March 22, 2010

Today, our teacher ed call centered around some of the sites that we triaged recently. As we were discussing sites, I noted a few that seemed very promising. When we triage for MERLOT, it means that we're selecting sites that we will review in the future. Cris Guenter mentioned a site that was particularly useful in graduate education classes, an assignment that taught students how to use Zotero to create an annotated bibliography. One of the neat aspects is that it could easily be adapted to any other course (it's constructed for an early childhood literature class). After checking it out, I discovered some other fine work by the author, Sarah Leigarde Swart, and thought you might find it interesting as well.

Ms. Swart's main site is located at http://www.easytechnoskills.com/index.html. One of the most impressive aspects is a compilation of resources for online teaching and learning. You can view that at http://www.easytechnoskills.com/DE_resources.htm.

I'd encourage anyone interested in incorporating more technology in their teaching and learning to check out these websites.

Jane

Teacher Education Call 3/8/10

As is usual, we learned about a lot on our biweekly teacher education call. I thought I might share some of the ideas here.

Cris Guenter shared information about a Virtual World Conference on March 12-13: (http://www.vwbpe.org/) Registration for Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education's quick link is: http://vwbpe10.eventbrite.com/ Once you register, you’ll have SLURLS so that you can teleport to the session of your choice. You need to have a Second Life avatar to participate and you should know how to teleport and how to sit down in Second Life, but other than that, newbies are welcome.

We talked about a new feature in You Tube which allows you to use machine captioning on your video. David Wicks tried it out but found that the captioning (similar to programs like Dragon Speak) was not very accurate. It might be something you want to look into. You do have the option to go back in and edit the captioning file once completed.


One site that we are planning to explore is Tiny Chat
Tiny Chat allows users to embed chat in a website, blog or forum. You can also share You Tube videos through Tiny Chat....something to investigate!

Jane

Quizlet

Just the other day I was working with my math methods students on the topic of geometry and it became clear that many of them had forgotten some important vocabulary terms, like similar, congruent, the difference between diameter and radius and so on. I recommended a site to them that the Teacher Ed board had recently reviewed -- Quizlet. Quizlet was created by a then-high school student in order to practice for his tests. The program allows you to either use electronic flashcards created by another teacher or student, or develop your own to help you practice and learn vocabulary.

Just recently, the Quizlet site posted that an Apple app for Quizlet will be available this month. How cool is that?

Quizlet, though valuable for math vocabulary, would be equally useful for foreign language acquisition, science terms, literature terms and the like.

Check out our review of Quizlet!

Jane