It’s now three months since our school introduced a BYOT “Bring Your Own Technology” program in the Senior School. Students from Year 7 through Year 12 are required to bring their...
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Educators share their secrets to choosing apps that are both fun and informative.
Via Steve Yuen, Timo Ilomäki
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Popular ScienceBreaking Blades: The Engineering Lab Where Wind-Power Propellers Get Built To ...Popular ScienceBy Peter Andrey Smith Posted 03.19.2012 at 10:12 am 0 Comments Support Group To keep the wind blades secure, engineers affix them to a...
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After looking at what information is required to award a badge using the Open Badge framework, I created a design for a platform that can be picked up and used within another institution or context with minimal customisation required. The purpose of this blog post is to document the decision processes involved and to describe and show the resulting design.
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Here are four key concepts that have driven Draw Something's success and a look at how these should be implemented in game based learning.
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It’s not really fair to smoosh three big topics into a single heading. Beyond the words though, we don’t have a solid plan for any of the three features above. By the end of the second quarter, we want to have paper versions of all the above. They’re topics we’ve thrown around for a while now, if they’re not obvious, some definitions: Endorsement is the ability for one badge issuing organization to endorse another organization’s badges. Endorsement is a significant step towards a badge ‘economy’, where badges have objective worth relative to one another. A badge with multiple endorsements will probably be ‘worth’ more than a badge without the endorsements. Public key infrastructure will allow issuers to sign a badge cryptographically. Badge signing will allow the issuers an extra level of security, but will also give the earners truly portable badges, even if the issuer goes away, or stops hosting the badge’s assertion file.
Federated backpacks are the holy grail of the open badges infrastructure. Mozilla’s hosted backpack can’t be the only backpack out there, we want everyone to create and host backpacks. We want them discoverable though, which complicates things. We need a system for making all the backpacks in the world act like one giant backpack for the purposes of aggregation and discovery. This is a tricky one, but it will be super awesome when we’re done with it. Super awesome.
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Digital storytelling is simply using computer-based tools to tell stories.
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The parade of directors and department heads from DOE, NASA, Veterans Affairs, and elsewhere at the September 2011 launch event suggested that this initiative was going to have some impact. Given that other education funding agencies routinely spend far more on a single project, this level of attention for a $2M competition must have raised some eyebrows in DC (more at http://bit.ly/w3Jxc0). On one hand, it is simple to add open badges to an existing educational ecosystem. With the Open Badges Interface (OBI) being developed by Stage 3 awardee Philipp Schmidt and Peer 2 Peer University, virtually anybody should be able to easily offer digital badges for accomplishments. By structuring and simplifying the peer reviewing process, communities will be able to negotiate criteria and establish validity and value. But there is more to it. Barry Joseph of Global Kids put it perfectly at the end of the meeting: "Introducing badges into an educational ecosystem is like developing a new website within a company or an organization.” Barry explained how the seemly simple process of creating a website often reveals unexamined sources of power and information, and forces communities to explicate reams of previously tacit information. Introducing badges forces learning organizations to do the same thing.
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As the competition unfolded, I followed the inevitable debate over the consequences of “extrinsic rewards” like badges on student motivation. Thanks in part to Daniel Pink’s widely read book Drive, many worried that badges would trivialize deep learning and leave learners with decreased intrinsic motivation to learn. The debate was played out nicely (and objectively) at the HASTAC blog via posts from Mitch Resnick and Cathy Davidson . I have been arguing in obscure academic journals for years that sociocultural views of learning call for an agnostic stance towards incentives. In particular I believe that the negative impact of rewards and competition says more about the lack of feedback and opportunity to improve in traditional classrooms. There is a brief summary of these issues in a chapter on sociocultural and situative theories of motivation that Education.com commissioned me to write a few years ago. One of the things I tried to do in that article and the other articles it references is show why rewards like badges are fundamentally problematic for constructionists like Mitch, and how newer situative theories of motivation promise to resolve that tension. One of the things that has been overlooked in the debate is that situative theories reveal the value of rewards without resorting to simplistic behaviorist theories of reinforcing and punishing desired behaviors.
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Simply type the speech for each slide, instead of recording it,
and HelloSlide automagically generates the audio. It gives more exposure to your presentations,
making them searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages.
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SUNY Empire State College’s Virtual Teacher Incubator in the School for Graduate Studies hopes to implement a series of digital badges during the next year to increase the recognition of quality teacher practices, projects, skills, and experiences. Traditional assessments of teacher development, .i.e. the Danielson model (The Danielson Group, 2011), may miss specific teacher successes as it focuses on a closed-rubric of unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and distinguished categorical distinctions (Danielson, 2011). As a non-traditional assessment that focuses on individualized achievements, badges in the Virtual Teacher Incubator create another level of accredited validation of teaching abilities that have been demonstrated inside or outside of the classroom environment. The digital badging ecosystem not only provides authentic recognition of accomplishments for performance evaluations and professional development, but also creates a motivating learning community of shared and evaluated teaching practices across New York State.
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Turn your Twitter stream into a non-stop 24-7 audio book bith Tweader.
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Badge Competition grantee Lisa Dawley writes about 3D GameLab, the game-based learning platform that will drive NOAA's badge system. "I absolutely LOVE it when serendipity moves in and gives us an entirely new way of thinking about education. I had one of those moments today as teachers in 3D GameLab responded to my query for quest designers interested in usingBrainPop content. I was surprised we had approximately 20 interested teachers, and it made me wonder if we could crowdsource educational quest design. I'm going to try." (Read more to see how it plays out.)
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You have probably heard of a new “hot” social network called Pinterest. Yes, one more social network… I know, it might seem overwhelming but this one you just cannot afford to miss!
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This video is to help parents understand how student-owned devices can be used in the classroom for instructional purposes.
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Take Notes With These Apps On Your iPad...
Via EdTechSandyK
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Bring Your Own Technology BYOT. BYOT is a hot topic in K12 right now with many policy issues. From a policy perspective, what do you think schools should do?
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Great list of apps that are useful in high schools
Via Jenny Smith
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It's called Nearpod and it allows teachers to create interactive content that runs on their iPads and share that content with students on student-controlled devices. In the picture here I'm showing the teacher app installed on my ...
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In his book Start with Why and the accompanying TED talk, author Simon Sinek claims that we're all very clear about “what” we do.
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As protesters took to the streets yesterday to protest the inequality of wealth, two computer scientists in Portland, Oregon are protesting the inequality of resources in schools.
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Google Docs for Learning ~ Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners: http://t.co/bztjTxeO #edtech #mlearning...
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The do's and don'ts of beefing up your wireless network to handle the bring-your-own-device movement.
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I am so excited for a new Mac app called Reflection ! It shows my iPad's screen live on my comput...
Via Jeremy Angoff
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