[FREE WORKSHOP] How to easily create engaging, interactive presentations using LectureTools.

Attend this live webinar below:   

LEARN HOW TO USE LECTURETOOLS
Increase learning, the easy way.

Online Session:
Thursday, 5 September 13:00 BST (UTC+1) (UK) (Local time zone) 

With the second half of 2013's teaching calendar underway, now is the time to consider using LectureTools, the world's leading student engagement system. Studies have shown that engagement levels in classes using LectureTools rise from 3 percent to 65 percent!

Join us for this free workshop and learn how to use LectureTools from the inventor himself, Professor Perry Samson.

IN THIS 60-MINUTE WORKSHOP, YOU'LL LEARN: 

• How to create a course, upload your presentations and add polls, quizzes and questions
• Best practices and tips for using LectureTools in your teaching
• How LectureTools increases student engagement
• How easy it is to incorporate LectureTools into your teaching

Using LectureTools, instructors can easily generate engaging classroom conversation and get real-time feedback by uploading quizzes, polls and questions into their existing presentations. Students (even the shy ones) are empowered to participate using the mobile phones, tablets and laptops they already own. You won't want to miss this insightful session to see how this active learning solution engages students and puts the fun back in teaching. 

Learn more about the world's leading student engagement solution, LectureTools. 
Register for this free session

[FREE WORKSHOP] How to easily create engaging, interactive presentations using LectureTools.

Attend this live webinar below:   

LEARN HOW TO USE LECTURETOOLS
Increase learning, the easy way.

Online Session:
Thursday, 5 September 13:00 BST (UTC+1) (UK) (Local time zone) 

With the second half of 2013's teaching calendar underway, now is the time to consider using LectureTools, the world's leading student engagement system. Studies have shown that engagement levels in classes using LectureTools rise from 3 percent to 65 percent!

Join us for this free workshop and learn how to use LectureTools from the inventor himself, Professor Perry Samson.

IN THIS 60-MINUTE WORKSHOP, YOU'LL LEARN: 

• How to create a course, upload your presentations and add polls, quizzes and questions
• Best practices and tips for using LectureTools in your teaching
• How LectureTools increases student engagement
• How easy it is to incorporate LectureTools into your teaching

Using LectureTools, instructors can easily generate engaging classroom conversation and get real-time feedback by uploading quizzes, polls and questions into their existing presentations. Students (even the shy ones) are empowered to participate using the mobile phones, tablets and laptops they already own. You won't want to miss this insightful session to see how this active learning solution engages students and puts the fun back in teaching. 

Learn more about the world's leading student engagement solution, LectureTools. 
Register for this free session

Feminists launch model for online learning

Photo: Hajer Naili

Hajer Naili, a New York-based reporter for Women's eNews reports, "This multi-university online course emphasizes feminist contributions to technological innovation and a collaborative approach that contrasts with the MOOC. "Expertise is distributed throughout the network," says a facilitator."

Photo: FemTechNet

A year after The New York Times ran an article about Silicon Valley, which opened with "Men invented the Internet," FemTechNet is about to launch an online curricula highlighting the significant contributions of feminists to technology.

FemTechNet, which describes itself as "a global network of feminist, students and artists who work on, with and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields," is calling the curriculum a DOCC, or Distributed Open Collaborative Course.

"Dialogues in Feminism and Technology," its first DOCC course--running from Sept.16 through December in 15 universities across the United States and Canada--is something of a pilot, which starts in North America and aims to expand across the globe in the coming year.
Two goals are preserving the history of feminist contributions to technological innovation and advancing feminist principles of social justice in future educational models and pedagogies, FemTechNet said in a press statement.
Read more... 


About FemTechNet  

Who?
FemTechNet is an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields including STS, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies.
Members in the network collaborative on the design and creation of a work of feminist technological innovation for the purposes of engaging the interests of students on advanced topics in feminist science-technology studies.  This project seeks to engender a set of digital practices among women and girls, to teach and encourage their participation in writing the technocultural histories of the future by becoming active participants in the creation of global digital archives.


What?
In 2013, FemTechNet initiated a networked learning experiment involving instructors and students from several institutions in the creation of a collaborative open course structure called a DOCC:  Distributed Open Collaborative Course on the topic of Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.
The first iteration of the DOCC 2013 will take place from September-December, 2013.
Read more... 

