Last year I wrote a post on why I think wikis are so cool and I’d like to repeat and/or continue on this train of thought here.
First of all, if you don’t quite know what a wiki is, here’s a pretty decent three-minute fifty-two second explanation of how it works:
Much has been said about the pros and cons of using ICT in the classroom - for example, many worry about online safety and health impacts, and some also question whether ICT improves learning. For example, some studies indicate that the introduction of laptop programs in schools does not necessarily improve test scores.
While these are important concerns - of course we want to improve learning - there are other reasons for choosing to use computers in the class, and traditional test scores may not be sufficient benchmarks for evaluating the benefit of introducing ICT in the classroom. Read the rest of this entry »
Middle school students can encounter problems when researching on the web. This can lead to wasting a great deal of time and energy. Here are some tips that should make the job much easier.
1. Spell keywords properly.
2. Choose strong keywords. For example if you were trying to determine what turtles eat, you may want to use turtle and diet as your keywords. Example: If you want to buy a car, don’t enter the keyword “car” if you can enter the keyword “Toyota.” Better still, enter the phrase “Toyota Dealerships” AND the name of the city where you live.
3. More keywords narrow your focus. Poodles black quiet “for sale” will result in fewer hits.
If you’re interested in the intersection of technology and education - which these days covers a rather large part of education - you might like to check out this new podcast. The host, Jeff Utecht, is a teacher at Shanghai American School, as well as a presenter and IT consultant for schools in the Asia region, but for a number of the episodes - a series of conversational episodes called called SOS (Shifting Our Schools) - he is joined by teachers from various other schools in the region, where they discuss
the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning.
This is highly relevant material for international school teachers and administrators, and the latest episode is from the EARCOS conference just the other week, where Jeff was one of the presenters.
To subscribe with iTunes, click here: 
If, on the other hand, you don’t want to use iTunes, you can also just go to the site itself (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/ondeck/archivepage/) and browse the links there to download individual episodes or recorded conference presentations or conversations to your computer and listen to in Media Player.
Way back in October, I wrote a blog entry called Web Searching 101, outlining some basic web searching tricks using Google, but mentioned that some techniques work better with other search engines, for example AltaVista, and I promised to write a follow-up, Web Searching 201. Better late than never, so here goes…
A simple Google search may appear to give you the most relevant hits first, but that is not necessarily the case. A number of techniques can be used to (artificially) improve a site’s page rank, i.e. how high on the list of hits it appears. For companies with an online presence, getting a high page rank has enormous potential to increase traffic to their site and thus (hopefully) boost their business. Not surprisingly, SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) are in high demand these days.
Most often, when Internet users do a web search, they just choose one of the first few links that appear and don’t even bother going to the second page of hits. In some cases that’s fine, but they should be aware that a carefully crafted search algorithm has determined the order of the results you get, thus the results necessarily contain a certain bias.
All Internet users will benefit from learning how to formulate search criteria to target their search more carefully, and this is something we all ought teach our students specifically before sending them to the lab to do research.
Here are some powerful ways to get a lot more out of your web search engine. (Note: all these examples are for using the search engine http://www.altavista.com.)
As part of 5th grade’s unit ‘Why Should I Care about the Environment?‘, students were asked to take action in some personal way. To model this behavior (as good teachers do), Jen has made a personal pledge to stop using paper coffee cups, and has started a blog chronicling this process: Cutting Coffee Cups Out of My Life.
She approached the Allegro staff with a suggestion to give a price incentive to encourage everyone to bring their own mugs rather than buying paper cups, and regular coffee buyers may have already noticed that the staff are currently doing data gathering, writing down every time someone brings their own mug.
What is Social Networking?
Many of our students are members of MySpace. MySpace is a social networking site that offers users a personalized page that can contain photos, videos and personal information about themselves. Students can connect with peers and set up their own online networks of friends. The site has privacy settings that allow users to moderate who can access their site. The minimum age requirement to sign up for a MySpace site is 14, although it is possible that a younger student could sign up and enter a false age.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Image source (under a Creative Commons license): http://www.flickr.com/photos/fullgl/171813349/ |
According to ISM’s mission and our school-wide student goals, our mandate is to develop “effective communicators” and “responsible, caring and ethical contributors“. The NETS technology standards also commit us to developing digital citizens who “practice legal and ethical behavior” in their “use of information and technology“.
This may all sound well and good, but what does it mean in practice?
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Image source (under a Creative Commons license): |
I’ve been writing a few things lately about the Internet as a tool for collaborating and connecting minds, both in terms of expanding educational opportunities and in the context of skills our students will need in the future. I’d like to explore another aspect of that for a moment…
I believe networked collaboration tools can serve a crucial role in other ways as well: as collaboration tools for social improvement. During the Long Now conference earlier this year, author Paul Hawken spoke of the emergence of what he calls ‘the largest movement in the world’: countless organizations working in decentralized unison to restore the environment and foster social justice.
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Mark Granovetter introduced more than thirty years ago the notion of “the strength of weak ties” - the idea that for many purposes, a large network of loose connections can be more useful for meeting many of your needs than a small network of close connections, e.g. for finding a job. This may seem counter-intuitive, but just think about it: there is typically a relatively large overlap between your network of connections and those of your close friends or family members. You already know or regularly interact with many of the same people, and it’s probably unlikely they’ll be able to pull out of a hat a connection to a person you don’t know, who possesses just the skills or resources you’re looking for. A former colleague who’s since moved on to a new occupation, however, is probably more likely to know new people and be able to put you in touch with what (or who) you need.
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