Mind The Gap And Ride The TeacherTube

TeacherTube is a video sharing website similar to, and based on, YouTube. It is designed to allow those in the educational industry to share educational resources. TeacherTube contains a mixture of classroom teaching resources and others designed to aid teacher training. Students have also uploaded videos that they have made as part of K-12 and college courses. This site provides the convenience of finding educational videos without the probability of running into inappropriate and random videos posted on YouTube.

Ning The Bell; School's In!

Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks, launched in October 2005. Ning’s unique feature is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific membership bases. It competes with MySpace and Facebook. Ning has focus groups and one of them is education. It gives teachers a space to personalize a class online communication tool. It also successfully caters to the students’ modern way of social networking.

Got Justice?

I'm not sure how many times I've heard my peers and colleagues question the applicability of social justice to the standards that they're going to teach. They never question the importance of social justice, they just can't seem to find where to fit it in. Well, being familiar with digital media is one of the standards, and this digital media is rife with social justice issues. From immigration and immersion to youth violence and discrimination, Media That Matters has no trouble providing what their name proclaims. The films are short and well made which makes keeping your classes attention during the screening a simple task. And once you've grabbed their attention the topics are provocative and controversial enough to get even the quietest group of teens voicing their opinions. Media That Matters is a must see for everyone with an ear to the ground for social justice.

Be a Follower!

Since 2006 the social networking website Twitter has been gaining in popularity as one of the best tools for staying connected over the Internet. How does it work? So glad you asked!

Considered a micro-blog, Twitter allows its users to read and send messages, known as tweets, with a 140-character limit. This message will be displayed on the author’s profile page, where it can then be seen by the author’s subscribers, or followers.  Users can also add a hash tag to their tweets, which identifies the subject of a tweet. For example, an English teacher with two British Literature classes could create a hash tag for each of her classes to keep both informed of assignments and allow students to communicate with each other.

Although a survey found that the content of almost 41% of tweets consisted of “pointless babble,” Twitter has recently tried to shift its focus to more of a news and information source. During the 2007 California wild fires, Twitter users were able to get some of the most up-to-date information about fire and emergency locations to their followers, who were often neighbors and friends. During the 2009 Iranian presidential election, Twitter was one of the only forms of communication that protesters were able to use to broadcast their message outside of the country after the government blocked most modes of communication.

The use of Twitter in the classroom is growing daily. Not only is this an excellent tool to communicate with people across the world, Twitter is very effective at keeping teachers connected to their students. Some instructors have adopted a policy that students must tweet a question or ideas they have about the days lesson. Some universities have also started having students tweet feedback to instructors at the end of a course, as opposed to the usual course evaluations.

Tag! You're it!

Have you ever been at work or a friends house and struggled to remember the name of a great website? It is right on the tip of your tongue, and it’s bookmarked on your computer at home, but you just can’t remember it.  You need Delicious!

Delicious is a social bookmarking website that allows users to store, share and discover web bookmarks. Basically, instead of saving bookmarks to your toolbar, you save them to the web, where you can access them anywhere by signing into your Delicious account.

Delicious also allows users to “tag” their bookmarks with any name, and as many tags, as they would like. This allows for ultimate personalization, and an organization system that easily allows users to find exactly what they are looking for. Because the information on Delicious is public, users can search for tag topics and see sites that other users have saved, and Delicious has a “hotlist” on their homepage, which lists some of the most searched for topics and current Internet trends.

Go check out this tasty bookmarking site and make your life Delicious!

Current News: Vanguard

Have you ever struggled to find interesting and relevant topics for students to discuss? Have you ever wanted to couple a work of fiction with non-fiction to illuminate deeper and closer relationships between the themes and motifs? Even if the answer is no, Current Vanguard Journalism probably has something useful for your classroom. Recently, Vanguard has gained some notoriety, particularly because of the arrest and detention of two of their journalists by the government of North Korea. However, long before Laura Ling and Euna Lee were taken by the dear leader, Vanguard was exposing issues and topics that are more often than not ignored by the mainstream media. For example, Ling presented the deplorable state of Haiti more than four years before a slew of cataclysmic earthquakes forced the world to stop turning their heads and see how bad the situation really is. Some of the topics presented by Vanguard are very mature, including pornography, the prison system, and narcotics to name but a few. Nevertheless, these are the issues that confront our society and to hide them from our students does nothing for our future. Furthermore, I believe it highly unlikely that our students remain ignorant to these issues regardless of our efforts to cover their eyes. Discussing and examining them in a scholastic environment with purpose and design is one way we can confront these problems and begin to work toward their solutions. With discretion and seriousness this source can be used to help our students open their eyes and hearts to their global communities.