Source: FemTechNet

Feminists launch model for online learning

Photo: Hajer Naili

Hajer Naili, a New York-based reporter for Women's eNews reports, "This multi-university online course emphasizes feminist contributions to technological innovation and a collaborative approach that contrasts with the MOOC. "Expertise is distributed throughout the network," says a facilitator."

Photo: FemTechNet

A year after The New York Times ran an article about Silicon Valley, which opened with "Men invented the Internet," FemTechNet is about to launch an online curricula highlighting the significant contributions of feminists to technology.

FemTechNet, which describes itself as "a global network of feminist, students and artists who work on, with and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields," is calling the curriculum a DOCC, or Distributed Open Collaborative Course.

"Dialogues in Feminism and Technology," its first DOCC course--running from Sept.16 through December in 15 universities across the United States and Canada--is something of a pilot, which starts in North America and aims to expand across the globe in the coming year.
Two goals are preserving the history of feminist contributions to technological innovation and advancing feminist principles of social justice in future educational models and pedagogies, FemTechNet said in a press statement.
Read more... 


About FemTechNet  

Who?
FemTechNet is an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields including STS, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies.
Members in the network collaborative on the design and creation of a work of feminist technological innovation for the purposes of engaging the interests of students on advanced topics in feminist science-technology studies.  This project seeks to engender a set of digital practices among women and girls, to teach and encourage their participation in writing the technocultural histories of the future by becoming active participants in the creation of global digital archives.


What?
In 2013, FemTechNet initiated a networked learning experiment involving instructors and students from several institutions in the creation of a collaborative open course structure called a DOCC:  Distributed Open Collaborative Course on the topic of Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.
The first iteration of the DOCC 2013 will take place from September-December, 2013.
Read more... 

Source: FemTechNet

How music technology can boost student skills Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor

Tweet me @eSN_Meris

Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor writes, "In today's news, a new study reveals that music education can offset widespread student achievement gaps, enhance student learning skills, and promote better brain function later in life. The good news for cash-strapped schools is that new music tech can provide students with music ed at little to no cost."

“We are what we do,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles professor and principal investigator at the Auditory Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. “And the brain helps prove that.”

Also fascinating is the brain’s dependence on experience. For example, if the brain hears a few notes of a song it recognizes, even if the song stops playing, the brain will often continue mirroring the next few notes of the song.
For a recording of the brain’s electrical responses to music, watch the slideshow.

Musician Quincy Jones’s software, Playground Sessions, helps students learn to play the piano using popular songs. Playground Sessions also has hours of interactive video tutorials starring pianist David Sides teaching songs and music theory, explains the Playground Sessions website.

Playground Sessions: 30 days to play

Playground Sessions’ platform includes a music store for sheet music, video lessons, and a MIDI keyboard setup for learning to play through popular music.
Read more... 

Source: eSchool News and Channel Playground Sessions (Youtube) 

How music technology can boost student skills Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor

Tweet me @eSN_Meris

Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor writes, "In today's news, a new study reveals that music education can offset widespread student achievement gaps, enhance student learning skills, and promote better brain function later in life. The good news for cash-strapped schools is that new music tech can provide students with music ed at little to no cost."

“We are what we do,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles professor and principal investigator at the Auditory Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. “And the brain helps prove that.”

Also fascinating is the brain’s dependence on experience. For example, if the brain hears a few notes of a song it recognizes, even if the song stops playing, the brain will often continue mirroring the next few notes of the song.
For a recording of the brain’s electrical responses to music, watch the slideshow.

Musician Quincy Jones’s software, Playground Sessions, helps students learn to play the piano using popular songs. Playground Sessions also has hours of interactive video tutorials starring pianist David Sides teaching songs and music theory, explains the Playground Sessions website.

Playground Sessions: 30 days to play

Playground Sessions’ platform includes a music store for sheet music, video lessons, and a MIDI keyboard setup for learning to play through popular music.
Read more... 

Source: eSchool News and Channel Playground Sessions (Youtube) 

Current Site and App of the Week - eSchool News August 14, 2013

Current Site of the Week

Tweet me @eSN_Dennis

"Our Site of the Week is OpenClass Exchange, a searchable catalog of free, open educational resources from publishing giant Pearson", writes Dennis Pierce, Editor.

