Teacher Experience Exchange - 5 awesome alternatives to a traditional classroom blog

Teacher Experience Exchange - 5 awesome alternatives to a traditional classroom blog

Blogging is still an excellent educational activity for your students. It provides opportunities for them to develop writing skills as well as an outlet for creative thinking. However, if the "traditional blog" is losing its appeal but you still want your students to focus on writing, we've got a few alternatives to the classroom blog for you.

Let's start with the most "blog-like" site and explore the similarities and differences. Tumblr is becoming a very important social media tool and is gaining popularity in the educational setting. It's not nearly as big as Facebook or Twitter but it is growing fast and teachers are jumping on board.

So, what is Tumblr? Basically, it's a blogging platform for posts larger than Twitter and smaller than a traditional blog. Posts are usually rich with a combination of text and multimedia. A unique feature is the ability to "tumble" blog posts. This takes a post of a friend and posts it on your page. If you use Twitter, this is similar to retweeting.

Tumblr is a nice tool for teachers and older students but everyone will need accounts. Create an account for your class and have your students create accounts as well. Then, follow your students' accounts and vice-versa. Now you are all connected and can interact in numerous ways. Your students have an excellent vehicle for all manner of writing and multimedia projects.

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Using VoiceThread to communicate and collaborate

Using VoiceThread to communicate and collaborate

One of the best free Web 2.0 tools available to teachers and students is VoiceThread. Initially defined as a “group audio blog,” VoiceThread allows users to have ongoing digital conversations built from text, audio, and/or video comments added by small groups of participants around any content imaginable. Some teachers upload PowerPoint presentations filled with quotes, charts, graphs, and statistics for their students to study. Others upload Word documents, provocative images, and/or short video clips. Regardless of the kinds of content choices that you make, VoiceThread has the potential to engage your students and — if you’re willing to find professional partners to play with — to connect your class with students across counties, countries, or continents.

VoiceThread has three distinct advantages for teachers interested in making digital communication a part of their professional practice:....

100+ iPad Apps Perfect For High School

100+ iPad Apps Perfect For High School | Edudemic

If you’re a student, teacher, or administrator at a high school looking into adopting iPads for educational purposes, it’s important to know that the iPad is more than just an easy way to browse the web or visit the app store.

There are actually thousands of educational apps hiding in the bowels of the app store.But how do you find them? Unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, it is usually pretty tough to find the best apps. Heck, once you may come across an app it may prove to not be worth the time it took to download!

Share your sounds - SoundCloud

SoundCloud - Share Your Sounds

Capture a voice, moment or music in seconds or upload audio you’ve already created.

1:1 Computing is a challange

Survey of School Administrators Explores Digital Classrooms, Major Challenges -- THE Journal

Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of school administrators who responded to a recent survey said 1:1 computing classrooms where teachers act as a coach for students are the future of education, in a poll that looked at some of the changes, opportunities, and challenges that lie ahead for schools.

Flipping your classroom

How the Flipped Classroom Is Radically Transforming Learning - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

..... we began to record our live lessons using screen capture software.  We posted our lectures online so our students could access them.  When we did this YouTube was just getting started and the world of online video was just in its infancy.
 
Flipping the classroom has transformed our teaching practice.  We no longer stand in front of our students and talk at them for thirty to sixty minutes at a time.  This radical change has allowed us to take on a different role with our students. ....

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Using Apps in the classroom

APPitic - 1,300+ EDUapps

APPitic is a directory of apps for education by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) to help you transform teaching and learning. These apps have been tested in a variety of different grade levels, instructional strategies and classroom settings.

21 things that will become obsolete in education by 2020

21 things that will become obsolete in education by 2020 - Education - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

It’s nearly two years since Shelly Blake-Plock wrote “21 things that will become obsolete in education by 2020” on his TeachPaperless blog. I’d highly recommend it for a mid-week read - and perhaps use it to stimulate some thinking on where you can help your own organisation as you move into the future - whether you work in an education institution, or you’re a Microsoft partner working with education customers.

25 Tips for taking great photographs

25 Tips for Taking Great Photographs | Prudent Baby

25 Tips for Taking Great Photos This list starts with some general thoughts on photography and gets into the nitty gritty. Stick with it and you will learn something.

Why Johnny Can't Search - a Response

Why Johnny Can't Search - a Response

We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the webpages at the top of Google's results list. But Pan pulled a trick: he changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren't assessing information sources on their own merit - they're putting too much trust in machine. Other studies have found the same thing: high school and college students may be “digital natives” but they're wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the author's credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can't read. Today the question is why can't Johnny search?

Best 107 Websites

Best Websites

Here you go, the best 107 websites for all your needs. We’ve taken the effort to categorize the websites and picked only those we believe to be the best ones and which will most likely be useful to you. Spread the word!

Tools for learning: Mobile phones and authentic learning tasks | edtalks.org

Tools for learning: Mobile phones and authentic learning tasks | edtalks.org