The Super Book Of Web Tools For Educators:
Here is the book. Download it, pass it out, share it with your colleagues, administrators, teammates.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Monday, December 13, 2010
Free E-Book: Web Tools for Educators
Monday, March 1, 2010
The State of the Internet or Why We Care About Web 2.0
Many of you - maybe your colleagues - may be wondering what all the fuss over the Internet is about, Web 2.0, Social Networking, etc. Why are we training faculty to teach online? Could it be the 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide? Why are young, energetic faculty like Dara Evans experimenting with Twitter and Facebook in their classes? Could it be the 50 million tweets per day? Or the 400 million people using Facebook? How about Facebook's 6 million page views per minute? Why the interest in podcasting and video? Hmmm ... 1 billion videos per day watched on YouTube - could that have something to do with it?
Think of these new tools not as replacements or substitutes for what you're already doing. Instead, think of these tools as the hot sauce or special sauce that spices up your lecture or your discussion.
Also worth a read is a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project - The Future of the Internet.
Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet
Photo by Trois Têtes (TT)
Also worth a read is a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project - The Future of the Internet.
Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet
Individual stats like Facebook passing the 400 million user mark, Twitter hitting 50 million tweets per day, and YouTube viewers watching 1 billion videos per day are impressive on their own, but what if we looked at Internet-related stats collectively? Jesse Thomas did just that in his video State of the Internet.
The video — created and animated by Thomas with data from multiple sources — highlights some remarkable figures and visually depicts the Internet as we know it today. It’s a must-watch video for anyone trying to wrap their minds around just how immersed web technologies have become in our everyday lives.
You can watch the video below, but we’ve also included some of the most intriguing figures shared in the video:
- There are 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of September 2009.
- There are 1.4 billion e-mail users worldwide, and on average we collectively send 247 billion e-mails per day. Unfortunately 200 billion of those are spam e-mails.
- As of December 2009, there are 234 million websites.
- Facebook gets 260 billion pageviews per month, which equals 6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion pageviews in a year.
Photo by Trois Têtes (TT)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Teaching Genetics
Do you teach biology? Wouldn't this image be a great way to begin a discussion on genetics?
(Via How genetics works.)
(Via How genetics works.)
Monday, February 22, 2010
Finding Photos for Your Slides
In an earlier post, we found interesting slides for our lectures. Now let's take a look at how we might create our own eye-catching slides. For this exercise, we'd like to create slides for the 10 Questions to Ponder we posted last week. We'll focus this week on photo hosting/sharing site flickr. Flickr is a great site for finding high-quality photos, as well as posting and sharing your own photos. 
Once you create a Flickr account, you can upload your own photos and "favorite" the photos of others.
When someone posts photos in Flickr, they have the option to make them public or private and to license them. The licenses range from "All rights reserved" to a variety of "Creative Commons" licensing. Let's talk a little bit about some of the "Creative Commons" licensing options--in particular, some of the terms we encounter.
If you want learn more about Flickr and some of the advanced features available in Flickr, here's a great slideshow "Flickr 101" from the Nebraska Library Commission:
#1 How do we support the changing role of teacher?
#2 What is the role of the teacher?
These questions both deal with the role of the teacher, so we've combined them. We found this diverse set of photos by searching for terms such as "teach," "teacher," "teaching." and "professional development"
Now a little more on Flickr. We really like the two the photos from "superkimbo in BKK" that we included above. We can click on her username to see her "photostream" - the images she's posted to Flickr and made publicly available.
Wow - she's posted some really great photos. We can continue to "favorite" individual photos - as we've been doing, but if we come across a Flickr user whose work we really like, we can also add them as a "contact."
When you add someone as a contact, you will get an e-mail every time they upload a new photo. This is a great way to keep up with their work. You'll see some great photos from user paurian later in this blog post.
Now let's get back to our questions.
#3 How do we help students discover their passions?
The first photo we found by exploring paurian's photostream; the second by searching for "students" and "passion."