Pearson launches searchable catalog of open educational resources

Photo: OpenClass

The number of open educational resources (OERs) that educators can choose from is constantly growing. Every week, new—and free—textbooks, quizzes, videos, and even full courses are appearing online.
Now, publishing giant Pearson has wrangled up nearly 700,000 of these resources into an easily searchable catalog through its OpenClass Exchange platform.

An expansion of Pearson’s online learning environment OpenClass, Exchange will allow educators to search for and access thousands of resources, including videos from TED-Ed, Kahn Academy, and YouTube EDU, as well as courses from the Open Course Library.

Scot Chadwick, vice president and general manager of OpenClass, said the expansion seeks to address two concerns the company has heard repeatedly from instructors: It’s hard to locate the best open educational resources, and, when found, the resources are not always easy to integrate into existing learning management systems.

“Educators are saying, ‘We can’t dedicate our lives to content searches,’” Chadwick said. “We wanted to address that, so we brought together as many really great learning resources as we could. A lot of them are video-based, which is intentional, but there’s also great simulations, courses, and eBook content.”
To access the material, educators type what they are looking for into a search bar. They are then given the option to preview material that matches their search terms. If they like what they see, they simply click on a button that says “add to course.”

App of the week 

Name: ChemDraw
 

What is it? 
Use ChemDraw® for iPad to create, edit and share publication-quality chemical structures with just the touch of a finger.

Features:

• Create chemically accurate, publication-quality structures and reactions: Pre-drawn rings, bonds, functional groups, charges, radicals, arrows, shapes, and stereochemistry.
• Arrange and adjust diagrams: Scaling and moving gestures, lassos, automatic clean-up, structure checking, color selection.
• Save your diagrams as CDXML files.
• Share with Flick-to-Share™ for mobile-to-mobile collaboration; import (CDXML and molfiles) and export (CDXML) files from iTunes or using email.

Read more... 

Related link 
Visit iTunes to buy and download apps

Source: eSchool News and OpenClass

Current Site and App of the Week - eSchool News August 14, 2013

Current Site of the Week

Tweet me @eSN_Dennis

"Our Site of the Week is OpenClass Exchange, a searchable catalog of free, open educational resources from publishing giant Pearson", writes Dennis Pierce, Editor.

Pearson launches searchable catalog of open educational resources

Photo: OpenClass

The number of open educational resources (OERs) that educators can choose from is constantly growing. Every week, new—and free—textbooks, quizzes, videos, and even full courses are appearing online.
Now, publishing giant Pearson has wrangled up nearly 700,000 of these resources into an easily searchable catalog through its OpenClass Exchange platform.

An expansion of Pearson’s online learning environment OpenClass, Exchange will allow educators to search for and access thousands of resources, including videos from TED-Ed, Kahn Academy, and YouTube EDU, as well as courses from the Open Course Library.

Scot Chadwick, vice president and general manager of OpenClass, said the expansion seeks to address two concerns the company has heard repeatedly from instructors: It’s hard to locate the best open educational resources, and, when found, the resources are not always easy to integrate into existing learning management systems.

“Educators are saying, ‘We can’t dedicate our lives to content searches,’” Chadwick said. “We wanted to address that, so we brought together as many really great learning resources as we could. A lot of them are video-based, which is intentional, but there’s also great simulations, courses, and eBook content.”
To access the material, educators type what they are looking for into a search bar. They are then given the option to preview material that matches their search terms. If they like what they see, they simply click on a button that says “add to course.”

App of the week 

Name: ChemDraw
 

What is it? 
Use ChemDraw® for iPad to create, edit and share publication-quality chemical structures with just the touch of a finger.

Features:

• Create chemically accurate, publication-quality structures and reactions: Pre-drawn rings, bonds, functional groups, charges, radicals, arrows, shapes, and stereochemistry.
• Arrange and adjust diagrams: Scaling and moving gestures, lassos, automatic clean-up, structure checking, color selection.
• Save your diagrams as CDXML files.
• Share with Flick-to-Share™ for mobile-to-mobile collaboration; import (CDXML and molfiles) and export (CDXML) files from iTunes or using email.

Read more... 

