Have you ever found that you need to show a YouTube video but for whatever reason you’d like to be able to play it from your computer? Well, there is a way…
Archive for April, 2008
Just over a year ago I wrote about a massive collection of SMART Board files for free downloading, and while I got good feedback on that tip, many did not find the time to check it out. Thus, I thought it was time to put it out there again.
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 »
The Grade 8 EXPO is the culminating project for students in the Middle School. It is a cross-curricular unit encompassing the core and exploratory subjects.
The project is based on three Enduring Understandings:
Change - Students will understand that change includes environmental, political, social, religious and economic transformations
Interdependence - Students will understand that decisions or actions can have an impact on other people or nations
Identity - Students will understand how people define themselves and their place in the world as well as how they are defined by others
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.)
