EdTech @ ADW

Here’s a great little article about how blogging is beginning to gain serious currency in the educational field, because it incorporates a number of new literacies necessary to successfully exploit the rapidly changing information and communication technologies in our world. Read the full article here.

However, the writer warns that teachers must first learn to use blogs throughout their curriculum to foster these new literacies. For example,

• How to address writing for a public audience
• How to cite and link and why they should do so
• How to use the comment tool in pedagogical ways
• How to read web materials more efficiently as well as explore other ways to consider pedagogical uses of blogs
• How to teach students to critically engage media, including blogs
• How to teach students to become efficient navigators in digital spaces where they will be obtaining a majority of their information

The author goes on to provide a list of reasons regarding why blogging is educationally sound for teaching students:

* Blogs provide a space for sharing opinions and learning in order to grow communities of discourse and knowledge — a space where students and teachers can learn from each other.

* Blogs help learners to see knowledge as interconnected as opposed to a set of discrete facts.

* Blogs can give students a totally new perspective on the meaning of voice. As students explore their own learning and thinking and their distinctive voices emerge. Student voices are essential to the conversations we need to have about learning.

* Blogs foster ownership and choice. They help lead us away from students trying to find what the teacher wants in terms of an answer.

* The worldwide audience provides recognition for students that can be quite profound. Students feel more compelled to write when they believe many others may read and respond. It gives them motivation to excel. Students need to be taught skills to foster a contributing audience on their blog.

* The archive feature of blogging records ongoing learning. It facilitates reflection and evaluation. One student told me that he could easily find his thoughts on a matter and he could see how his thinking had changed and why.

* The opportunity for collective and collaborative learning is enormous. Students have the opportunity to read their classmates’ blogs and those of others. This is not possible in a regular classroom setting.

* Blogging provides the possibility of connecting with experts on the topic students are writing.

* The interactive nature of blogging creates enthusiasm for writing and communication.

* Blogging engages students in conversation and learning.

* Blogging encourages global conversations about learning–conversations not previously possible in our classrooms.

* Blogging provides the opportunity for our students to learn to write for life-long learning.

* Blogging affords us the opportunity to teach responsible public writing. Students can learn about the power of the published word and the responsibilities involved with public writing.

Here’s a neat solution, prompted by a question from Marlene of the Business Department. How can we get a PowerPoint displayed on a Promethean board/ActivStudio flipchart. The first option was to open a new flipchart, right click on the flipchart and choose ‘insert’. You can then insert your PowerPoint as text or a file.

However, Padraig, on the ball as ever, spotted the ‘convert to PowerPoint’ option in the ActivStudio toolbox. Just browse to your Power Point file and it will be converted with one PowerPoint slide being converted to one page of the flipchart. You can then annotate on top of the slides and export the completed file when you’re finished.

Microsoft released beta 2 version if its latest browers about a week ago. It claims to have some new and interesting features such as Accelerators, Web Slices and Tab Grouping to name a few.

Read more at the browser homepage.

Yes! it’s true. Google Chrome, a new web browser, will be made available to download in more than 100 countries from September 3, 2008. Below is a blog post from Google:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

Click here to read full article.

I’ve been using Xobni for Outlook. It helps you organize, search, and navigate your email. Excellent for finding conversations you have had with anyone and files exchanged in emails. I thought you’d find it useful. Here’s an invite to download it.

Xobni has:

1) Lightning fast email search
2) Threaded conversations
3) Useful social networking features
4) Quick attachment discovery
5) Automatic phone number extraction

To download a free copy, click here:

http://www.xobni.com/download/6576656265702A75717661776C6D446C67702A65672A6561/6575717661776C6D35446C67702A65672A6561/38

Enjoy!

Yet another reason to use only IE when reading SharePoint (it grieves me to say it).  When you’re uploading files to a document library, the ‘upload multiple documents’ option is only available when using IE.  Apparently this command relies on an ActiveX control only available in IE.

Here’s a nice little article that might prove useful for the language teachers in our faculty. It provides 10 tips regarding behaviors and attitudes you require to learn a foreign language quickly and effectively. Here’s a brief summary:

1. Immerse yourself
It’s almost impossible to learn a new language, or at least to learn it rapidly, unless you begin thinking in that language. But how do you think in a new language you can’t yet speak? The answer is to simply immerse yourself in it.

2. Forget translating: think like a baby!
Through imitation, repetition of sounds, and above all, by not being shy or self-conscious.

3. How do you say?
Besides common greetings, the one phrase you should memorize and always have at the ready is the phrase is “How do you say that / what is that called?”

4. Write it
After having conversations, jot down the things you remembered hearing but didn’t quite understand.

5. Use cognates and draw links
Unlocking the usage of cognates instantly gives you several hundred more words to your vocabulary. For example, most words ending in “ion” in the Latin languages are the same in English. For example: information / información, donation / donación

6. Local TV, movies, music
Watch movies, listen to music, sing songs, and browse newspapers and magazines. It’s fun and helps improve your pronunciation and comprehension.

7. Non-verbal cues
Beyond words, observe locals when they talk. Be it the Gaelic shrug or a slight tilt of the head, combining body language with a new tongue helps you communicate better.

8. Get emotional!
Emotive experiences often etch impressions onto our memory. Make full use of embarrassing / funny / angry experiences by linking them to the new language.

9. A world of friends / then going solo.
Having a friend to practice with helps you get better, and you can also learn from the different mistakes different people make.

10. Practice at every opportunity before and after you travel.

The internet, in addition to allowing us easy access to business documents, research papers, free encyclopedias and some great books, also provides us with tutorials to absolutely anything.

Want to learn how to grill a great hamburger, or how to program in PHP?

This web page posted on dumblittleman.com details 15 such super-useful sites, which aim to provide you with all the tutorials you’d ever need.

Here’s a site called teachingtips.com, which lists some great blogs written by teachers for teachers. Click here to read.

These blogs are categorized under the following headings:

General
These blogs cover a wide range of subjects from current events to ideas for lessons and instruction.

Subject Specific
Secondary school teachers and others who are focused on one subject can find some interesting reading related to their work in these blogs.

Tips and Tools
Find supplements to your lessons and helpful tips on teaching in these blogs.

International
If you are teaching abroad, or have ever dreamed of doing it, these blogs can give you some fun and informative reading material.

Technology
These days technology and teaching are nearly inseparable, so stay on the cutting edge with some help from these blogs.

Here’s a nice little article from PCMag.com that outlines some little-known but powerful features of Microsoft Word 2007. Click here to read this article.

Here’s a brief overview of the 8 features it presents:

1. Shrinking a document by one page
2. Calculating in tables, using only Word
3. Merging to e-mail and sending e-mails using Word
4. Comparing two documents to detect revisions
5. Using the Document Inspector to remove comments, hidden text, or private properties from a document before printing or sending
6. Using the Built-in translator
7. Creating fancy equations using the equation toolbar
8. Using math autocorrect to create fancy equations outside of the equation toolbar