June 2014 archive
Employers’ Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students’ Lives
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/employers-challenge-to-educators-make-school-relevant-to-students-lives
while critical thinking and communication are important, Wagner said schools are in danger if they stop there. “Above all, they need to be creative problem solvers,”
a bottom-up and top-down strategy should be implemented
the bottom-up strategy will only work, if it’s accompanied by business leaders clearly articulating the outcomes they’d like to see and helping align accountability to those outcomes.
Recently elite liberal arts colleges like Hampshire and Bard have announced they won’t consider SAT or ACT scores if they’re submitted with an application, because admissions officers don’t believe the tests are a good measure of students’ potential.
The survey found that student who felt supported — that their professors cared about them as individuals, that professors made them want to learn, that they had a mentor — were three times more likely to thrive as those who did not feel supported. Only 14 percent of college graduates answered that all three of those qualities were present in their college experience.
Even fewer college graduates found their higher education experience to be relevant to life and work after college. Only six percent reported with strong affirmatives that they worked on a long term project (at least a semester), had an internship where they could apply skills, and were very engaged in an extracurricular.
These six categories are:
- Textual Works and Musical Compositions
- Still Image Works
- Audio Works
- Moving Image Works
- Software and Electronic Gaming and Learning
- Datasets/Databases
From: Scanlon, Donna [mailto:dscanlon@loc.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2014 6:34 AM
To: ‘lita-l@ala.org’
Subject: [lita-l] Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications
The Library of Congress announces the availability of its Recommended Format Specifications, a document describing the hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which will best maximize the chances for preservation and continued accessibility of creative content. Creators and publishers have also begun to employ a wide array of intangible digital formats, as well as continuing to change and adapt the physical formats in which they work. The Library needs to be able to identify the formats which are suitable for large-scale acquisition and preservation for long-term access if it is to continue to build its collection and ensure that it lasts into the future.
The Library was able to identify six basic categories of creative output, which represent significant parts of the publishing, information, and media industries, especially those that are rapidly adopting digital production and are central to building the Library’s collections: Textual Works and Musical Compositions; Still Image Works; Audio Works; Moving Image Works; Software and Electronic Gaming and Learning; and Datasets/Databases. Technical teams, made up of experts came from across the institution bringing specialized knowledge in technical aspects of preservation, ongoing access needs and developments in the marketplace and in the publishing world, were established to identify recommended formats for each of these categories and to establish hierarchies of preference among the formats within them.
The Library will be revisiting these specifications on an annual basis. The creation and publication of these recommended format specifications is not intended to serve as an answer to all the questions raised in preserving and providing long-term access to creative content. They do not provide instructions for receiving this material into repositories, managing that content or undertaking the many ongoing tasks which will be necessary to maintain this content so that it may be used well into the future.
The Recommended Format Specifications are available at http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/. For more information, please contact Ted Westervelt [thwe@loc.gov].
Donna Scanlon
Electronic Resources Coordinator
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
eMail: dscanlon@loc.gov
Phone: (202) 707-6235
http://eresources.loc.gov
The Epic BYOD Toolchest (51 Tools You Can Use Now)
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-epic-byod-toolchest-vicki-davis
Formative Assessment
Screencasting and Capturing What Happens in Class
Content-Sharing Platforms
- Sophia: Nudged along by my friend Todd Nesloney, I use Sophia for my computer applications instruction and am very pleased with the results.
- Haiku Learning: This is the full content management system that I’m trying to get our school to adopt. It’s multiplatform and robust, which makes it a great fit for our BYOD environment.
There are many other apps like Moodle, Canvas, and Coursesites. The point is that you should have one in a BYOD environment.
Assessment Aids
All three of these apps — Quick Key, Grade Ninja, and WISE — are available on iTunes and Google Play, but there are more.
Electronic Note Taking
Expression
Students need multiple ways to share and express themselves, particularly verbally and with pictures. This is part of transliteracy.
Cloud Syncing
Graphic Design and Infographics
Color Selection
Presentations
Blogging
Written Expression
Link Sharing
More (from the blog section)
The advent of the CLOUD and the industry and our personal orientation to save pictures, videos and other data “out” in the “cloud” makes us think less of hard drives and other storage devices. However…
Best storage devices
Updated June 6, 2014 1:51 PM PDT
http://www.cnet.com/topics/storage/best-hard-drives-and-storage/
If you still think storage devices are passe and are looking firmly for “cloud” solution, here are the ten best, according to PC Magazine:
The Best Cloud Storage Solutions
By Jill DuffyApril 2, 2014
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413556,00.asp
Please watch a great video inquiry by SCSU MassComm student Colette Jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLNWWZN8BAA
- What social media tools do you use?
- How do you use them?
- privately?
- for educational purposes?
- both?
- How do you see social media being used for learning and teaching purposes?
- Do you use social media in your classes?
- How do you think social media can be used successfully in your classes?
Free Course – Copyright for Educators & Librarians
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2014/06/free-course-copyright-for-educators.html?m=1
Copyright can be one heck of a confusing topic. There seems to be an endless number of nuances and exceptions to copyright rules. To help educators gain a better understanding of copyright as it relates to schools, instructors from Duke, Emory, and UNC Chapel Hill have created a Coursera course titled Copyright for Educators & Librarians.
Copyright for Educators & Librarians is a four week course beginning on July 21st. It is free to register and participate in this online professional development course. Attendees who desire a “verified certificate” can register for that option for a $49 fee.