Related link 
Visit iTunes to buy and download apps

Source: eSchool News and OpenClass

New Research: Live Webinar on How to Prepare Your Campus for the Future of Video

Attend this live webinar below:

Preparing Your Campus for the Future of Academic Video
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. CT (convert to your time zone)

Demand for academic video from the “YouTube generation” of students is growing at an astronomical rate, and universities large and small are evaluating how best to harness the power of video to meet this new level of student expectations and broaden the reach of their institutions. Video is foundational to the cutting edge trends in higher education today, including personalized education, flipped instruction and MOOCs. Does your institution have an academic video strategy?

Join us for this live webinar as JD Solomon, Editorial Director for University Business, reveals research findings from a new white paper about how universities are preparing for a campus future with video at its core.

Topics will include:

• The strategies, tactics and technologies best suited to secure, search, index, archive and stream the video created on your campus
• Case studies from universities that have already deployed enterprise-wide video capture and management
• First-person faculty findings on transforming existing courses into interactive personalized learning environments

Register now

New Research: Live Webinar on How to Prepare Your Campus for the Future of Video

Attend this live webinar below:

Preparing Your Campus for the Future of Academic Video
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. CT (convert to your time zone)

Demand for academic video from the “YouTube generation” of students is growing at an astronomical rate, and universities large and small are evaluating how best to harness the power of video to meet this new level of student expectations and broaden the reach of their institutions. Video is foundational to the cutting edge trends in higher education today, including personalized education, flipped instruction and MOOCs. Does your institution have an academic video strategy?

Join us for this live webinar as JD Solomon, Editorial Director for University Business, reveals research findings from a new white paper about how universities are preparing for a campus future with video at its core.

Topics will include:

• The strategies, tactics and technologies best suited to secure, search, index, archive and stream the video created on your campus
• Case studies from universities that have already deployed enterprise-wide video capture and management
• First-person faculty findings on transforming existing courses into interactive personalized learning environments

Register now

Learn to Train Online with a Virtual Learning eBook

Discover the Power of Webcasting with Webinars for Dummies - Free eBook
 

Never has employee and talent development been more important than in the current economic climate. Competitive advantages and employee retention through training are key to success in the future. 

Virtual learning solutions ensure that your employees, customers, and partners have instant access to the training and resources they need to be successful. Now you can deliver highly interactive learning environments that can be accessed anywhere, anytime, from any device. Explore the benefits of implementing a virtual learning solution with the Virtual Learning For Dummies eBook.  

This eBook will help you quickly learn the WHY and HOW of virtual learning, along with:

• Virtual learning best practices
• How to create the most effective virtual learning environment
• How to revolutionize your training with virtual learning programs
• How to choose the best virtual learning solution 

Download now

Source: ON24

Learn to Train Online with a Virtual Learning eBook

Discover the Power of Webcasting with Webinars for Dummies - Free eBook
 

Never has employee and talent development been more important than in the current economic climate. Competitive advantages and employee retention through training are key to success in the future. 

Virtual learning solutions ensure that your employees, customers, and partners have instant access to the training and resources they need to be successful. Now you can deliver highly interactive learning environments that can be accessed anywhere, anytime, from any device. Explore the benefits of implementing a virtual learning solution with the Virtual Learning For Dummies eBook.  

This eBook will help you quickly learn the WHY and HOW of virtual learning, along with:

• Virtual learning best practices
• How to create the most effective virtual learning environment
• How to revolutionize your training with virtual learning programs
• How to choose the best virtual learning solution 

Download now

Source: ON24

Complimentary eBook: How to Get Started with Enterprise Social Networks: Justify, Evaluate, Deploy, Adopt and Grow

Social business tools are not entirely new. Enterprises have been using virtual tools such as chat and message board tools for years. 

 

 

Yet today, Gartner predicts that by 2016 half of all large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30% of those will be considered as essential as email and phone. 

Why are we seeing such a rapidly accelerating interest and business investment in social business implementations, especially as Gartner notes in Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)? How do you understand how ESNs can help you and how do you get started?

Download this free eBook from Bloomfire to learn how.

Source:TrainingMagNetwork

 

Complimentary eBook: How to Get Started with Enterprise Social Networks: Justify, Evaluate, Deploy, Adopt and Grow

Social business tools are not entirely new. Enterprises have been using virtual tools such as chat and message board tools for years. 

 

 

Yet today, Gartner predicts that by 2016 half of all large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30% of those will be considered as essential as email and phone. 

