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CNN - 1972: Xerox Parc and the Alto - July 8, 1999 The lesson of missed opportunity resounds in this discussion of Xerox Parc and the Alto. They invented the PC and gave it away for free. tags: education , clicksmart , change Primary teachers to gain HECS relief | The Courier-Mail In Australia, they are taking an initiative to get more math and science graduates into primary teaching -- those who do so will have a 50% refund on their loan payments. This in response to a study in July from the National Numeracy Review that "concluded that systematic teaching of numeracy in the early years of schooling, in maths lessons and across the wider curriculum, was essential if these trends were to be reversed." I find this interesting and hope that it will encourage people who love math and science AND STUDENTS will accept. Just a geek doesn't mean you love students or want to teach them. tags: education , edu_news EasyBib: The Free Automatic Bibliography Composer - MLA and APA ...

Was visiting Tony Searl' s blog and a post of his pulled into some great writing from down under educator and conference presenter Lauren O'Grady ( laurenogrady on twitter).  In a recent post about the overuse of elearning and eteaching as buzzwords, Lauren says: "We need to stop creating buzzwords such as elearning and eteaching as they are no longer relevant in our schools.  Computers and technology have been around long enough.  We need to move beyond this speciality paradigm and move into powerful learning and teaching.  I see a real danger in the titles such as elearning integrator and epotential.  Whilst we still continue to view ourselves as a speciality with specific skills we will never have integration into our classrooms where it is needed to benefit students.  I was one of these people butting my head against the wall two years ago trying to understand why people did not integrate technology,  I had to change my tact and look at it ...

Wikispaces has released the ref tag, so now wikis, in addition to hyperlinking, may include references.  We're still working through our class standards, and I"ve got a page on our school wiki that I will update for the students.  We would love some feedback from the experts out there because some of these items are our best interpretation of wiki-fying MLA.   We integrated this into some of our current projects today.  Note: These projects are still not quite done.   Reference and Citation Steps: Go to Son of Citation Machine to Generate the MLA Citation Return to your wiki page . Insert your blinker just after the quotation or paraphrase that needs a citation. Type a bracket and ref and ending bracket (see below) Paste the reference into the wiki.   Type the page number and a period after it if it is a book. Close the reference tag by typing a bracket forward slash (/) ref and an ending bracket (see the image above.) If it...

Some of you may wonder why this is the same time as Chris Lehman's amazing work at Educon 2.1 in Philadelphia -- the first reason is that we have a stellar speaker who has tentatively planned to come to Qatar and this is the only time he could do it, and secondly, we hope to network the two at some point if it works out.  Additionally, this conference will be very international, pulling heavily from participants in past projects, and I don't know that the audience will have a lot of overlap.  Educon is great, and this conference will have a different format from what he is doing.   August 29, 2008 - Doha, Qatar - Flat Classroom Project co-founders Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis in conjunction with Qatar Academy and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) announce the first Flat Classroom Leadership Workshop and Student Summit to be held January 24-26, 2009 at Qatar Academy in Doha. Visit our website for more details: http://flatclassroomconfer...

Wikispaces Blog » Blog Archive » Add References to Your Wiki OK, so now we can create references on the wiki! This is going to be one I'm going to DO this year! tags: education , flatclassroom NJ Tech Teacher Musings: RSS for Blogger Link Backs How to share your comments from Ann Oro in New Jersey. Also, I'm switching to Disqus sort of halfway - and soon the entire way so my comment links will stop working until I update. I'm loving Disqus for a variety of reasons that I'll have to blog. tags: education , disqus Learning Intelligences for the 21st Century - Flat Classrooms Person who wants to talk about learning intelligences for the 21st century -- see Jackie Gerstein's goals and join in the discussion. Feel free to join the Ning. tags: education , flatclassroom , edu_trends

Everyday Heroes: Eric Marcos, Ed.M.'03 Congratulations to my friend Eric Marcos for being featured in the Harvard Graduate School of Education "Everyday Heroes" column. Eric's Mathtrain.tv project is amazing and an excellent use of digital storytelling in Math. He is a fellow Google Certified Teacher and I'm so proud of him! Way to go Eric! tags: education , web2 , math_teacher Measuring Learning - Practical Theory Fascinating response from Chris Lehman to a Dan Meyer who asks him a question about what he should do when the test scores of his students don't measure up? In true Practical Theory style, Chris gives a whiz of an answer. tags: education , teaching , standardizedtests , NCLB AUP 2.0 at dougbelshaw.com Just turned up this very nice post by Doug Belshaw about Acceptable Use Policies that Include Cell phones - this one and the one he wrote before it are very nice talking points for your committe who looks at AUP's. tags: education , learning , ...

As I was cleaning out my inbox, I came across an email from Lorraine Leo in Jackson Elementary School in Newton, Mass, USA, this is what she says: "Hi, I was reading your profile in Classroom 2.0.  I am also a technology teacher but at the K-6 level.  I'm always curious to hear what other technology people are doing.  I wanted to share with you a program that my students and I were involved with since 2001 when we followed the voyage of skipper/teacher Rich Wilson as he sailed to break world records.  It was a really exciting experience to have a teacher at sea to connect us with the science, history, math, technology and fitness.  Rich is sailling again in 2008. He will be the only US sailor in the Vendee Globe and will compete with the top sailors in the world.  He will once again invite students to follow along on his race with his website.  I enjoyed it so much over the years that I share the site with as many people as I can.  The more fo...

