World-Shaker

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gjmueller:

27 Simple Ways to Flip the Classroom

Read, watch, curate, communicate, research.

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How to Add Voice Comments to Google Documents →

iamlittlei:

everyfiredies:

windycitylibrarian:

um…how awesome is this??

Cooooooool! Actually, the voice comments function is one of my favorite parts of Turnitin.com. I’m glad I can leave them on Google Docs too!

Oh, neat!

Love it! I wish it was an integrated feature instead of a free, outside service, but this is definitely going into my toolbox.

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VideoNotes - A Great Tool for Taking Notes While Watching Academic Videos

VideoNotes is a neat new tool for taking notes while watching videos. VideoNotes allows you to load any YouTube video on the left side of your screen and on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad to type on. VideoNotes integrates with your Google Drive account. By integrating with Google Drive VideoNotes allows you to share your notes and collaborate on your notes just as you can do with a Google Document.

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Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction Offers Hundreds of Drawings

Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction is a free gallery of images hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Research Library. The gallery contains nearly 500 drawings of people conversing, scenes in houses and buildings, and objects commonly found in houses. You’ll also find drawings scenes in cities, in stores, and in nature. The visuals are all drawn cartoon style without any text or speech bubbles.

6 Tips for Successful Mobile Video Assignments in the Classroom →

An emphatic “YES!” to everything in here. These are the first two:

1. Good video doesn’t always mean good audio. While it’s easy for a student to see what their mobile camera “sees,” it’s impossible to hear what their mobile microphone is hearing without wearing headphones connected to their device. In our first in-class interview practice, students almost always hold their devices too far from the interviewee. Yes, it can be awkward holding a phone near someone’s face, but unless you have a handheld microphone that plugs into the phone, the device should always be within arms length of the interviewee’s mouth for good audio. The common “camera position” of holding the phone near your face doesn’t work for video interviews. it’s always more important that the device be closer to the interviewee than it’s to the interviewer. TheMobileActive web site offers more tips for good mobile audio.
2. Brevity is the soul of wit. Tell students to keep their interview questions focused and video clips as short as possible. With some practice, it’s relatively easy to stop and start the recording instead of capturing an entire 15 to 20 minute interview. (That also results in a huge video file.) With the right mobile app, each clip can be automatically uploaded to the cloud while the interviewee starts the next question and recording. In general, students should have only three or four good questions to ask.  If the interviewee rambles for several minutes, stop then start recording again asking the interviewee to summarize in a minute or less what they just said. This also produces a more focused and shorter clip for online viewers to watch later.

Making a Unit Intellectually Engaging →

Don’t let the title fool you: This article is mostly about working in challenging questions. 

No wonder, then, that simulations, video games, and sports are so engaging and athletes are willing to endure the tedium of skill development and the pain of conditioning. Lurking behind every soccer game or swim meet is a set of interesting and ongoing essential questions: What do we need to do to win? What do we need to do to improve? What are our strengths and weaknesses, and how can we play to our strengths and lessen our weaknesses?

Such questions are constantly alive because each new game or meet brings a new form of challenge, and using one’s mind to figure out how to be better at an immersive challenge is key to motivation.

In fact, the best coaches make such implicit questions explicit. Grant saw this with one of his daughter’s high school soccer coaches, a veteran of 40 years of college and high school coaching. Unlike so many of his colleagues, he didn’t lecture during the half-time break. He merely asked questions: What is working for us so far? What isn’t? Why isn’t it working, and how can we improve it? What is working for the other team, and how can we counter it?

28 Creative Ideas for Teaching with Twitter →

A lot of oldies, but some fresh ideas as well. It’s definitely worth a look, especially since each idea comes with a source. Here are three (with sources):

1. Set up a poll: Teachers might want to set up a Twitter poll for either their students or the broader microblogging community. The applications are limited only by one’s own creativity; for an added bonus, combine the poll with some sort of geotracker.
2. ______ of the day: No matter the class, a vocabulary word, book, song, quote or something else “of the day” might very well make an excellent supplement to the day’s lesson. When teaching younger kids, tell their parents about the Twitter feed and encourage them to talk about postings at home.
3. Start a book club: Within the industry but outside the classroom, some educations band together via Twitter and host their own book clubs. A common hashtag and communicative network is all it takes to share insight and recommendations.

