Curating-Social-Learning

Now I understand that this is Google trying to sell a product. But really isn’t that exactly what we hear educational institutions say? If only it was easier, faster and of course cheaper. What I love is Google is taking on those challenges and is continuing to try and knock down the barriers of technology in the classroom. At some point educational institutions will run out of reasons not to fully integrate technology. The only reason that will be left is fear….and fear is no way to run a school.

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Google Play Store for Education

Two things here that make this a game changer:

1) The easy of use to volume purchase an app for a school/district or classroom.

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Honestly this to me was the biggest announcement of the three hour keynote. One of the big things I focus on in all my talks is how search is THE skill of our time. If there is one thing that everyone should know how to do today it is to know how to search. Not “find stuff” but really search the web for meaningful information. What they showed of course is pretty basic but this is just the beginning for sure. This is going to be a game changer.

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I keep thinking about this and how does this change everything about education? An education system that was built over a hundred years ago on the premise of “Just in Case”? If we can literally learn anything “On Demand” then education has to change. It can not survive a world where there is no “Just in Case”. We need new skills, we need new knowledge. We need to be able to learn, unlearn and relearn quickly and we need to be comfortable always being a beginner.

What are your thoughts? What does school look like if we are preparing an “On Demand Generation” for their future?

The MOOC Quality Project will ask 12 experts in 12 weeks for their best thinking on MOOCs and quality.

MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credit toward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution.

MOOCs are moving from an early entrepreneurial stage into the reality of more and more educational institutions. Gaining participants, visibility and a growing community worldwide in many occasions the question rises to the surface: Are MOOCs the new model of online education for all? Are they fit to democratize education? and above all – what is a good quality MOOC?

Before participating in this survey, please ensure you have reviewed the "getting ready" checklist on the Project 24 website http://digitallearningday.org/news-and-events/project-24/self-assessment/get-ready/. Then, together with your team members, complete this digital learning self-assessment. (Plan to spend 1.5 to 2.5 hours depending on the size of your team and the depth of your discussions.) Upon completion of the survey, you will receive a report that analyzes your district's readiness for each element of the Project 24 Framework, with links to Project 24 resources.

IMPORTANT: Your team can start and stop taking the survey, picking up from where you left off, but ONLY if you select SAVE and copy (and use later) the link provided.

To get started, click the NEXT button below.

Learning to Teach in the 21st Century

This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, “Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia,” and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don’t dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation--to what I call socialstructed learning.

Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education--from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey--talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.

Deeper Inspiration Getting to a deeper understanding of what drives you creatively means you have to have some way to get inspiration. In past posts, I mentioned reading a lot to get ideas and this...

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So, what should a teacher use to mine new ideas and write the content at the same time. I suggest Storify, Learnist, and Edcanvas.

The three suggestions I gave all do the same thing and that is to curate content from the Web, create some kind of “board”, and share it with the world. Within the app, you search for content and then organize how you choose. Because you have control over what goes in and that you have to verify the content to make sure it’s what you want, the opportunity to create endless content for students and gain ideas for yourself is limitless.

We all want to make our learners excited, that's why many of us are looking for advice and tips on how to engage students in eLearning environments.

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We all want to make our learners excited by what we create: That is why many people are looking for advice and tips on how to engage students in eLearning environments.  Keep reading to know how to do it effectively – in just 60-seconds, you will be able to command their attention like never before.

1. A very simple way to start: use images to engage your learners. Many studies reveal that employees engage best when they have a picture to look at or a video to watch. It's a good idea to use different types, depending on the kind of information you have.  

I had the pleasure of spending time with Clark Quinn at the 2013 Learning Solutions Conference, and while it is tempting to keep his secret identity intact, I am bound by my journalistic (ahem) integ...

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I like to think I'm in the performance technology industry (finding problems with the terms "learning" and "instruction"), though others might say I'm in Learning and Development (but I'm across K-12, higher ed, corporate, not-for-profit, government, etc.). I am excited about how technology complements our cognitive capabilities, and recognize that people need help cutting through the hype and seeing the core affordances on a principled basis.

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What are some of the best examples of eLearning that you have seen? What is considered "state of the art" in our industry?

I see bits and pieces of what we could be doing, though there's little I think that does it all well, unfortunately. On intros, I like what Michael Allen did on the flight attendant safety checklist, or what we did on another project using comics, e.g. humorously or dramatically indicating the value of the coming learning. Speaking of which, Scott McCloud's Google Chrome comic was cool. Similarly, we used comics for examples in a media-skills training (as an industry we underuse graphic novel formats). I like game-based practice, like the game we did for CalTrans on project management for non-project managers. The 2012 Lingos Giveback award winner, IPT for Tuberculosis in HIV patients had some challenging scenario-based practice that illustrates the ways we need to go. We've seen some preliminary use of alternate reality games (cf. Tandem Learning), which is an approach I think has more potential, and mobile will provide new opportunities. I also think we'll rediscover the key affordances of virtual worlds now that the hype has boiled away, such as the insurance-adjusting example Masie & American Family Insurance generated.

Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any Internet-connected device including iPads and Android tablets. Infuse Learning allows teachers to push questions, prompts, and quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. In an Infuse Learning room a teacher can give students a wide variety of formats in which to response to a question or prompt. Students can reply to prompts and questions in standard multiple choice, true/false, and short answer formats. But Infuse Learning also offers an option for students to reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their iPads, Android tablets, or on their laptops.

Today we are extraordinarily pleased to announce Wikispaces Classroom to the world.

Wikispaces Classroom is a brand new product from the Wikispaces team entirely and exclusively for teachers and students.

Over the years we’ve distilled what we believe and do into one simple thing: help teachers help students. And Wikispaces Classroom is our attempt to take that to the next level.

When we ask ourselves, our users, and our customers, what we can do to better help teachers help their students, the message always comes down to three things: Keep it simple. Help teachers and students engage deeply. Help teachers improve student outcomes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Simplicity. Wikispaces was built to help people work together. All kinds of people, in all kinds of contexts. Over the years we made it easier and easier for teachers and students to use Wikispaces but there were always parts of Wikispaces that weren’t designed for the classroom and frankly, got in the way. In Wikispaces Classroom, all that is gone. It’s streamlined and focused, it puts everything you need to manage your classroom right up front, and it gets everything you don’t need right out of the way.

Learn about Education Datbase Online and the features available to discover online and campus schools in your field of interest.

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Education Database Online is a comprehensive resource designed to help current and prospective students learn about the many educational opportunities and higher degree programs available within the United States.