The course will feature four units of study:
- A framework for thinking about copyright.
- Authorship and rights.
- Specific exceptions for teachers and librarians.
- Understanding and using fair use.
Coming this summer, SoftChalk will debut these amazing, educator-friendly features in both SoftChalk Create 9 (desktop version) and in SoftChalk Cloud…
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SoftChalk eBook Builderbeta gives YOU the power to create and distribute your own interactive eBooks for use on both iPads and Chromebooks. |
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Major accessibility enhancements including frame-free lessons and fully HTML5-compliant content. |
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Add Google Analytics to your SoftChalk lessons, allowing you to measure and report student use of your learning content. |
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Access to thousands of new resources through SoftChalk’s integration with new media libraries including the Khan Academy, Getty Images and more! |
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SoftChalk’s new fluid layout will automatically adjust your lesson display on any screen size for any device. |
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Chrome browser support will be available for student viewing of all SoftChalk content. |
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Register for one of our Sneak Peek webinars today and be the first to see SoftChalk Create 9 in action!
| Tuesday, June 24, 2014 |
2:00 PM EDT |
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| Thursday, June 26, 2014 |
12:00 PM EDT |
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7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers
http://mashable.com/2010/10/16/free-social-media-tools-for-teachers/
EDU 2.0 is a lot like online course management systems Blackboard and Moodle, but with a couple of distinct advantages. First, teachers can share their lesson plans, quizzes, videos, experiments and other resources in a shared library that currently hosts more than 15,000 pieces of content. Second, a community section allows teachers and students to network and collaborate with other members who share the same educational interests. And third, everything is hosted in the cloud for free.
The popular visual organizing and sharing tool Symbaloo launched its “EDU” version last month. According to the company, 50,000 teachers are already using Symbaloo to organize classroom resources. The new EDU version comes with academic subject-specific resource pages or “webmixes” and top tools like TeacherTube, Slideshare, Google Docs, Flickr and more are fully embeddable. Teachers with a “Free Plus” account can add their school logo and customize the links. The site also allows students to easily share their Symbaloo pages and projects with classmates.
This app gives teachers four discussion format choices. Students can either agree or disagree with a statement, answer a multiple choice question, post responses, or have the choice between adding a new response or voting for someone else’s response. Teachers can add photos or videos to their prompts and all of the discussions take place on one class page.
This WordPress-like blogging platform only supports educational content and thus, unlike WordPress, usually isn’t blocked by school filters. Since 2005, it has hosted more than a million blogs from students and teachers.
Kidblog is a bit more specific than Edublogs. There are fewer options to adjust the appearance of the main page, and it’s hard to use the platform for anything other than as a system for managing individual class blogs. The homepage serves as a catalog of student blogs on the right with a recent post feed on the left.
Teachers can also control how private they want the blogs to be. They can keep them student-and-teacher only, allow parents to log in with a password, or make them open to the public.
Edmodo looks and functions much like Facebook. But unlike Facebook, it’s a controlled environment that teachers can effectively leverage to encourage class engagement. The platform allows teachers and students to share ideas, files and assignments on a communal wall. Teachers can organize different groups of students and monitor them from the same dashboard. Once they’ve organized classes, they can post assignments to the wall and grade them online. They can then archive the class groups and begin new ones.
7. TeacherTube and SchoolTube and YouTube
As the name implies, TeacherTube is YouTube for teachers. It’s a great resource for lesson ideas but videos can also be used during class to supplement a lecture. For instance, you can let Mrs. Burk rap about perimeters if you like her idea but lack the rhyming skills to pull it off yourself. This site also has a crowdsourced stock of documents, audio and photos that can be added to your lesson plans. Unfortunately, every video is preceded by an ad.
SchoolTube is another YouTube alternative. Unlike other video sharing sites, it is not generally blocked by school filters because all of its content is moderated.
The original, generic YouTube also has a bevy of teacher resources, though it’s often blocked in schools. Khan Academy consistently puts out high-quality lessons for every subject, but a general search on any topic usually yields a handful of lesson approaches. Some of the better ones are indexed onWatchKnow.
Venmo Is The ‘Killer App’ That The Mobile Payments Industry Has Been Waiting For
http://www.businessinsider.com/venmo-is-the-killer-app-that-the-mobile-payments-industry-has-been-waiting-for-2014-6#ixzz35DtKD2EI
Venmo, owned by eBay’s PayPal unit, already channels as much volume in total dollar value of transactions as Starbucks’ successful mobile payment app, according to BI Intelligence’s estimates.
Venmo allows users to easily send money back-and-forth to one another for expenses like rent, restaurant and bar checks, and event tickets. Venmo is free to use and appears to be gaining the most traction with U.S. smartphone users in their late teens and twenties. It’s very popular on college campuses.
How to Use the Free YouTube Video Editor
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Use-YouTube-Video-Editor
The YouTube Editor is not the most powerful editor you will ever use. However, it is free, and it includes all the basic editing tools you need to make a professional looking video. It is also an online tool, so you can use it anywhere you have an internet connection, and on any computer that you have access to.
My note: The author forgets to mention that the editor exists now also as an app for mobile devices, thus competing with other “free” mobile apps for video editing such as Splice, iMovie etc.
It can be a great addition to “spice up” videos posted on Instagram, Tweeter and other social media, besides YouTube.