Moodle

Moodle or Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (lets stick with Moodle), is a website that helps educators create online courses that focus on collaborative and interactive content. This is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)  that allows teachers to easily create dynamic web sites for their students. Used in education, training and development, and utilized by many businesses, this site is a great and easy way to incorporate technology in the classroom, or rather move the classroom online.

Using Moodle a teacher can create a course with content that includes:

·      Activities, such as word games

·      Resource lists

·      Quizzes and tests (multiple choice, fill in the blank, true or false, etc…)

·      Graphs

·      Authentication methods (such as requiring usernames and passwords)

·      Content filters

·      Forums for discussion

Moodle is growing in popularity, mainly because it is easy to use. The site often offers seminars, hosts forums and discussion boards, and has many instructional videos and demonstrations to help you make the most of Moodle. 

Instead of carrying a bunch of worksheets around in a Kaboodle, think about expanding your noodle, search around on Google, and start utilizing Moodle!

Fill Bellies with Free Rice

Free Rice

Free Rice truly sounds like it’s too good to be true, especially in an age of digital deception. Except, Free Rice is true and truly fun!

Who created Free Rice?

Managed by the United World Food Programme and partnered with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Free Rice aims at providing a free education to any person with Internet access and to providing rice for hungry people around the world. Sponsors who are featured on the site donate the rice, but any person can make a charitable donation to the UN World Food Programme to help buy more rice.

How it works?

There are various subjects to choose from including English, Art, Chemistry, Geography, Math, and World Languages. After selecting a subject, the participant is prompted with a series of questions, which will vary in difficulty depending on the participant’s responses. Questions are presented in a multiple-choice format, and if a question is missed, it will be asked later in the game to ensure the participant has learned the material. For every correct answer, Free Rice donates ten grains of rice to people in need. Amazing.

Here’s a sample question from the vocabulary section of Free Rice:

Small means:

a.    little

b.    old

c.    big

d.    yellow

With the vocabulary section, the difficulty levels range from 1 to 60 so people can track their improvement.

More info:

To date, Free Rice has donated over 75 billion grains of rice. Rest assure, 100% of rice (or money) donated goes to people in need. The Free Rice FAQ section makes sure to alleviate any doubts with a clear explanation of the site’s goals.

How can teachers use Free Rice?

First, Free Rice helps build not only vocabulary but also helps students learn material from other subjects in a fun and effective manner. Teachers can bring students to the computer lab when they have earned “Preferred Activity Time” and allow them to play Free Rice.

Second, Free Rice demonstrates to students the importance of community service. By playing on FreeRice.com, students are aiding people in need throughout the world. Students of the 21^st century should be exposed to global citizenry, and Free Rice is an excellent avenue to illustrate the student’s role in the world. Free Rice also provides additional resources regarding world hunger so that teachers can further lessons by helping students define world hunger and identify methods to combat the epidemic.

So what are you waiting for? Bet you can’t get to level 60! 

Prezi-licious

Prezi is the latest presentation phenomenon on the market and is rumored to have lain to rest the popular Microsoft Office application PowerPoint. Created by a team of web 2.0 gurus, including Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, Prezi allows presenters the freedom and creativity that PowerPoint doesn’t.  With Prezi, designers can create a more holistic demonstration of ideas. Using what Prezi terms as a “digital napkin,” designers can place a series of overarching thoughts and images in whatever order desired and even conveniently frame particular parts of the presentation for emphasis or cohesiveness. Creators can then zoom in and out of the digital napkin (or map) when giving their presentation—allowing them more opportunities for inventiveness than just presenting a series of slides. 

Sound confusing? Check out this Prezi presentation I recently created for one of my education courses.