Why are we seeing such a rapidly accelerating interest and business investment in social business implementations, especially as Gartner notes in Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)? How do you understand how ESNs can help you and how do you get started?

Download this free eBook from Bloomfire to learn how.

Source:TrainingMagNetwork

 

Professor Sugata Mitra on teaching spelling and grammar: Phones have made it unnecessary

Photo: Rebecca Klein

Rebecca Klein writes, "Well, this is an opinion you don’t often hear in the education world."  

Acclaimed professor and educational researcher Sugata Mitra suggested in an interview with British education magazine TES that he no longer thinks it's entirely necessary for kids to learn spelling and grammar. 
He credits the proliferation of new technologies, such as the "autocorrect" feature on mobile phones, for phasing out such curricula. 

Photo: TheHuffingtonPost.com

“Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way,” Mitra told the magazine last week.

He added, “My entire background tells me, ‘No, no, it is really bad what you are saying,' but I think there is a change and we have to learn to live with it."
Read more...

Source: Huffington Post

Professor Sugata Mitra on teaching spelling and grammar: Phones have made it unnecessary

Photo: Rebecca Klein

Rebecca Klein writes, "Well, this is an opinion you don’t often hear in the education world."  

Acclaimed professor and educational researcher Sugata Mitra suggested in an interview with British education magazine TES that he no longer thinks it's entirely necessary for kids to learn spelling and grammar. 
He credits the proliferation of new technologies, such as the "autocorrect" feature on mobile phones, for phasing out such curricula. 

Photo: TheHuffingtonPost.com

“Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way,” Mitra told the magazine last week.

He added, “My entire background tells me, ‘No, no, it is really bad what you are saying,' but I think there is a change and we have to learn to live with it."
Read more...

Source: Huffington Post

Current Site and App of the Week - eSchool News

Current Site of the Week 

Tweet me @eSN_Dennis

Dennis Pierce, Editor. writes, "Our Site of the Week is Mathlanding, a free resource to support elementary math instruction."

 

Mathlanding helps elementary educators with math instruction

Developed by Maryland Public Television in partnership with The Math Forum at Drexel University and the International Society for Technology in Education, Mathlanding is a new website to support elementary math instruction.

Photo: eSchool News

Aimed at elementary math specialists, coaches, mentors, and teachers, the website is a dynamic resource to help support the professional development needs of elementary educators in building mathematical knowledge and instructional practice. It includes videos of exemplary instructional practices, as well as lessons, games, activities, and articles.

A robust search engine gives users the ability to search by keyword, math topic, and grade level anywhere on the site. Users also can browse through resources by Common Core or NCTM content standard.

What’s more, you can save, share, and collaborate with fellow educators within a school, a district, or across the country, using a feature called “My Folders.” Users have the option of making their folders and groups either public or private.

This free website was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation.

About Mathlanding 

It's about teaching; it's about learning; it's about elementary math.

Mathlanding (ML) is designed with the elementary math specialist/coach/mentor and teacher in mind. It's a dynamic resource to help support the professional development needs of elementary educators in building mathematical knowledge and instructional practice. The site is created to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support teaching and learning of elementary mathematics. 
Read more...

App of the week 

Name: 
K12 Timed Reading & Comprehension Practice
 

What is it? 
This app lets readers in levels K–4 practice fluency by reading 250+ short, timed stories. This offering includes comprehension questions to check reading understanding following grade 1 through 4 stories, as well as per-student charts to track grade and story mastery.

Features:
• More than 250 short, fiction and nonfiction stories for young readers
• 46 unique Flesch-Kincaid reading levels between 0.0 and 4.7
• Track one reader, multiple readers, or even a whole class
• Track stories read and what’s next on the reading list
• Automatic suggestions to increase reading difficulty when students achieve consistently fast wpm scores
• Timer automatically calculates wpm for each reading attempt
• Each grade 1 through 4 story includes questions to check reading understanding
• Question pools of 6 to 9 questions per story gauge comprehension on rereading attempts
• Question prompts for grade 1 stories include audio support for developing readers
• Grade Stats: Per-student chart shows fluency (time) and comprehension (correct answers) mastery across the grade level
• Story Stats: Per-student chart shows fluency wpm and correct answers for the last 6 reading attempts per story
• Easily delete single reading attempts from charts  

Visit iTunes to buy and download apps
Read more...

Source: eSchool News