35 Sources for Curated Educational Videos →

Here are four (click through for the rest): 

1. NeoK12: This site features free educational videos, games, lessons, puzzles and quizzes sorted by topic.
2. NOVA Teachers: PBS’ full features and magazine-style shorter stories are available here for classrom use.
3. SchoolTube: This site is set-up to serve students who wish to get ahead at home and at school, as well as teachers who want to access digital resources. Teachers can also create their own channels and upload their own videos.
4. Sophia: With more than 25,000 tutorials from a range of expert teachers across many academic fields, Sophia is a first-of-its-kind social education platform created to reach 21st century students.

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Using iPads In Scientific Fieldwork

Traditionally, while engaging in fieldwork, students made handwritten notes and drawings. More recent classes have taken photos with cameras / phones and then, after the excursion, labelled these images in Word or something similar. The biggest drawbacks of these techniques have been illegible or poorly sequenced notes, and inaccuracies in image labels due to time delays between fieldwork and accessing a computer.

This year, each of my students took their iPad 2 into the field, using it as the main tool for collecting and organising observations.  This resulted in significant improvements.

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In a traditional classroom, when a teacher asks a question, “Who can tell me … ?” usually four or five hands go up. The teacher will call on one student, and perhaps on another few to see if their answers agree with the first, but the teacher will have no way of knowing what is going on in the heads of the other 20 students.

The kinesthetic teacher has a different approach. “Show me … ” Twenty-five students are being asked to respond physically to the question: Show me what comes first, the comma or the closed quotation mark. Show me if this is a series or parallel circuit. Show me an animal that lives in the rainforest; show me how the character feels just before the story’s climax. Immediately, all of the students respond, and their learning is made visible. They have to think about what they are going to do, and literally take a stand. If they want to change their answer, they don’t have to erase anything, they just change their pose. Rather than calling attention to the “mistake,” the focus is on the “re-take,” which lessens the fear of failure that is so prevalent among students today—and teachers can give immediate feedback to students (formative assessment) rather than waiting for a weekly or unit test.

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— The Power of Movement in Teaching and Learning

7 Educational Uses for 3D Printing

In case you haven’t heard: 3D printing is awesome. Here are two of the uses (click through for the rest): 

Biology: Need a cross section of a heart for your students to study with? Perhaps you need several for a whole classroom? A 3D printer can replicate as many items you need with great detail.

Artifacts: There are some things in this world that our students could learn so much from if they had access to them. With a good 3D artist in a CAD program, those items could be recreated for any purpose. Can the recreation of stone tablets help accentuate the learning process of an ancient civilizations class?

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Why an Educator is Flipping Colorado’s Classrooms

Across the room, a student tossed his hand up.

“Did you ask someone to help you yet?” said Gray. When a group got stumped, she’d squat next to the students, guiding them toward answers, inspiring engagement and creativity.

Gray’s classrooms emphasize coaching, not lecturing. With 16 years of teaching experience, the educator encourages collaboration, peer support and inquiry, while coordinating quizzes only when content is mastered.

Teachers’ Ultimate Guide to Using Videos

In collaboration with educator Catlin Tucker,MindShift presents Teachers’ Guide to Videos[PDF], to answer these questions and more. You’ll find a slew of valuable resources, including video links for all kinds of subjects — history, math, science, language arts, and more — and ideas on how to inspire students to use videos as a conduit to dig in, ask questions, and learn.

Awesome free resource. Snag this while it’s up.

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Scholastic Story Starters is a great tool that students will enjoy using to create short, creative fiction stories.

And it works on the iPad :o)

(via FreeTech4Teachers)

Teaching Writing and Learning With Graphic Organizers

A great collection of ideas and resources. Here are a handful (click through for the rest):

What Are The Best Graphic Organization Tools?
There are various ways you can go about creating concept maps, webs, and mind maps.

There are some great software programs you can buy or download.  For example, check out Inspiration, Edraw or Creately. These programs allow your students to create their own visuals and explore technology.

Otherwise, you can download pre-formatted templates. For example, here are some graphic organizer templates that are specifically designed to help facilitate the writing process.

If you need even more inspiration, check out this list of graphic organizer resources.  You’re sure to find what you need there!