#4 What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
There may be better photos to describe essential learning, but searching for "light bulb" we found this image, which makes us think of spark, imagination, or idea.
#5 What is the purpose of school?
You can find lots of pictures searching for "school" "university" or "college." This is a great photo of the Front Quad of University College, Oxford. Apparently, it's very difficult to get permission to take photos here.
#6 How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
We found this photo by searching for "adapt" and "technology." This isn't one of Mike's cats.
These photos we found with search terms such as "kids," "technology," and "learning."
Searching for photos even led us to discover an image that caused us to ask a new question:
BONUS QUESTION Do we risk kids becoming addicted to technology?
#7 What does an educated person look like today?
We love this photo - would you have guessed that we searched for "educated?"
#8 How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
Time: These images were discovered searching for "time" and "clock" - you can even try "tick tock."
Place: These images were found with search terms "world" and "Earth."
#9 What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
We found lots of interesting stuff by searching for combinations of "informal," "learning," and "education."
#10 How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?
To find this figure we searched for the terms "rich" and "poor."
That should get us started. Next week we combine these images with our questons to create slides - stay tuned!
Once you create a Flickr account, you can upload your own photos and "favorite" the photos of others.When someone posts photos in Flickr, they have the option to make them public or private and to license them. The licenses range from "All rights reserved" to a variety of "Creative Commons" licensing. Let's talk a little bit about some of the "Creative Commons" licensing options--in particular, some of the terms we encounter.
- "Attribution" is present on all; this term means that we must cite the source of the photo - in this case the Flickr user.
- "NonCommercial" means that we can't make any money from the use of the image - is anyone paying for your PowerPoints?
- "ShareAlike" licensing requires that any modifications we make to the photo be shared back with the community (i.e. Flickr).
- Finally, "NoDerivs" means that we are prohibited from creating derivatives works from the photo - for example recoloring or altering the photo to create an entirely new version.
If you want learn more about Flickr and some of the advanced features available in Flickr, here's a great slideshow "Flickr 101" from the Nebraska Library Commission:
Now let's dive into our 10 Questions to Ponder!
#1 How do we support the changing role of teacher?
#2 What is the role of the teacher?
These questions both deal with the role of the teacher, so we've combined them. We found this diverse set of photos by searching for terms such as "teach," "teacher," "teaching." and "professional development"
Now a little more on Flickr. We really like the two the photos from "superkimbo in BKK" that we included above. We can click on her username to see her "photostream" - the images she's posted to Flickr and made publicly available.
Wow - she's posted some really great photos. We can continue to "favorite" individual photos - as we've been doing, but if we come across a Flickr user whose work we really like, we can also add them as a "contact."
When you add someone as a contact, you will get an e-mail every time they upload a new photo. This is a great way to keep up with their work. You'll see some great photos from user paurian later in this blog post.
Now let's get back to our questions.
#3 How do we help students discover their passions?
The first photo we found by exploring paurian's photostream; the second by searching for "students" and "passion."
#4 What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
There may be better photos to describe essential learning, but searching for "light bulb" we found this image, which makes us think of spark, imagination, or idea.
#5 What is the purpose of school?
You can find lots of pictures searching for "school" "university" or "college." This is a great photo of the Front Quad of University College, Oxford. Apparently, it's very difficult to get permission to take photos here.
#6 How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
We found this photo by searching for "adapt" and "technology." This isn't one of Mike's cats.
These photos we found with search terms such as "kids," "technology," and "learning."
Searching for photos even led us to discover an image that caused us to ask a new question:
BONUS QUESTION Do we risk kids becoming addicted to technology?
#7 What does an educated person look like today?
We love this photo - would you have guessed that we searched for "educated?"
#8 How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
Time: These images were discovered searching for "time" and "clock" - you can even try "tick tock."
Place: These images were found with search terms "world" and "Earth."
#9 What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
We found lots of interesting stuff by searching for combinations of "informal," "learning," and "education."
#10 How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?
To find this figure we searched for the terms "rich" and "poor."
That should get us started. Next week we combine these images with our questons to create slides - stay tuned!
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