Posts Tagged ‘Weekly’

Weekly Roundup: 12/6

December 6th, 2010

What a busy week! Today’s flurries of snow follow a flurry of interesting activity on the educational technology front. Read on to see what caught my eye.

Free Technology for Teachers, which is an unbelievable wealth of constant ed tech information, has a post about free ebooks for teachers and parents. Two that you might find useful are 20 Webtools Applied to Teaching, which provides summaries and sample ideas for webtools such as Voicethread (which we love here at BCC). Microsoft has a free pdf guide for Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research Skills. Of course it is Bing-centric but it is filled with resources for you to use to help your students evaluate information online.

It’s also time for ProfHacker’s monthly Teaching Carnival. These carnivals are basically a roundup of the top news of the month on “teaching in college and university classrooms.” There’s a ton of content in this one so I recommend sending the ones that intrigue you the most to Instapaper or bookmarking the page for those Sunday mornings when your neighbor swipes your Times, you know, if you still get paper delivery.

Oh, reflexivity. In every syllabus I make sure to include the requisite “Your paper must be in APA style, 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced with 1 inch margins and page numbers in the header” blurb. But why is it requisite? A post by Evan Snider at ProfHacker sort of blew my mind a little when he argues “such draconian formatting requirements stifle students’ creativity and cut off any critical thinking about what should be a crucial part of any writing-intensive classroom, namely visual design.” I’m all about visual research methods when I’m wearing my researcher hat, so why have I kept the visual out assignments? Snider engages the skeptics and followers with a lengthy discussion about the how and why of document design and how to encourage your students to break the mold. There’s quite a healthy follow-up discussion in the comments as well.

And, finally, there’s an interesting article from Edudemic documenting How the Harvard Law Library is Embracing the 21st Century. They chronicle the changes the library is making to move into the digital era and how these changes in information management have influenced other areas of the university. The guiding principle behind the library’s organization is “to define it before it is decided for us” which is a sentiment that I think is often echoed throughout our own engagement with technology and our own institutions.

Honorable Mentions

Weekly Roundup: 11/29

November 29th, 2010

Do edtech bloggers rest over a holiday weekend? I think not! Lots of good ideas were percolating this week in between lots of eating and decorating. Here’s your roundup:

  • The promise and hope of distance education for renewing higher ed opportunities in Haiti is the subject of this Mashable! post. The table showing the losses to the higher education system in Haiti (from human casualties to building destruction) is tremendous. University of the people is constructing online work centers to help students gain access to distance learning programs to help continue their education while the universities are rebuilding.
  • In summarazing the need for a purposeful education technology plan, one of the key suggestions is to make use of “the disciplines.” In my previous work at LaGCC I found the discipline approach particularly helpful in encouraging faculty to identify writing projects/techniques specific to their students’ needs, what’s to say we can’t capitalize on it for encouraging technology use as well?
  • Honorable Mentions: Enter the Group for group collaboration; 18 Tasks You Can Crowdsource, from website design to transcription; and, as I wearily rub my eyes and reach for the eye drops I’m reminded of 5 Important Tips for Better Eye Health in a Digital World.
  • Irrelevant-but-too-humorous-not-to-post-bonus: Sesame Street’s savviness with social media never ceases to astound me. Their latest campaign? Cookie Monster to host SNL.

Weekly Roundup: 11/15

November 15th, 2010

Start your Monday out right, with a recap of useful bits from the IT world:

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