August 2012 Blog Posts (47)

Dorian shared examples and experiences with his students using Gaming in his session:

This link was shared at beginning:

The photo on our Helping Hands website shows the nuclear bombs, Fat Man, and Little Boy that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan 66 years ago. War always kills people, but these bombs opened up a new world with weapons of mass destruction, entire cities at a time.

Nuclear warhead stockpiles of the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, 1945-2002.  

These numbers are total stockpiles,…

I took an Elementary French I course through the Open Learning Initiative.   I have been to France several times and am planning on going back in the next year.  However, I took Spanish in high school and stumbled around France using that knowledge and a smile.  I have often talked about taking a French class to help me on my future travels.  So, I thought this was a great opportunity.  While I only took the first lesson in this course, I think I will be revisiting it.

This course is…

Open Yale Course

HIST 116: The American Revolution



Since the adoption of the CCSS, the American Revolution is now a part of the fifth grade curriculum. Upon looking for free online courses I came across Open Yale Course which allows people to take part in various introductory courses of all subjects. In choosing HIST 116: The American Revolution, I was given a quick synopsis of the course as well…

I attended parts of a course titled AMST 246:  Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner from open source courses at Yale University.  I thought it was a pretty neat learning experience.  The course offers a complete syllabus which includes information about the professor, a description of the course, texts for the course, requirements (participation, short paper, term paper, and final exam), and the grading criteria.  There is also a link where you can purchase the required books for…

Today was the first day! I must say I was totally out of routine but I quickly got back in it lol I am very excited about this new year because I know what to expect and the nerves are almost behind me :) 1 day down 174 to go #bittersweet

I know everyone is ready for that first bright day when our students return to socialize and learn. But here are a few ideas for using Google Apps, including an activity for Veterans Day: a short 150 word essay on the simple topic "Honor All Veterans." This was sponsored by our local VFW last year, but two of my students carried it further, and if you use Google Apps, you might want to try this, or adapt it to another project.

Google Docs is our tool to…

These are the sites I subscribed to using Google Reader and created the folder titled, College Class.  I cannot however, get them to link to this page. 
 
Subscriptionsrefreshing...
root
College Class(71)ESPN.com(17)NYT > Home Page(14)Techdirt.(11)Top Stories - Google News(11)WSJ.com: What's News US(18)All items Mark all as read Folder settings...

Imagine a Wikipedia-scale resource of learning materials.  The English language Wikipedia has 4 million articles, 25 times as much information as Encyclopaedia Britannica. New technology allows us to collaborate to build a new system of linked lessons which will enable anyone, anywhere to search and learn whatever they like, at any time.

     I participated in an open source course on recognizing and employing different parts of a sentence.  This lesson discussed how to identify independent and dependent clauses, how to spot prepositions and prepositional phrases, how to find infinitives and infinitive phrases, and how to distinguish between participle phrases and gerund phrases.  

    This course had a definition of each general term (for example, clauses) followed by a definition of the types of clauses (independent…

This morning I opened my email and was greeted by a link to an article profiling what is commonly being referred to as an "outdoor school" or “nature preschool.” We usually blog about issues concerning Educational Leadership and…

Spanish is fun

For those of you who are following along with any of the Connected Educator Month activities, I am blogging daily to create a month long series of blog posts for Connected Educators Month on my Change Agency blog, you can access all of the posts by clicking…

Some learners have been flexible enough to depend on the internet to help them learn foreign languages. In fact, due to the endless opportunities a learner can take advantage upon learning a language, most students only prefer in internet learning rather than going to Foreign Language School for intimate learning. Who could blame them? Most students, such a reality indeed, they prefer taking the…

Preparing for the new year in teacher education at Western Illinois University.  Lots of excitement about iPad use as all faculty were given one. I'm looking to have my college kids (pre-service teachers) skype/facetime elementary classrooms and get authentic tips about using projects and technology in a time when all we hear is Common Core standards and testing.

How many times have you said something about public speaking or your reluctance to give speeches and had someone come right back with the threadbare cliché about how “one study” found that “the average person fears public speaking more than death?”

Who conducted this study, exactly?

Regardless of whether or not this “study”/cliché can be…

Collaborative and real-time data projects engage students in collecting, analyzing, and sharing data from web-based databases; as well as allow communication with other students around the world. These kinds of projects are highly motivating to students because they bring classrooms together from across the globe in shared learning experiences.