The EdTech community has become rather twitterpated by @TomBarrett, who has developed a series of worldwide crowd-sourced google documents on a variety of uses of technology in the classroom. Each is essentially a series of slides made public where anyone can add their own use or see ideas from others. While many of the examples pertain more to elementary or secondary education, there are plenty of applications for higher ed and professional development as well. There’s one for pocket video cameras, one for iPads, Voicethread, Prezi and tons more. Thankfully he’s collecting them all in an “Interesting Ways” page on his blog. It is definitely worth checking out. To boot, he’s also been engaged in a Creative Commons license violation argument with an Australian software company who lifted the slides directly and removed all attribution. Thus, the advantages of worldwide collaboration and the pitfalls, all at once.
As we began sketching out our vision for the TE(A)CH site I perused a number of web-site design questionnaires to outline what we knew we wanted in the site as well as identify gaps in our thinking and issues we may encounter. Though much of the commercial stuff wasn’t relevant, I found the exercise helpful in that we thought about the user’s experience more than we might have otherwise. Smashing Magazine has assembled a list of Web Design Questionnaires, Project Sheets and Work Sheets that might prove useful as you plan your own website or work with faculty/students to design project sites.
Honorable Mentions:
- Talia at Cac.aphony has a great post about developing a visual assignment for her FIT students to help with their interpretation of a text. This ties in nicely with the document design discussion and follow-up posts happening over at ProfHacker. What is the role of the visual in your classroom?
- Teach Paperless has been nominated for an EduBlog Award for their post “Why teachers should blog.” The post brings up a number of points but one of the most interesting is the notion of a public display of thought processes and teachers as models for this, which echoes Joe Ugoretz’s post about the public/private of blogging and learning.
- Awesome. Evernote founder states “Where there’s a platform, there will be Evernote.” Which is why it is quickly growing on me after only about 10 days of usage.
- A useful post on 11 Ways Not to Use Powerpoint at NspireD2.
- Though the list is short right now, NspireD2 is creating a list of blogs about teaching in the disciplines. Hopefully the list will grow as more folks use the recommendation form to add blogs to the list.