Rethinking High School on Prezi

User friendly? Using the online presentation tool can be tricky at first but one becomes accustomed to the tool with little practice. Plus, Prezi provides plenty of demonstration videos and textual instructions for users who may become confused.

The good stuff: Prezi is free, with the possibility of upgraded packages (for a fee of course) and it’s done online—meaning one can access it whenever online and more than one person can edit the Prezi presentation.

How can teachers use Prezi? Students are continually flooded with information. With Prezi, teachers can present themes or specific concepts to students and discuss their meaning and application rather than just inundate students with slides full of facts. Teachers may also use a Prezi presentation to provide students with directions for an activity or game, or may use Prezi to show the connections between topics, since Prezi is formatted to view projects as “big picture.”

Happy Prezi-enting!  

Digital Age Report on Prezi

NPR

National Public Radio (NPR) has rocketed full-bore into the digital age of journalism. Their website offers one of the most comprehensive and diverse venues for viewing everything from world new stories to  articles about hipster rock groups who top the charts of Pitchfork Media or who appear in Vincent Moon's latest La Blogotheque Take Away Show. NPR's own Tiny Desk Concerts have spotlighted some of the hippest and most uniquely talented artists currently out and about in the western music world. NPR is a great place to begin when students are having difficulty thinking of a topic or finding evidence and examples for their arguments. NPR also continues to maintain a disinterested and unbiased stance in its news reporting. Something which is important for impresionable young minds. They offer a multitude of podcasts that provide a good opportunity to stream some audio content about current topics for students in the classroom.

Google Sweet!

Google is slowly but surely taking over the world, bursting the seams of zip codes in California and digitally constructing their own mammoth edifices in the East, so big we can view them from space (in fact because of Google we now view everything from space). To accurately describe the magnanimous position Google has taken as the purveyors of indiscriminate access to web based software we have to look at the variety of services they provide at no cost to their users.

First of all Gmail has become a giant of the digital communication world. Since its in inception in 2004 Gmail has steadily climbed up the latter of web mail success and is among the three giants of email, including yahoo and hotmail. Gmail has a chat feature and allows sharing of files of a relatively large size. It also provides a multitude of organizational features which help to catalog your communications with others as they occur. Of course it is free and you receive a large amount of storage space (7421.864606 megabytes+) for free before you are charged to rent more space. 

Next there is YouTube, google's video posting website acquired in 2006 and used by billions around the world. Anyone can put their best, or worst, foot forward at becoming an internationally famous video star. New videos go viral everyday and millions enjoy watching video, often repeatedly, and having a good laugh about the contents. YouTube provides more than just entertainment though. It can be a great teaching tool providing short videos on how to do just about anything. It can give academic advice as well as DIY advice. It can help you cook a meal or show you how to fix your toilet. YouTube is a treasure chest of information that is useful and appropriate for all ages. 

Now lets talk about some of the less famous services Google has to offer. Google Wave was released for testing Google Wave is an online software application product of Google, described as a personal communication and collaboration tool. It was first announced on May 27, 2009. It is designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. I haven't used this yet in the classroom, but it is doubtful that any less than hundreds of applications exist for such a robust communication

Another less known product from Google that is essentially free is Voice. Google Voice gives the user a phone number and a voice mailbox, for FREE! The user can SMS for free from their Voice account and they can make calls for a small fee and no monthly fee. Voice allows you to organize your contacts and filter different callers. For example one caller may go directly to voice mail while another might ring multiple numbers. I use Voice to maintain an open line between me and my students or their parents/guardians. My students can SMS or call me. If they call they are directed immediately to voice mail. Voice's voicemail will convert a spoken message into an SMS and send it to my mobile device. I can then judge the seriousness of the message and respond accordingly.
Finally, Blogger is the service that has made this presentation possible. Blogging has provided a voice and forum for anyone to express their self about anything. This can range from the mundane or the lewd to innovative and deeply philosophical. Google doesn't discriminate, which is why they appeal to everyone. Because of this openness one might assume that such a forum would be inappropriate for high school students. However, Google is no stranger to the spectrum of appropriateness that is the Internet. As a result Blogger comes with multiple levels of privacy settings so that as a teacher you can determine the scope of access and the level of control the students have over what is being published.