Honest reviews of the apps, platforms, AI tools, and devices teachers are asked to adopt. We assess what genuinely helps students think, what just keeps them busy, and what’s heavily marketed without earning its place.
24 posts
Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by a 30-year English teacher at an Alexandria, Va. school that just spent $98 million on renovations and technologies that none of the teachers want to use.
Reflecting on danah boyd’s distinction between social networks and social tools in schools, and why social networking sites themselves may not belong in classrooms even though social tools and network literacy do.
We’re big mind map people, and MindMeister has our minds a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that makes it easy to import FreeMind and MindJet MindManager maps, collaborate with others, track history, publish and embed maps, and even get Twitter update alerts—all while smoothing out that “publishing hump” much like Skitch and Jing.
A conversation with ourselves about why we use Twitter, what “tweeting” is, and how following and followers create a strange sense of presence and connection we can’t quite explain.
There are more educators using blogs, wikis, and Read/Write Web tools than ever, but the real shift isn’t just about publishing student work—it’s about networks, connection, and ongoing learning beyond individual projects and classrooms.
Andrew Keen at the Britannica blog writes something so diametrically opposed to our own take on things that it’s startling and, frankly, amazing on some level (as well as ironic). We do agree with one thing: this is a critically serious debate about Web 2.0, education, and the future of our information economy.
From the “Sometimes This All Scares Us” Department comes this item about parents Google-testing baby names to make sure their child wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Our kids are going to be so, so unclickable…
Ok, so check it out, dawg… here’s an example of what you can do with the new “My Maps” feature from Google. Go on…go look.
Great article in the New York Times magzine today on the burgeoning use of blogs and wikis by government intelligence agencies to capture and connect information and turn it into knowledge.
We share how we’ve been using Pageflakes in RSS workshops to create topic-specific student portals, and why these dynamic, customizable pages can be powerful tools for teaching content management, RSS, and global awareness.