21st Century Skills

I was intrigued by this site I found that outlines educational response to 21st century skills, Route 21. I love the logo (a highway marker 21) and the idea of collecting resources to help teachers target specific needs of a changing world. NWEA also has an excellent page that asks questions of online policy makers, teachers, and students about online course objectives that prepare learners for 21st century skills. Their Guide to Online High School Courses is here for download. If online courses kept these skills in mind, we could give our students valuable skills for life later on. :) Dabareh

Transforming Students with Internet Freedom Writing

Transformational leaders provide learning opportunities to empower others and stimulate innovation. Their charisma inspires others to overcome resistance to change and they give individual attention to encourage and motivate others. Nahavandi (2000). "Envisioning,enabling and empowering are central to transformational leadership” (Bass, 1997, p 134). Teachers are leaders empowering their students to reach a potential they never dared to dream alone. The movie Freedom Writers with Hilary Swank portrayed a first year teacher in the middle of a newly integrated school riddled with gang violence and prejudice. She created community in her class through making the various minorities realize that prejudice hurts everyone. Students wrote in journals about their personal pain and published a book of their writings called the Freedom Writers after the civil rights Freedom Riders they studied. She raised reading and writing scores and got them interested in reading Anne Frank after taking them to a Holocaust museum. Virtual education allows e-teachers to take students on virtual field trips. There is a poetry and literature world in Active Worlds (free virtual world) for teens that stretches the imagination with renaissance costumes, an opera theater and colorful flower gardens, carousel and poems scripted on parchment billboards. Students can blog about their life and reading experiences in online journals. Relating reading to life experience is one of the traits of good readers. A good reader “makes connections, asks questions, identifies confusions agrees or disagrees with ideas” (Tovani, 2004, p.63). The anonymity of the internet encourages students to share without fear of personal reprisal. Lowering the risk level students can partake in poetry nights or Shakespeare readings in an e-conference and write in blogs sharing writings and life changing experiences from reading. E-teaching can publish student works on websites increasing student pride by sharing their work with the world. E-teachers have potent tools to stretch students’ imaginations transforming and empowering them to potentials they never knew existed. References Bass, B.M. (1960). Leadership, psychology, and organizational behavior. New York: Harper & Brothers. Nahavandi, A. (2006). The art and science of leadership (4th Ed.) [Electronic Version]. Upper Saddle River: Pearson. Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to Teach Reading? Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Online Free Speeches

What a resource for history, literature, and cultural studies. Check out the American Rhetoric site for hundreds of free video clips and speeches. If you haven't watched "Who's on First" by Abbott and Costello lately, treat yourself!

Teach Collaborative Revision with Google Docs

Revision is a critical piece of the writing process—and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader’s Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way.

The sharing features of Google Docs enable you and your students to decide exactly who can access and edit documents. You’ll find that Google Docs helps promote group work and peer editing skills, and that it helps to fulfill the stated goal of The National Council of Teachers of English, which espouses writing as a process and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing.

Get the rest of the story including a lesson plan and lots of great resources at:
http://www.google.com/educators/weeklyreader.html

Free online classroom resources

Thank you Susie for this resource!

A very user friendly resource for educators and a little something for everyone! =;->  

Free Web Tools Blog
http://freewebtools.wordpress.com/

Here is a sampling under the Creativity Tools section.
Toondoo- free comic strips and comic books creation tool.
Animoto-free music video creation site for 30 second spots. Then it costs $3.00/video for longer videos/
Flickr-free photo sharing website and online community platform.
Picnik.com-free photo editing online and integrates with Flickr.

Flat Classroom Wiki Project

Thank you Bethany for sharing this cool wiki project 
http://flatclassroomproject2006.wikispaces.com/  
:)
~julz

On-demand webinar: Building better Moodle rooms

Building better Moodle rooms: Online strategies and best practices
Sponsored by: Moodlerooms

Original broadcast date: December 4, 2007
Expiration date: March 3, 2008
Audience link:

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=94646&s=1&k=9B7400E6E6534B9DD4FC267D25E2CF8E&partn
erref=opn24

This event is now available on demand. The archived webinar will be
available for viewing through the expiration date listed above.

To view this Webcast you will need to have Real Player or Windows Media
Player. You may download either of these at
http://webcast.on24.com/clients/help/.

2007 VSS Resources now available

The North American Council for Online Learning is pleased to announce that the 2007 VSS Resources page is now available online at http://www.virtualschoolsymposium.org/resources.php. On this page, you will find links to webcasts, vodcasts, articles, PowerPoint presentations, photos, etc. from many of the presentations offered at last month's Virtual School Symposium.

Don't forget to mark your calendar for next year's VSS: 2008 Virtual School Symposium, October 26-28, 2008 in Phoenix, AZ. It is sure to be even more exciting and innovative than ever!

Video sites make science more accessible

Inspired by YouTube's success, several new science video web sites have sprung up online
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

Haim Weizman is a chemist by trade and an internet movie maker on the side. In his first video, a telegenic narrator in a lab coat swirls a flask as electronic music plays in the background. Created by four science and film students at the University of California, San Diego, the video shows a typical recrystallization experiment straight out of Chemistry 101.

The six-minute epic, complete with bloopers, got 1,205 views on Google Inc.’s YouTube, but the number increased fourfold when the video was posted to SciVee, one of a number of online video-sharing startups designed to let scientists broadcast themselves toiling in the laboratory or delivering lectures.

Read the rest of the story at http://snipurl.com/1uuxi
:)
~julz

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

It seems to go without saying that e-courses will need a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities. It is the nature of personalities that some students will be masters of synchronous online chat and response, while other "wall flowers" will need time to process and then form a response in private. As good e-teachers, we will need to provide a good mix of both kind of interactions so that all of our students will have an equal chance to respond and receive "credit" for participation. One of the most difficult tasks will be to perfect the pose of the "guide from the side" and let live discussions and threaded chats flow without being stirred with the teacher stick.

Free MIT high school content

Check out http://snipurl.com/1ukkz

MIT is offering free content on their OpenCourseWare site for high school teachers and students in just about every subject. There are videos, learning objects, demonstrations on video, and online learning labs (check out the toolbar to the left).

These would be great resources for online courses.

WOW!

Dabareh