Flat World Knowledge LLC Interesting tidbit in their press release this week: "Flat World has announced 17 new author titles under contract. Flat World's in-classroom beta test gets underway this week, with 20 participating colleges and universities nationwide." Open Textbooks may be closer -- this model is a more hybridized version. If we had a "wiki to print" tool or technology, then we could literally have grassroots teachers writing and creating textbooks together. This is interesting to follow tags: education , opensource , textbook , edu_trends Jott goes to trapster now I just thought this was funny - trapster lets you find where the speed traps, cameras, etc. are. Jott now has a link service to trapster to let you tell it where there are traps using your voice (that's handsfree for those of you who will use a ticket). Just think it is interesting to see the proliferation of tools. As for Jott charging - I forked over the $3.95 a month - I just can...

He glides, he floats, he makes it look so easy.  Fred Astaire just makes me relax and be happy when I watch this beautiful scene.  But, Fred Astaire and great teachers have some things in common. 1 - They Make It Look Easy Did it really take that long to get ready for this scene?  It looks effortless and easy! Does it really take that long to plan for that lesson?  It looks like they are just "winging it" and going with the flow? Yes.  It takes a long time.  Lots of knowhow, experience and practice. 2 - Deep Knowledge of Their Subject It is easy to see that Fred Astaire knew how to dance.  He knew it inside and out.  Great teachers do too. 3 - Enjoyment of the Dance Fred Astaire loved dance like a great teacher loves teaching.  It is in their blood, life, and bones.  To stop dancing (or teaching) would mean that life was over.  It is what we're born to do. 4 - A few tricks Of course, there were four separate rooms f...

NOVA | scienceNOW | PBS Last season of Nova science available for download free from PBS - get it now. It is legal! They are doing it for teachers! tags: education , science_teacher , movies , free Quiz School: Create A Quiz Online, Make Free Quizzes, Tests & Fun Trivia Free quizzes at Proprofs - I've blogged about their flash cards before. Like the facelift for the site! tags: education , tools , assessment Helcat Rants and Ramblings » Delicious Tech Tip Another Great blog post from Elizabeth Helfant from Mary Institute County Day School in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. This one distills the Student NETS into 4 ponts: 1) Inquiry, Research, and Information Literacy, 2) Digital Citizenship and Personal Learning Networks, 3) Communication and Collaboration in a Global World, and 4) Creativity, Inventive and Critical Thinking, Design. Her school has used these four talking points to give them two goals at school - managing information effectively and creating learning networks. ...

This is a copy of the post I shared at the Supercool Blog This weekend .  Because it was a live event, I waited a few days to post it here. Throw Down the Gauntlet:  Break the Chains of Bad Practice, Build Our Future I always enjoy reading the articles that talk about what kind of students that we need to create for our future, and I feel strongly that this is where I head in my own classroom.  However, as I talk to many friends in education, they feel that they are educating industrial age workers, largely because the system is itself a product of the industrial age. This week, Education Week says in its article, The Case for Entrepreneurship Education "As leaders, how can we develop a systemic initiative to keep young people in school, learning academic and work skills effectively, motivated to be productive and engaged in their communities and the larger economy, and developing success-oriented attitudes of initiative, intelligent risk-taking, collabor...

Jamendo : Home A website for creative commons music. Searching for places to send my students to get music. The big problem is that there is no guarantee there won't be profanity in the music. We really need to do something about this! tags: education , creativecommons , music , digital_storytelling , technology , edu_newapp , mp3 , audio Guided Reading and Reading Games with Roy the Zebra This is the location for getting the Mango game that Lorraine Leo recommends so highly. Mango looks like a really cool game to play on those Kindergarten smartboards. There are a lot of free interactive reading games to use with your interactive whiteboard. Pass this along to your elementary teachers! tags: education , elementary_teacher , smartboard , kindergarten , games , edu_newapp Soundsnap.com: Find and Share Free Sound Effects and Loops Sound effects and music for free - but your work must be creative commons and you must share it! tags: digital_storytelling , education , music , sound...

Just spent the last bit of time writing some local newspapers urging people to keep computers out of landfills and join freecycle .  (http://www.freecycle.org/) This service comes highly recommended from people around the world and is a grassroots effort of people sharing the electronic devices that they need to recycle and posting them in the group local to their area. Here is the letter I sent, will you share yours if you send it.  If we make it easy for others to copy and paste, maybe we'll get more support for this. Copy of my Letter to the Camilla Enterprise "If you don't want to do an article on this -- could you include this as a letter to the editor.  You can contact me at **********. Hi, this is Vicki Davis, I'm a teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla I just wanted to point out that there is a group online called "freecycle" - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ pelhamcamillafreecycle/ - and that we have a group for Mitchell County. So man...

Spanish to English Dictionary | Translation | Translator Website w/ translations tags: language_teacher , education Safe Kids Chat Rooms - Fun Games for Girls and Boys - Action Adventure Games for Kids - KidsCom.com Another "safe" world -- has anyone tested this one? It has a lot of seals and awards. tags: education , edu_newapp Reminders: Get and set reminders via Twitter How to get and set reminders on twitter using the user "timer." tags: education , twitter , timemanagement To Do Managers: Remember the Milk with Twitter Tips from Life hacker on how to use Remember the MIlk with Twitter. If I don't renew Jott, I may have to just brush up on the twitter interface for RTM. tags: education , rememberthemilk , timemanagement Welcome to Freepath This site was founded by one of the cofounders of the original Powerschool. It lets you play multiple things and mash up a presentation. This looks like it has fascinating applications. tags: education , edu_newapp Disc...