

    tags: google gafe search

  • Very tangible suggestions here.

    tags: humiliation discipline SEL Edutopia new teacher

    • When is it OK to humiliate students? Never.
    • Many of us can recall a situation when we were humiliated by a teacher. If you close your eyes and recall it, it still has the power to make you cringe. And also for many of us, if we never resolved our feelings with those teachers, we still haven't forgiven them
  • How the learning environment affects learning.

    tags: learning Environment Classroom architecture

    • The modern classroom is a space full of light and colour, with flexible furnishings and a degree of comfort not present in the classrooms many adults recall. Students are encouraged to take charge of the space and arrange its physicality to meet their needs. Design decisions are based around engagement, creativity, expression, imagination and an understanding of education as an active process that the student chooses to engage with. So important is the physical space that authors and architects for education OWP/P published a book titled ‘The Third Teacher’ as a tome for anyone wishing to enhance the effectiveness of their learning spaces. 
  • Lesson for digital citizenship that fair use has major implications. Thicke and Williams had to pay $7.4 million to Marvin Gaye for his song.

    tags: remix fair use digital citizenship

  • The article states why the humanities are still important to developing a well rounded work force. Especially interesting are the test stats vs. the innovation within a given nation. They seem to run contrary.

    tags: STEM innovation humanities maker education article

    • A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy.
    • Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want.
    • the American economy historically changed so quickly that the nature of work and the requirements for success tended to shift from one generation to the next. People didn’t want to lock themselves into one professional guild or learn one specific skill for life.
    • In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.
    • Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.
    • “This country is a lot better at teaching self-esteem than it is at teaching math.” It’s a funny line, but there is actually something powerful in the plucky confidence of American, Swedish and Israeli students. It allows them to challenge their elders, start companies, persist when others think they are wrong and pick themselves up when they fail. Too much confidence runs the risk of self-delusion, but the trait is an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship.
    • technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success.
    • America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically-trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook.
    • Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Internet behemoth Alibaba, recently hypothesized in a speech that the Chinese are not as innovative as Westerners because China’s educational system, which teaches the basics very well, does not nourish a student’s complete intelligence, allowing her to range freely, experiment and enjoy herself while learning
    • Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and majored in psychology while he attended college. And Facebook’s innovations have a lot to do with psychology.
    • Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense — skills that we understand only tacitly — for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet.”
    • This doesn’t in any way detract from the need for training in technology, but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out — yet.
  • Work offline is a good setting to know about as well as linking within a doc.

    tags: google gafe Google Drive google docs Google_Drive

    • Google Drive has an “offline” mode that lets you create, view, or edit documents in these situations.
    • A little known feature of Google Drive is its web clipboard, which lets you copy and paste data across Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Unlike your operating system’s clipboard, it can hold multiple items at once, and because it’s associated with your Google account, its contents are accessible across all your devices.
  • WeVideo is a web-based video editing platform whereby students can share videos with teachers. What this means is that teachers can monitor students' progress while they are working on a video. However, it is not like Google Docs where students can collaborate with one another in real time. Still, students can do work on video together, just at separate times.

    tags: video video editing collaboration tech tools technology

  • Tangible ideas for how to use Google Forms to check in with students about their social-emotional wellbeing.

    tags: forms SEL social-emotional check-in

  • How competitive high schools are crushing students souls.

    tags: stress high school pressure

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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