Today as I was wading through my Google Reader subscriptions I came across a great post under the title " 5 Great Slides about Technology, Learning, and Change." featured in the
Dangerously Irrelevant website. These are mainly witty quotes that you can share with your students and colleagues. They can also be embeded in presentations and slideshows pprovided you respect the copyrights whih I am pretty sure you will.
Here are the five slides
1- The Illusion of Lecture
2- Master Learners
3- Halcyon Days
4- Good vs Good Enough
5- The Real Pedagogical Problem
Yesterday, Snigdha Nandipali won the
National Spelling Bee Championship to become the best American speller of the year 2012. It is pretty amazing how a young girl in her age could reach this towering achievement, it is as she said herself a miracle. I heard this piece of news on the radio as I was driving back home from work yesterday and the first thing I did when I logged on was I checked in Google for
National Spelling Bee website. To my susrprise I found that the website itself is a great resource which deserves a fair review here.
There are sections for teachers, parents and students , and a column where you can learn more about the past spelling champions. There is also a section called " take the test " where you can test your spelling skills. Believe me if you think you are a good speller and have not yet tried that section then think again. You might probably be surprised to find that you are not the spelling geek you thought you are.
Talking about spelling skills,
Richard Byrne has compiled a great list of activities that are designed to improve your students spelling performance. After going through the list I picked up the ones below.
This is a great game where learners can improve their spelling based on matching activities. It has different levels and grades.
Scholastic provides three awesome games to improve spelling skills. Leo Loves to Spell ( students help Leo find the correct letter ), Reggie Loves to Rhyme ( Rhineceros needs help finding the the words rhyming with different objects ), and the third one is called Nina the Naming Newt which also needs help identifying objects that belong to various places.
This one here has 6 word games and some of them are spelling activities such as : Miss Spell's Class.
This is a great website for both spelling and vocabulary practice. It includes more than 42.000 spellimg words and takes into consideration the spelling differences between the American and British English ( colour/color, favourite/favourite ). It also provides the correct pronunciation of every word mentioned there.
Spell Bee provides different spelling games for students to play. Teachers have the option to create accounts for their students in order to track their performance.
This is an awesome game where students get to practice their spelling abilities. It has different levels of difficulty and students move up the scale upon spelling words correctly. It also offers pronunciation for words students find hard to spell.
This one resembles one of the tools I mentioned in
The Best Free Tools to Help you Improve your Typing Skills. Catch the Spelling is basically a set of several spelling games with more or less the same format. Students watch their computer screens as words fall down from the top, they have to catch the right letters in the correct sequence to spell the word shown to them.
This is another awesome website where students get to learn and improve their spelling skills via a plethora of games.
As usual with with every first day of the month, I feature here the most popular posts in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning for Last month. This is a practice I have been doing for some time now in attempt to make it easy and accessible for all my readers to bookmark and read, at their own leisure, our most popular articles according to your interaction with them.
Let me just reiterate my thanks and gratitude for all of you for being faithful readers of this blog and it is because of your encouragement and help that this blog is where it is now. I am so glad we have built such an awesome community of educators and teachers.
Here is the list of the most popular posts in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning for last month;
1-
Six Free Tools to Easily Cite Resources for Teachers and Students
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Eleven Free Tools to Teach Human Anatomy in 3D
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Free Tools to Create and Administer Quizzes
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Fifty Two Secrets Students Should Know about Google Docs
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Free Plagiarism Detector Tools for Educators
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Eight Ways Students and Teachers Can Use Google Plus
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An Interesting List of Google Plus Circles for Educators
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Free Tools to Easily Record and Share Audio Messages with Students
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Ten Must Have Bookmarklets for Teachers
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The Top 20 TED Talks in The Last 5 Years
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Five Great Motivational Videos for your Students
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Great Specialized Search Engines for Educators
Have you already subscribed to Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ? If not this is how to do it :
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Subscribe via RSS
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Find Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Google Plus
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Google World Wonders Project is a new service from Google that has been laucnhed today.As we have learnt from
Google Official Blog, this new project allows users to discover 132 historic sites from 18 countries including Stenehenge, the archaeological areas of Pempeii and the ancient Kyoto temples. Users can also wander the sandy dunes of Australia's Shark Bay and explore beautiful parks around the world.
World Wonders uses Street view technology to cover all the sites that a normal camera could not dig into. It also provides YouTube videos and 3D models of the historical places so that you can have a broader view of each location. Most of the information and photographs included in this project are a fruit of a partnership between Google and UNESCO, The World's Monuments Fund, Ourplace, and Getty Images.
Watch this video to learn more about this project.
Texting is a ubiquitous word you almost hear everyday especially in schools. Two days ago and as I finished explaining the instructions of the assignment my grade ten students a had to work on I was taken aback by one of girls surprised me with her daunting question to me . she said " Mr Med, can I have some free time when I finish my assignment first ? " and even though I told her that it is not a matter of who would finish the work first but what matter is understanding and doing it right, she nodded her head and went on " Yes, but being the first to finsih the assignment means that I understand it better ". I left it here for I did not want to engage with her on a discussion that would take us the rest of the period and rather asked her why she insisted on having some free time and only when I heard her answer then I knew where all that motivation and zeal to quickly finsih her assignment came from. She wanted some free time to text. Yes texting even inside the classroom ( Of course I do not tolerate it but some teachers in my school do and that is why students ask such questions ).
The story above is just the tip of the iceberg. I know most of you have experiences of some sort with students texting during the course . This has several negative pedagogical and educational downsides. However, below is a set of 15 amazing facts about texting ,as featured in
Online Colleges page, that I want you learn about and probably share some with your students. Every fact mentioned below has its correspending article that explains it more. Just click on any title to read the full article. Some of these articles are provided by leading online newspapers and websites such as : Washington Post, Daily Mail, Mashable, Reuters, Fox News, and many more.
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Getting a text makes you happier
2- Hypertexters are less healthy
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Texting behind the wheel is even riskier than we thought
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Texting while driving killed 16.000 in a six-year period
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Texters use fewer abbreviations than we thought
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Black people send the most text messages
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Texting heps HIV sufferes take their meds
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Texters don't believe that's a word
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Texting makes it easier to lie
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Many people are addicted to texting
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Most people still prefer a phone call
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Banning texting while driving is not the answer
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Female teens text the most
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Texting has spawned its own journey
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Predictive texting changes children's brains
Med Kharbach posted a discussion
Julio Palma replied to Med Kharbach's discussion 12 Interesting Educational Technology Posts for you
Matthew Reyes replied to Med Kharbach's discussion 12 Interesting Educational Technology Posts for you
