December 2011
26 posts
Raspberry Pi, a Tiny But Powerful $25 PC, Coming... →
charlesperkins:
Grants for Teachers - LiveBinder *Take a little... →
kbkonnected:
#elemchat #spedchat #grants
I'm no shill
But these online courses are outstanding and a steal at 35% off: http://post.oreilly.com/form/oreilly/viewhtml/9z1zm9liqnbr6s35ujcoc27n16igctrjo2tnvh1f14o?imm_mid=07b304&cmp=em-ost-promos-dec2011-save30-direct-lastchance
3 tags
Baen Gets it (free etexts) →
Give it away for free, and people will buy it up and invest their loyalty.
Will education text puplishers pick up on the success of this strategy? Doctorow, Lessig, countless bands now serve as excellent models.
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Dropbox News for Android Users
lifehacker: Dropbox for Android releases preview build with support for ICS, bulk photo and video upload, and more. Check it out: http://t.co/CNjoehDK
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Evernote in the Classroom (1)
On Monday, all but one student came into first period with a tablet. For students with or without executive function challenges, effective notetaking seems to be an epic struggle. New tools, tablets and smart phones, can’t immediately become powerful assets in this struggle if students still struggle differentiating main ideas from support, identifying types of support - reasoning vs....
Better Than Owning « Learning Change Technologies →
gfbertini:
Access is so superior to ownership, or possession, that it will drive the emerging intangible economy. The chief holdup to full-scale conversion from ownership to omni-access is the issue of modification and control. In traditional property regimes only owners have the right to modify or control the use of the property. The right of modification is not transferred in rental,...
4 tags
A Day in the Life of the iPad Classroom →
girlwithalessonplan:
stevekinney:
Jeannetta Mitchell, a veteran teacher of 20 years, is encouraged by what she sees so far. “This is not a magic wand,” she says. “This just makes it more fun for them to learn. Nobody’s just sitting there writing down the answer, saying I don’t know how I got there. They know how they got there.”
Even—if at the very least—all a given tool does is making...
11 tags
Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education... →
gfbertini:
Complexity as an approach to knowledge and knowledge systems now recognizes both the growth of global systems architectures in (tele)communications and information with the development of open knowledge production systems that increasingly rest not only on the establishment of new and better platforms , the semantic web, new search algorithms and processes of digitization but...
Network thinking « Learning Change →
gfbertini:
Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:
Adaptability instead of control
Emergence instead of predictability
Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
Contributions before credentials
Diversity and divergence
One major...
11 tags
Putting Literature to Use
Interesting spin this year. My professional life has been committed to participating in learning communities centered around literature; composition has always been a necessary but not tremendously rewarding part of that. </context>
This year I gutted my syllabus to pivot on the needs of the post-secondary writer - emphasizing agility and performativity/audience awareness no matter what the...
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OpenTeacher →
OpenTeacher is an opensource vocabulary training application that helps you learn a foreign language!
Enter a list of words in both a known and a foreign language, and OpenTeacher tests you.
OpenTeacher 2.2 has the following features:
Smart question asking and interval training
Think answer, shuffle answer and repeat answer input modes
Easy symbol, Greek and Cyrillic input
Read and write...
14 tags
CLI Ampache Config: Masses of Minds, meet...
Ampache is an outstanding audio streaming server/technology that has potential to serve all kinds of minds. Although developed “for the love of music,” Ampache has a place in education. For example, Ampache provides an opportunity for the population I work with, gifted thinkers facing difficult reading challenges, to access developmentally and academically appropriate content that...
6 tags
Discipline and Punish
My last position was in a DC public school with a miracle of a Principal. (Our entire interview together was a very p2p discussion of systems thinking.)
The most obvious boon he brought to this institution was successfully establishing an effective heterarchy and shunning the traditional education hierarchies.
It took a few weeks, but I eventually realized every administrator in the school...
4 tags
Unlike New York, Some Districts Embrace Social... →
positivelypersistentteach:
According to the New York Department of Education’s Web site, students may access the Internet for limited educational purposes. The Department of Education grants access to the Internet for relevant learning activities both in school and at home, for career development, and communication between teachers and students.
Students may use social media networks only for...
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Servers for Educators Looking into Open Source...
Information Infrastructure for Open Source School
Ampache: Streaming audio and video. Accessible anywhere there’s access to the web, presuming you’re not using iOS (wifi only). Great for recorded books, guided notes, lectures, etc.
Calibre: Etext repository as a headless server. Use the free Calibre client (multiplatform) to convert from epub to pdf etc. Great for refactoring text for...
4 tags
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Use the Kindle Fire as a Creative Device
From Wired.com:
1 Plan A: The Easy Route
1.1 Writers
1.2 Photographers/Artists
1.3 Musicians
2 Plan B: Sideloading Unavailable Apps
2.1 What is sideloading?
2.2 Instructions
3 Plan C: Rooting Your Kindle Fire
3.1 Why would you want to?
3.2 Why wouldn’t you want to?
The Kindle Fire ships with Quickoffice, allowing you to access documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides you save...
9 tags
Teaching Narrative?
Some success can be claimed when we used character generation sheets from elaborate role playing games (I used a GURPS sheet this week, others in past years).
They are polymorphously helpful: this time, I deployed them selectively during a revision workshop to encourage more indirect characterization through dialog (nonfiction narrative), in particular.
Also great for teaching the part of...
4 tags
Move over, Nonfiction
Up until today, students have been reading nonfiction in ISM (info systems management) (Minsky, Stallman, Catherdral and the Bazaar, etc.).
Today students chose from the following fiction for independent reading (reading responses due daily, regardless of amount of content-related HW).
“True Names,” Vinge
Neuromancer, Gibson
Snow Crash, Stephenson
Little Brother, Doctorow
Using...
3 tags
vimtutor / vim
Advanced Information Systems class took a break from Axzo’s Linux+ Powered by LPI. We’re working through the third unit, a much needed review on manipulating files and directories; however, the unit ends with a skimpy sequence of exercises introducing vim.
We’ve chosen, rather, to rely on the fantastic vimtutor resource.
On Ubuntu,
apt-get install vim-gnome
seems the least...
9 tags
Teaching Narrative with Ushahidi
Students are building location-based narratives using a Ushahidi instance on TurnKey Linux’s LAMP stack 11.2. So far, lessons have emphasized
dialog,
setting,
indirect and direct characterization,
and moving from first to third-person voice.
Above all, we are concerned with producing compelling prose that will not leave the reader asking “So, what?”
Each student will...
