New Tools for Schools

• David Jakes‘ excellent intro to web 2.0 for teachers wiki.
  - post by cburell

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How-to RSS: Macromedia Flash (SWF) Movie

• Nice, but too long?

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Better Writing from Text Messaging and Blogging Teens Annotated:

University of Glamorgan, Learning Zone Annotated

• Note the implied demotion of the academic essay as the scholarship of the future.
  - post by cburell

Universities: The learning mould is smashed - Independent Online Edition > Higher Annotated

• The entire article is fascinating. Here’s a snippet:
  - post by cburell

The undergraduate curriculum has been criticised for being too superficial a way of learning, relying as it does on the student essay and examination. Warwick wants to change that and bring some coherence to what is known as research-based learning, an issue that is moving fast up the higher-education agenda. Until now, research and teaching have been separated. “The two activities will be brought together,” says Dr Neary, who is a sociologist. “What we’re developing are programmes and practices where students are working in collaboration with academics on their own research, on the academic’s research or on a piece of extra-curricular research.”

But why the futuristic play space? “If you are redesigning teaching, you have to redesign the places where students work,” says Dr Neary. “This is a room that is designed for movement and play, maybe for lectures, maybe for group work. It’s not technologically determined.”

Not all the students have taken to it. They seem to have mixed feelings about their new modernist play space, which is costing £2.5m over five years. “Some of the students are very interested,” says Dr Cath Lambert, a lecturer in sociology and academic co-ordinator of the Reinvention Centre. “Some regard it in a playful way; others were quite threatened when they first came in. They didn’t know where to sit. In a conventional classroom, you put your books on the desk and sit at the front whereas when you walk in here you say, ‘Whoa, where do I go?’”

The centre, which is part of a collaborative project with Oxford Brookes University, is doing its own research via a questionnaire into what the students think of the space. Some of them think that it has made the interaction between students and lecturers less hierarchical, according to Dr Lambert. The academics who use the centre are very positive, mainly because those who choose to use it for their classes have to want to do so - and to develop what Dr Neary calls “a progressive pedagogy”.

Those involved in designing the new room are determinedly idealistic. The designers took a deliberate decision not to have any tables in the room because tables force students to sit in one place and not move about. Tables create a barrier, according to Neary. Having no tables means that people can feel closer to one another. “This room is driven by the dynamics of the relationship of collaboration,” says Dr Neary. “There’s no place for the teacher. It’s open and democratic and dynamic.”

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Apple Learning Interchange 2007 - 1-1 Learning Annotated

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills - Home Annotated

Madison, Wisc. - March 14 - More than 200 business, commerce, government, and education leaders from throughout the state gathered at the Madison Convention Center for a Summit on 21st Century Skills. Wisconsin recently joined the Partnership for 21st Century Skills to support efforts to revise academic standards and ensure that the state’s graduates are prepared for family-supporting jobs or postsecondary studies.

Summit participants focused on three key questions:

• What are the knowledge and skills that today’s eighth-grade students need to learn to be prepared to enter the workforce now as well as five or 10 years from now?
• What are the 21st century skills that will sustain and grow a vibrant, global economy?
• What are the strategies and actions on which business and education can collaborate to increase Wisconsin’s educational competitiveness?

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users » Slacker Manager

• Excellent guide to getting the most out of your del.icio.us (though it doesn’t include combining it with Diigo).
  - post by cburell

Way to Wiki / Good things

• This is a nice wiki featuring different uses of wikis from classrooms around the world. Worth checking out for ideas.
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An invitation to you to snoop in my new history class website’s pages laying out step-by-step instructions for how to set up and use all the tools listed above to do research.

All feedback is welcome. I’m especially keen to hear if anybody can suggest improvements in the process I use to subscribe to del.icio.us tagged searches. I’m new at it. It seems cumbersome to me.

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The burn-out I mentioned in my last post showed in the sour title. Apologies for that (and shame on me–life’s too short for sourness). I did “breathe,” as Barbara advised in a comment, and sleep in Saturday. Mental hygiene seems about done; frustration tolerance, refueled.

Especially in light of the email I woke to from Bloglines this morning. I hope they won’t object to me posting it. It only seems fair to share this, since I didn’t spare them the “petulant frenzies,” to quote Zappa, of earlier posts.

Short version: Bloglines has done good. Here’s the message–quite gracious:

Hi
Thank you for your input in the [image feature] matter. We at Bloglines went
back and came up with a solution that I hope will still allow your
students to use Bloglines and not be exposed to adult content. Basically
we moved the [image feature] to a new domain [URL omitted] and
have contacted all the major 3rd party filter sites to add this domain
to their adult lists. More information can be found at
[URL omitted].

In either case, I’m sorry about how long it took for us to get matters
settled. I hope that this change may save you some of the hassle of
rebuilding your lesson plans, but I understand that your students do
come first. Thank you again for choosing Bloglines as your original
choice. I hope that you may come back to try our service as we roll out
new features in the future.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best
[dloc]

So thanks to Miguel and everybody else who read my post and took action by going to the Bloglines forum and/or their own edublogs, and expressing their views. And thanks to Bloglines for problem-solving.

I said it earlier, and still find it true: for finding RSS feeds, Bloglines so far seems vastly superior to Google Reader (though GR is still in Beta). Their “find similar feeds,” “search for posts/feeds,” and other features are unmatched by Google Reader and Netvibes. (I will say that I like GR’s “tagging” system, and hope Bloglines adds this.) So I don’t know….

I may bring my students back to Bloglines. I may let them choose what reader to use. Again, I don’t know. The focus is supposed to be on locating, evaluating, and managing information, not comparing different web 2.0 services. It’s the literacy, not the technology. And all of this teapot tempest has distracted me and my students from that vital point.

But good on Bloglines for their solution.

Wait. I haven’t really checked it out. Is it a solution? What do you think?

Final thought: it’s interesting what a few people with a few blogs can do these days. In the last month, both ePals and Bloglines have listened to us bloggers and actually problem-solved with us. Sort of gives you hope, it does.

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