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Archive for September, 2008

September 27th, 2008

Magic and delight

Posted by sarah on September 27th, 2008

Some technology simply surprises and delights. I’ve posted about the web applications developed by 37signals before – their products give you what you need and nothing more. You never feel like you’re fighting the interface to make it work for you.

Quicksilver is another one. At first glance, Quicksilver simply lets you find applications and data on your computer or in the cloud. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognise which items you are searching for based on previous experience. 

More than that, having found what you want, Quicksilver lets you choose what to do with it – email it, copy it, move it, launch it. You can send instant messages, dial a phone number, look up words in a dictionary and queue up songs in iTunes party shuffle without having to open an application and wrangle with its interface. You can resolve a simple task and get back to what you were doing without interruption. 

more »

 
Tags: Design, Magic & Delight, Quicksilver, user experience, web 3.0
Posted in: e-Learning, Magic & Delight
No Comments
 
September 25th, 2008

Affordances of software

Posted by sarah on September 25th, 2008

It’s a relief that as we access new and more sources of information, we also develop tools to help us manage this information. One very popular tool is delicious, which lets you collect, tag (label) and share links to online content. 

Sunnybrae Normal School has created a delicious page to access learning objects on Digistore. Using tags, teachers have grouped and organised learning objects to meet specific learning purposes. Students use the page to access the LOs. Willowdale School has collated a wide range of resources, tagged by learning area, topic and level.

delicious and other social bookmarking websites like it provide a great service, but is that the full story? I’ve been reading this great article by Day and Lloyd (2007) ‘Affordances of Online Technologies: More than the Properties of the Technology’,Australian Educational Computing, 22 (2). The ‘affordances’ (or attributes) of software have the potential both to support and limit learning. 

more »

 
Tags: affordances, delicious, information overload, social bookmarking
Posted in: e-Learning
No Comments
 
September 17th, 2008

Boolify

Posted by sarah on September 17th, 2008

This is nifty. Boolify makes it easier for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search and by showing them how each change to their search changes their results.

Search results are presented through Google’s ‘Safe Search STRICT’ technology.

I’ve had a little play, and Boolify shows you the consequences of your choice of search terms. It definitely makes more sense if you read up on boolean logic first (the website provides information and links)!

 
Tags: search
Posted in: e-Learning
2 Comments
 
September 14th, 2008

EDtalks

Posted by sarah on September 14th, 2008

Congrats to the folk at CORE Education who’ve created EDtalks – a website featuring videos of New Zealand and international educators talking about learning. What a great idea! The simple, straightforward interface got me right into checking out the current collection of 15 videos with comments.

I started with a video of Sharon Freisen on inquiry, which she defines as a disposition cultivated by teaching and learning, not something that the student ‘gets done’. She argues that teachers themselves should be challenged by the inquiry to ask new questions – if this isn’t the case, we can’t expect to cultivate inquiry in the students that we teach.

more »

 
Tags: EDtalks, inquiry, key competencies, Rose Hipkins
Posted in: e-Learning
1 Comment
 
September 5th, 2008

Here comes everybody

Posted by sarah on September 5th, 2008

I’ve been a fan of Clay Shirky’s writing for a few years now, and Will Richardson has conducted this great interview (crikey, back in August, now) with Shirky teasing out the implications for education from his latest book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations. 

Shirky summarises his thesis as ‘group action just got easier’. He discusses the way that new technologies are shifting learning further towards collaboration and self-organisation, with a subsequent impact on the role of the teacher and the nature and shape of schools. 

more »

 
Tags: Clay Shirky, curriculum, Social software: practices, teacher's role, Will Richardson
Posted in: e-Learning
No Comments
 
September 3rd, 2008

Rocky’s digital dozen

Posted by sarah on September 3rd, 2008

Rochelle Jensen is an e-learning adviser at the University of Waikato. She’s a powerhouse of ideas for using ICT in the classroom! The latest post on her blog is a presentation featuring a dozen great ways that her advisory colleagues are using ICT in their work. It’s intended to inspire other advisers. As Rocky says, this format would be a great way for teachers and schools to share their ideas, too. 

While you’re checking out Rocky’s blog, click through to her website listing Handpicked Collaborative Projects for use in the classroom.

 
Tags: presentations, professional learning, Rochelle Jensen
Posted in: e-Learning
No Comments
 
September 1st, 2008

Can kids teach themselves?

Posted by sarah on September 1st, 2008

This TED talk by Sugata Mitra reveals what can happen when children are left to their own devices. In the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children figured out how to use a computer on their own (including learning the necessary English to operate it) and then taught other children. Mitra concludes that parts of education can happen on their own – that education is a self-organising system.

more »

 
Tags: hardware, independent learning, key competencies
Posted in: e-Learning
No Comments
 
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